en
Skip to main content
Biopharma organizations often invest heavily in new drug therapies. In fact, they spend an average of $4 to $10 billion to bring a product to market. Despite this investment, many launches fall short of expectations:
Why aren’t biopharma launches more successful? According to research from Indegene, many fail to address five key challenges:
To add to the frustration, multi-year studies show that the more products you launch, the less likely achieving excellencebecomes.
From a human capital standpoint, these shortcomings begin with gaps in organizational effectiveness. The wrong talent mix and decision-making can hamper teams, slow down launch strategies, and undermine the physician and patient experience.
Why has pharma overall lagged behind other regulated sectors in digital maturity and AI uptake?
Among the top reasons is sector insulation. Leaders source approximately 85% of talent for launch roles and 87% of technology talent from within the industry. While there are good reasons for this, the resulting lack of experiential diversity perpetuates cultures and norms that typically include slow, risk-averse decision-making processes. That’s kryptonite in today’s unpredictable launch environment.
Homogeneous brand strategy and field teams lose out on decision speed and quality, falling victim to pitfalls such as these:
But there’s a better way.
Across every sector, quality decision-making is a central part of successfully bringing a product to market, starting with pre-launch. It also supports the six elements that define overall organizational effectiveness. Tackling these areas is the key to a more effective organization and, therefore, better launch outcomes—these elements are far from mutually exclusive.
The results speak for themselves, from the best organizations within and outside of pharma. For example, one Fortune 50 consumer goods company shrank a major brand’s customer needs discovery phase from 9 months to 6 weeks by focusing on decision-making.
We outline the 6 major steps to take for a biopharma launch below.
Tackle big and small decisions differently.
In the past, launch teams tackled choices by consensus, leaving the door open for delays, indecision, and personal bias. Paired with the admirable desire to be inclusive (or perhaps simply spread the risk around), launch meetings often include people by default. To collapse launch timelines, brand and field teams and their counterparts must adopt decision-making processes that deal with the root cause of poor and slow decisions.
Thoughtful inclusion and clearer ownership of frequently occurring decisions can save time and resources. Research from Otter.AI shows that optimizing meeting quality and rhythm can save three to five hours per employee per week.
To ensure decision interactions are as efficient as possible, follow these principles:
Teams can save weeks to months on data collection by eradicating assumptions early and capturing “just enough” to move forward. For biopharmas pursuing agile ways of working, this is essential to realize the anticipated benefits of flatter team structures, including greater speed and customer intimacy.
Dividing decisions is a practice that Korn Ferry Associate Partner Harmen van Os says is a game changer in the consumer space. For example, one person owns the decision itself, while another is responsible for presenting the time vs. risk considerations. This stops perfectionism playing out at the cost of a timely decision. For example, a franchise lead might own the decision around when to resource for pre-launch (with input from the team), while a separate time vs. risk owner regularly presents the real cost of waiting beyond an agreed window.
If trying to get the headcount calculation “just right” takes too long, the risk becomes immediately apparent, ultimately preventing a poor decision. According to Dr. Tessa Misiaszek of the Korn Ferry Institute, “progress over perfection” is life science talent’s weakest attribute when compared to other industries.
Many organizations treat all decisions the same, applying lengthy processes to even low-impact choices. Instead, teams should empower individuals to make two-way door decisions efficiently and elevate one-way door decisions to senior leaders.
According to Jeff Bezos, two-way door decisions are lower-risk and reversible. They should be made quickly and delegated to smaller teams or individuals. An example of a two-way door decision is choosing the content and audience for a standalone brand campaign.
One-way door decisions are irreversible or costly to reverse, requiring thorough analysis. An example of a one-way door decision is making the final pricing determination in a payer reimbursement negotiation.
Most biopharmas talk about it ad nauseam, but in launch planning, patient and HCP data are often referred to at the beginning and end instead of throughout, leaving room for incorrect assumptions.
