Opinions of Biocompare
Carlton Hoyt
There was a bit of a heated discussion going on in one of the LinkedIn groups that I’m a part of where people, including a Biocompare founder, were debating the value of Biocompare as a life science marketing platform. For the moment, I’ll hold back the opinions that were expressed in those posts as well as my own and those I’ve heard from others. What I think is valuable to know is what the life science products community as a whole thinks about Biocompare. To that end, I’ve created this quick, 3-question survey. I encourage you to share your thoughts anonymously, and the results will be shared on BioBM.com.
I have also enabled comments below, so feel free to add your thoughts if you would like to air them out publicly!
Take the Biocompare survey
Supreme Court: Bayh-Dole Act
Carlton Hoyt
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Stanford vs. Roche Molecular Systems, which has implications for academic inventors who receive federal funding for their research. Stanford was suing Roche Molecular Systems, claiming saying RMS did not have the rights to a patent which described a test to quantify the HIV load in a patient’s blood, which is now commonly used. RMS had bought the rights from Cetus Corporation, a private company at which a Stanford fellow, Dr. Mark Holodniy, had been assigned by Stanford to conduct research and at which Dr. Holodniy had invented the HIV load test in question.
In their prosecution, Stanford used the Bayh-Dole Act to argue that the intellectual property was rightfully theirs. For those who may be unfamiliar with the act, the Bayh-Dole Act (also known as the Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act) granted universities, non-profit institutions, and small businesses within the United States the rights to intellectual property resulting from U.S. government-funded research. In defense, Roche Molecular Systems argued a simple point of wording. Dr. Holodniy’s contract with Stanford stated that “I agree to assign” intellectual property resulting from his fellowship at Stanford to the university, while his contract from Cetus stated that “I will assign and do hereby assign” such IP.
Despite that the Bayh-Dole Act states (albeit extremely verbosely) that rights to government-funded inventions lie first with the funded firm, then with the United States government, and lastly with the individual inventor, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Cetus indeed rightfully owned the IP that they sold to Roche Molecular Systems. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that the Bayh-Dole act does not automatically strip employees of the rights to intellectual property and because of the weak wording of Stanford’s contract (saying “will assign” instead of “do assign”) that Stanford never actually held the rights to Dr. Holodniy’s invention in the first place. You can read the full case syllabus and opinions in this pdf on supremecourt.gov.
What is of significance here is that Justice Roberts affirmed in the court opinion “the general rule that rights in an invention belong to the inventor”. This would indicate that companies, universities, and other institutions may need to have a very clear and explicit agreement that the individuals turn over their intellectual property to their institutions or else the individual may actually retain the rights, especially when the work is federally funded.
Disclaimer
BioBM Consulting is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. If you have any questions regarding the law, please refer them to an appropriate licensed legal professional. For questions related to patent law, especially as it pertains to life science or biomedical patents, we highly recommend Gordin IP.Improving Distributor Performance
Carlton Hoyt
Any bioscience company that sells through distributors is familiar with the problem: some distributors just don’t pull their weight. I spoke with a global laboratory equipment company recently that has about 100 distributors globally, excellent territory coverage, and no direct sales so all of their sales come through distributors. They told me that the 80/20 rule is in full effect with their distributors – 80% of their sales from 20% of their distributors. Even more extreme, over 50% of sales came from their top 4 distributors! They put in a great deal of effort trying to convert poorly performing distributors into well-performing distributors, but they were doing so in a very cost and time intensive manner and with moderate success at best. Admittedly, this is an extreme example, but Imagine how much a company like that would stand to gain from improving the performance of even some of their distributors.
If you sell through life science distributors, you are probably in a similar situation. You most likely have good distributors and not so good distributors (and probably some downright bad distributors), and wonder what you can do to improve distributor performance. We hear that same question over and over, and I thought I would share a few tips on how to get more from your distributors and grow global sales while improving your distributor relationships and building trusted long-term partnerships.
