Client Context
A first-time commercialization biotech hired a CCO who faced an expedited timeline to get a rare disease launch strategy foundation in place, adjust forecast expectations, and secure the investments for any needed market development during a period of intense internal expansion and transformation to a commercialization organization.
The Business Challenge
The biotech’s product was launching into an undeveloped category and was expecting quick follow-on competition. Previous assumptions and expectations for the innovative product were shaped by a predominantly scientific mindset, which often underestimates real-world barriers. The CCO needed to identify potential barriers – and how to address them, secure the needed resources, and hire and activate marketers and agency to develop and launch fit-for-purpose market development campaigns during a very contracted pre-launch period.
Capabilities Applied
- Framing of business questions to focus and ground the effort
- Custom design of a fit-for-purpose team that transitioned as commercial organization built
- Ability to drive alignment and “stakeholdering”
- Speed in uncovering critical insights and pulling through to decisions and action
- Executive-ready recommendations and facilitation
- Strong collaboration with CCO to drive focus on the critical few launch imperatives and key initiatives
Approach
Our deeply experienced team jumped into action establishing a plan for the engagement to answer a set of key launch strategy questions in advance of an upcoming Board meeting. We collectively identified patient inertia and lack of engagement with the US healthcare system as a potential barrier to medium-term growth, based on existing insights and HawkPartners’ years of experience in similar launches.
To validate and build out those barriers, we conducted rapid insights work to uncover the drivers of patients’ journey into inertia and isolation. We also spoke with HCPs given their importance as a key decision maker at launch, unpacking their feelings of frustration and apathy when treating these patients. We then connected the dots between HCP and patient insights to dimensionalize the experience, demonstrating how stakeholders’ barriers build upon each other to drive behavior in the space.
Following research, we quickly framed the insights and facilitated alignment on hypotheses related to “Where will we play?” and “How will we win?” strategy decisions, covering patient segments, brand distinction, and barriers requiring pre-launch disease state education. In addition to maximizing the value of the follow-on insights work, this stakeholdering started the mobilization process early, ensuring key internal people were engaged from the beginning and including their valuable perspectives.
We then generated additional insights to evaluate these hypotheses and support swift final decisions on the brand strategy foundation and presentation to the Board.
Impact
We clearly and fully characterized inertia barriers for the Board to support discussion and decisions, resulting in investment and alignment to realistic expectations of when they would experience growth from key populations. As an additional phase of work, HawkPartners led an AOR selection process using the insights-based agency brief we crafted, which supported the rapid onboarding of marketers, and the chosen agency followed by an expedited process for materials development for the Disease State Education campaign.
Our collaboration with the CCO and core team continued through the onboarding of the commercial team and their collective prioritization of initiatives to support the strategic imperatives. The expanded team was ready to move forward confidently towards launch, highly focused on the key customer insights and the resultant Imperatives and initiatives that would make a difference in launch performance.