In an example from the broader value chain, failing to focus adequately on patients resulted in packaging for Parkinson’s medication that patients with tremors struggled to open.
To make meetings more effective, focus on the tasks and decisions that need to be accomplished. Don’t center them around individual availability or preferences. This ensures that meetings are purposeful and aligned with launch goals, keeping discussions focused on outcomes rather than accommodating individual schedules or dynamics.
Arbitrary inclusion soaks up precious time and often causes unnecessary stress and disengagement. Discussions remain focused when only those with specific roles are included in meetings. Focused inclusion eliminates unnecessary distractions and ensures that each meeting participant can contribute to moving the work forward, saving time and improving productivity.
To choose attendees, ask what decisions need to be made day-to-day (perform) vs. strategically (transform) and determine which inputs are required. This will naturally vary from pre-launch through to launch itself.
Meetings should look and feel consistent, even if the topics and teams vary. For example, the format of a standup should always follow the same pattern. Establishing a consistent meeting structure across different teams and departments creates a familiar rhythm and expectation for making decisions. This fosters cross-functional alignment and allows all participants to contribute more efficiently, leading to faster, more consistent decision-making.
You should also set rules so attendees know what to expect and how to approach meetings. For example, you may want to set rules like these:
It will take some time to get it right, especially since therapeutic areas and teams are dynamic. Practice carving up decision ownership and update or eliminate meetings as necessary to reflect your changing needs across the product lifecycle.
Equip leaders to manage their team climate objectively.
In a longitudinal Korn Ferry CEO study of 111 companies over four years, findings show that the organizational competencies with moderate to strong correlations with revenue growth include courage, decision quality, driving results, optimizing work processes, and strategic vision.
These attributes depend on the climate the CEO creates for the executive team and, equally, the climate that leaders across the organization create for their teams. CEOs who scored high on these attributes increased the market capitalization of their companies by 110.0% versus low-scoring CEOs at only 54.5%.
In the pressure cooker of pharma launches, success hinges on effective teams, and those teams depend on effective leaders. Beginning with pre-launch two to three years out, highly effective leaders balance performance “edge” with the freedom to fail. They maintain a climate that keeps cognitive and emotional overwhelm in check for their teams. In turn, this gives decision-making speed and quality the necessary “oxygen” to flourish. Providing leaders with a true measure of their team’s climate helps them to adjust their style, unhindered by assumptions or subjectivity.
Other steps top leaders take include these:
As an example, take the experience of Glover Johnson, a top pharmaceutical vice president of sales who has overseen 27 biopharma product launches. Once, when leading the launch of a therapy associated with treating patients with agitation due to Alzheimer’s, Johnson realized the focus on specialists wasn’t working. Instead, the company needed to reach patient families and PCPs for a higher chance of diagnosis.
By creating a safe environment for his team to change course, they were able to pivot quickly. Other teams might have been tempted to waste valuable time defending the original decision for fear of getting it wrong.
Dial back activity expectations to make room for quality measures.
Effective measurement is crucial to launch success. But too many biopharmas prioritize activity metrics, such as reach and frequency, over customer experience (CX) metrics. Refocusing metrics to measure CX can have a marked impact on growth. CX accounts for 35% of every prescribing decision. One study showed that 50 additional Net Promoter Score (NPS) points can account for up to 5% additional market share within 12 months of launch.
Leading biopharmas have refined their key performance indicators (KPIs) in three important ways.
First, they incorporate measures of a positive CX, such as relevance and ease of contact, to ensure the right interactions occur across the right channels. For medical affairs, advancement from activity to outcome metrics begins by investing in better data capture. CX for key opinion leaders (KOLs) and HCPs acts more as a midpoint progress gauge on the path to the ideal (but often harder to capture) measure of improved patient outcomes. For sales reps, it’s a matter of adjusting activity metrics to rebalance around CX and interaction quality, which supports total prescribing and retention.