One of the most common factors in poor manufacturer-distributor relationships is poor communication. Note that poor communication can be both a cause and a symptom of poor distributor performance. Many companies set up distributor newsletters or make calls to them to ask open-ended or performance-based questions, and while these efforts are better than nothing, they rarely address core problems and often lead to one-directional communication. To improve your distributor relationship, and thereby improve your distributors performance, your communications should provide value to your distributors. One way to do so is to build a social-like platform for discussion and dissemination of materials and information. Customizable, easily built solutions from companies like Ning, SocialGo, or Groupsite provide inexpensive solutions that will not only get you communicating more with your distributors, but will also get your distributors talking amongst each other. Just remember when implementing any solution for communication – if your solution is not easy to use, distributors won’t use it. Chances are they’re not going to go out of their way to communicate with you.
Another common factor for poor life science distributor performance is motivation. In order for your distributors to sell your products, they have to want to sell your products. Are you properly rewarding distributors? Are you providing sufficient training and support? Are demo-intensive products eroding distributor ROI? Perhaps they have another product line which is their “bread and butter” and they are hesitant to place focus elsewhere? Lack of motivation to sell could be caused by many reasons, and each will have a different solution. Talk to your distributors one-to-one, build a relationship based on trust, then make use of that trust to get straightforward answers from them as to why they’re not selling. Sometimes the problem isn’t the distributor at all but other factors pertinent to a local or regional market that may appear to be problems with a distributor. Regardless, trusted distributors with whom you have build a good relationship will give you straight and honest answers.
There is also the chance that a distributor you have selected is not right for your company and / or product lines. If your product doesn’t fit their expertise, if the sales techniques required don’t fit their sales methods, if they offer too many competing products, etc., there may just be an irreconcilable difference. Sometimes there just isn’t anything you can do, and you need to be able to recognize that and move on.
Regardless of the reason, if a life science distributor has poor performance and isn’t improving (or you have reason to believe they won’t), you need to replace them. In future posts, we’ll discuss distributor selection, contractual terms that can be used to help motivate distributors up-front, and ways to replace distributors that will minimize disruption to your business.
Use Google Alerts
Carlton Hoyt
I’m guessing most companies do, but I’ve ran into a few that aren’t so I feel the need to say it here: use Google Alerts. For any small company, life science companies included, Google Alerts is an easy and free way of monitoring what is said about your company online. You can set up alerts for mentions of your company, your products, anything. Also, it’s an easy way to keep track of your competition – you can set up Google Alerts for mentions of their company, brands, and products as well.
If you’re involved in marketing or PR for your life science company you definitely be receiving Google Alerts. For small life science companies, executives probably should as well. For people in sales or business development it’s good to keep track of what is being said about your product and the product positioning of competitors. For support or applications scientists, it could be a good way to keep up with people posting methods or problems with your products on forums or anywhere on the internet.
Google Alerts takes almost no time to set up, alerts can be received “as-it-happens”, daily, or weekly and via e-mail or RSS. And did I mention that it’s free?
Business Plans for Scientists
Carlton Hoyt
If you have a great biotechnology innovation and you want to start a company to commercialize it, you’re almost certainly going to have to write a business plan. Even if you’re not going to try to obtain investment capital, in which case you would undeniably have to write a business plan, you should still write a business plan to make the case to yourself and anyone else involved in your start-up company that the company is viable and you have an understanding of what you’ll need to do to be successful. Most life scientists, however, have never written a business plan and likely don’t know how to properly compose one. While business plans for established companies or internal use only are not totally uncommon, we will focus on the business plan most relevant to bioscience inventors – an externally-focused business plan for start-up companies.
Every business plan is different, and you shouldn’t feel obliged to stick to any particular format. If you can make a better case for your business by changing the format, then do so. After all, the point of the business plan is to state what your business will be doing and why it will be successful. Making the document look and feel like a standard business plan is secondary. Whatever you do, just make sure you include all the necessary information.