Second, they balance commercial KPIs between team and individual outcomes. Too many individually focused metrics incentivize team members to work around instead of with each other, which can result in a poor CX. Have you ever had two field roles compete for the same HCP’s time? Johnson recalled basing 30% of the incentive for cross-functional disease state resource teams on physician CX. He observed, “Driving market share is one thing, but building physician loyalty when you have other launches in the pipeline is another.”
Team-focused metrics (and incentives where permissible) foster collaboration and synergy across interlinking roles, such as key account managers and sales reps, market access, medical affairs, and patient services.
Third, they measure and reward sales managers against aggregate team results and team development progress. These metrics signal that managers’ priorities need to include business performance alongside talent uplift in the form of coaching and development. This avoids the assumption that HR will take care of team development or, worse still, difficult conversations.
Translate your strategy into three actionable behaviors.
We know culture beats strategy, but why choose one or the other?
By culture, we mean the observable behaviors and beliefs that drive people’s approach to decisions (e.g., “My boss supports experimentation, but what about their one-up?”). Whether intended to support launch, portfolio growth and defense, or upstream R&D innovation, culture is crucial to organizational effectiveness. One Korn Ferry client attributes its Phase III trial success improvement (from a single-digit average to 23%) to its culture strategy.
Where a psychologically safe climate and critical mass of growth mindset will support decision excellence at the team level, overall culture makes it possible to mobilize around the strategy across launch teams and the organization, according to Korn Ferry Senior Client Partner Neil Whyte.
The challenge in life sciences is that a fixed mindset—being right, proving accuracy, and prioritizing results over progress—is synonymous with science itself. When you unpack the human side of slow, poor decision-making, you find at its core a deeply primal fear of failure that we’re biologically wired to avoid.
To top it off, our cognitive capacity to recall things like key behaviors when under pressure (i.e., doing launch work) is surprisingly limited. This remains at odds with most biopharmas’ approach to culture, where it’s common practice to flood teams with overlapping values and leadership and behavior frameworks along with ever-growing strategic “priorities” to somehow “bear in mind.”
Companies that successfully translate strategy into culture and achieve growth mindset-fueled innovation have learned that human working memory is finite and the perception of change in others is the greatest factor in choosing to take on a new habit. Accordingly, they take these steps:
Contrary to popular assumption, building new habits can be achieved even within a short launch window. However, in this example, best practice goes beyond launch and team and lives at the organizational level.
Broaden skills assessments to include behavioral drivers.
Launch success depends disproportionately on medical field effectiveness: the ability of field teams, including medical science liaisons (MSLs), to engage with HCPs, KOLs, and other stakeholders. Effective local thought leader engagement can increase the adoption of new brands by 25%. Globally, the greatest driver of CX is “knowledgeable staff,” while in the US, it’s being “easy to contact and engage with.”
According to Korn Ferry Senior Partner Stijn Van Steenbergen, today’s trending focus on skills marketplaces is a healthy move toward aligning team strengths to stakeholder value drivers. However, an over-reliance on self-nominated skills repositories risks missing the critical elements of genuine field talent transformation.
For example, the vast majority (94%) of field medical affairs teams are equipped for remote interactions. And remote MSL interactions rank among the highest for CX. But a startling 81% of medical affairs teams still rely mostly on in-person interactions, despite available technology and training.
How can you bridge that gap? Learn from one client in the rare diseases space. Frustrated by the rate of digital adoption and data utilization in their medical affairs team after numerous skills-focused interventions, the company assessed the future fitness of their medical science liaisons through the broader lens of traits and drivers. In other words, they went beyond “what you do” to evaluate “who you are.”
The client learned that curiosity, propensity to challenge, and overall learning agility were vital precursors to digital adoption and performance. The client rebalanced its talent mix to reflect MSLs who combined the right skills, traits, and drivers.
The result? Faster digital uptake, which meant greater usage of KOL data for outreach across a broader channel mix pre-launch. It also reduced the need for labor-intensive, recurring digital training and change efforts.