In general, I like my scientific business plans to include the following sections:
- Company Overview – The company overview should be a one to three sentence description of your company. This should be very similar to your elevator pitch. It should be to the point, effectively get the readers attention, and explain the company as concisely as possible.
- Mission Statement – Your company’s mission statement should effectively state the purpose of the company. Don’t brush this off. Write a mission statement that will be able to guide the strategy and high-level decision making down the road. A mission statement is not a marketing tool, but it should read well.
- Management – Introduce your management team. Give some background on them and highlight their strengths as it pertains to the venture and their position within it. A poor management team can easily drive away investors, so be sure that your team looks good both on paper and in person. You should have enough talent on your team to realize your objectives. If there are any key skill gaps that will be addressed through outsourcing, be sure to address those in your operating plan.
- Market Analysis – This is where you really start to get into the meat and potatoes of the document, so to speak. The market analysis should give information on competition, market size, trends, challenges and opportunities the market presents, etc. As appropriate, you’ll need to be both descriptive and quantitative, and you will definitely need to back up your numbers. Do your homework, include references as appropriate, and make sure you back up your statements.
- Scientific Background – This is where you start talking about your product specifically. Since scientific products are highly technical in nature, you will need to show that your product will work as you claim and also that it will meet the needs of the market that you have just identified. If you can, reference published literature. If you’ve built a working prototype, show some results of testing.
- Marketing Plan – How will you market your product? How will you position your product within the marketplace to achieve the projected market share and hit your targets? What marketing channels will you use? You’ve addressed the market in your market analysis, but this is where you address how your company will interact with that market.
- Operating Plan – How your new biotech business will operate. You don’t have to go into minutiae, but if there are any important considerations, make sure to include them. Address operational difficulties and areas that would not be considered obvious. Again, if you plan on outsourcing anything be sure to address that here.
- Projections – The projections, which can also be referred to as the “financial plan”, etc., is where you will make the case that your venture is worth investing in. Extend your projections out to a relevant but not-too-distant time point. What should that time point be? That will be different for every company and would be based on your projected product development time, how long you project until your product goes to market, and what the life cycle of the product will be, and any other relevant factors. Revenues always involve some guesswork, but make sure that your cost estimates are very close. Also, don’t overestimate your revenues or no one will believe that you’re capable of hitting your targets. It’s better to have a slightly worse financial outlook that’s defensible
- Long Term Vision – Are there any important long-term goals or achievements for your life science start-up that would be important to partners or investors? Do you have plans for expansion into new markets to build on successes in your company’s early years? Those are some things to think about when writing a long-term vision.
- Disclaimer – Ever read a corporate financial statement where they give a disclaimer about “forward-looking statements”? You need to include something similar to protect yourself from liability. It won’t be a full section, per se, but it should constitute some small print at the end of the body of the document. Basically, your disclaimer should state that projections are subject to risks, not guaranteed, and that you nor your company are liable if they turn out to be incorrect.
Keep in mind this is just how I frame many of the scientific business plans that I write. I don’t even always stick to this format, so you shouldn’t feel obliged to either. This is merely a guideline.
A few other tips… Graphs, charts, and supporting data that is too long to put in the body of the business plan should go into figures and appendices. You’ll probably want a copyright notice in the footer. Don’t forget to include trademark symbols next to any slogans or names that you plan on claiming.
Some may want to include a section about risks and projected difficulties to show that you understand your limitations, are addressing them, and have contingency plans in case any of them become problems. I sit on the fence about this. While I certainly think you need to have thought about these issues in the event that they are asked, I don’t always think that including them in a business plan is a good idea. The business plan is supposed to sell people on the idea of your business, and listing all the drawbacks doesn’t do that. If there are obvious risks or obstacles, however, then you should definitely address them.