The same principle applies to commercial field teams. Johnson once recruited a launch team from the same therapeutic area. He ended up with 23% turnover because the team lacked adaptability. Johnson remarked, “Who people are is a much more reliable predictor of performance than what they’ve done.”
According to Korn Ferry Senior Partner Becky Sanderson, the competencies and personality traits of high-performing sellers in one context are not always the right ones for the next context. So, “lifting and shifting” current salespeople into a launch may not result in the right fit.
By assessing field teams against a new framework specific to the launch context and understanding how their underlying personality traits fit against the profile, commercial leaders can configure teams with fewer skills gaps and superior decision dynamics while providing sales leaders with clear coaching tools. This translates to higher employee engagement and, importantly, a CX that offers a greater likelihood of launch performance.
Redistribute headcount around remote engagement options.
Two stubborn issues hold field-facing launch teams back today: commercial over-resourcing and the excessive pursuit of HCP face time. Despite data showing that HCPs generally prefer omnichannel interactions that blend face-to-face with digital, most biopharmas build up their sales force in anticipation of mobilizing the traditional reach model, requiring more resources to cover the same territory.
In pre-launch, medical affairs-led KOL engagement via congress is still “king” when it comes to launch impact. For example, an integrated scientific outreach strategy can hasten adoption by as much as 40% in oncology. What’s the catch? It’s not all about shaking hands with the top KOLs anymore. The stakeholder set has broadened to include younger, earlier-career oncology HCPs who are four times more likely to adopt a new treatment than their counterparts and 11 times more likely to engage via digital channels.
In spite of this upside, 70% of KOLs engage with only one biopharma, while 30% go untargeted altogether. Further, worldwide spending on medical affairs has decreased by roughly 20% relative to revenue in the last five years, yet sales teams continue to expand in line with product approval runways.
According to Korn Ferry Partner Luis Alberola, to close this gap, several biopharmas have incorporated medical affairs under the commercial function, using guardrails to maintain compliance, while others have invested more proactively in thought leader liaison roles. However, HCP preference for medical interactions extends well beyond pre-launch and launch. Leading companies have recognized this by eliminating overlapping field roles, making more operational expenditure available for medical affairs headcount and capability uplift while continuing to leverage digital tools and data for reach.
While 50% of HCPs limit access to three or fewer biopharmas due to overwhelm and excess face-to-face contact, often spurred by overlapping field roles, 84% want to maintain or increase virtual interactions. In other words, the human touch still matters; we simply need to move past face-to-face as a majority channel.
The virtue of this approach has already been demonstrated in commercial settings. By making better use of the blended channels their HCPs prefer, leading biopharmas achieve the same reach with 40 to 50% fewer full-time employees. According to Johnson, “Most companies enter an arms race for reps around launch. We used half the allotted headcount budget and found that larger territories encouraged more accountability, better partnership across teams, more digital use, and bottom-line savings. We went from paying three people for the same prescription to just one.”
The hidden challenge that a few top biopharmas have overcome is a temptation to benchmark field headcount against their peers, perhaps recognizing that the industry standard CX is more of a floor than a bar to aspire to.
In summary, minimizing the number of field role types, rebalancing operational expenditure between commercial and medical roles, and rationalizing total headcount around digital and face-to-face channels provide an achievable path to a superior CX, increased prescribing, and materially more attractive margins.
Beyond organizational effectiveness, there are numerous determinants of a successful launch, including organizational data and technology, therapeutic differentiation, and the operating environment. However, the six human-specific dimensions in this report are, comparably, some of the most controllable when it comes to stacking the odds of a successful launch in your favor.
Whatever your therapeutic area or operating region, if your portfolio has a launch skew in the next two to five years, get in touch with our experts, who can help you draw from insights that span 95% of the Life Sciences Fortune 1,000 and 25 million employees across 130 countries.
Stay on top of the latest leadership news with This Week in Leadership - delivered weekly to your inbox.