At the end of the day, your life science start-up should be able to create a business plan that is every bit as “bulletproof” as your idea. If you’re not a veteran at starting companies then there are likely issues you haven’t thought of. The creation of a business plan is a good way to expose those issues so you can address them before attempting to attract investors or launching your company and having unrecognized issues impact your bottom line. Remember that the business plan should show the value and merits of your idea, your understanding of the marketplace, and your ability to execute and realize commercial value. For maximum effect, don’t hesitate to modify the format and structure of the business plan to the unique needs of your biotech start-up and keep in mind what the purpose is and who your audience will be.
Misconceptions About SMM
Carlton Hoyt
There are a lot of misconceptions about social media marketing out there. I was recently reminded of it by a tweet from a company which will remain nameless. This company provides market reports and market research services for life science companies, and I find most of their reports to be quite compelling so I don’t want this one misstep to reflect too negatively on them. When marketing for their most recent report, they tweeted:
anonymous tweet
Scientists report using LinkedIn to find vendor-sponsored info more than every other social media platform–combinedThis exhibits something of a misconception about how social media marketing works and is the same misconception that many life science companies have about SMM. Put simply: scientists will very rarely use social media to “find” vendor information or product information. If a scientist is thinking about looking for a product, they know that twitter, facebook, linkedin, youtube, etc., are not the best places to look. Not to say that social media marketing isn’t valuable, but you need to understand it’s purpose and how your target market is going to use it. Social media is used for engagement, for brand positioning, and for active presentation of information to customers, not simply as a repository for information which you can expect users to seek out (as a catalogue or a website could be). Because of this consumer behavior, asking “what social media platforms do you use to look for vendor information” is inducing an answer to the wrong question.
Poorly executed social media marketing will at best be a waste of time and money, and at worst can hurt your life science company’s brand. In order for your SMM efforts to be sucessful, you need to understand your customers and their use of social media networks.
Presenting your Marketing
Carlton Hoyt
Life science marketing is an interesting thing. It is most often supported by a wide breadth of technical information, and scientists often want a lot of information, but at the same time most of the “standard” rules of marketing still apply. This dichotomy is often at odds with itself, and scientific marketers will frequently end up with marketing messages that are unorganized, contain too little information, contain too much information, or fail to effectively lead customers into the sales process. While it is true that this failure is often at least partially due to marketing functions being performed by marketers who do not sufficiently understand scientists or scientists who are not sufficiently well trained in marketing, it can even more frequently be ascribed to another failure. Life science marketers have an inexplicable tendency to present their marketing messages in the way they think it should be provided as opposed to how their customers are likely to want it.
The solution to this problem is to combine the psychology of the target consumer with the limitations of the given marketing medium. Stop asking yourself what information is important for the customer to know – the answer will center around you and your opinions. Instead, ask what the customer will want to know. What fuels their purchasing decisions? What is the first piece of information that they are going to look for? What will the customers view as the most important differentiators or benefits? Once you answer these questions and other, similar questions you will start to have an understanding of what is likely to be important to the customer (of course, to have a complete understanding you will need to perform some marketing research). This is not to say that the customer will never have unknown unknowns, and there may be information that they would view as highly valuable that they are completely unaware of and should still be presented to them, but such information still has to be assessed from the perspective of customer-perceived value. Once we have an understanding of the customers needs and what is important to them, then we can start to construct a well-crafted marketing message.
Consider the medium by which which your marketing message will be communicated. Print, web, video, and other mediums each have different constraints and will may be viewed under different circumstances, and therefore the marketing message for any given medium should not be a carbon copy of another. While they will probably be similar, marketing messages should be tweaked to make optimal use of the specific medium. Will your marketing be presented to life scientists or will they be going to your marketing? How much of your viewers attention will you have? How much content can you fit and what kind of content is appropriate to the medium? The answers to these kind of questions should be used to refine the marketing message for any given medium in order to make it more effective.
Regardless of the medium, don’t forget to include a compelling call to action! When and where to place them is also something that deserves some degree of consideration. Many marketers automatically put the call to action at the end of the marketing message and leave it at that, but is that really the best place? For example, if most of the compelling content is near the beginning of the marketing message and the later content is mostly supporting information, the end may not be the best place for the call to action. Alternatively, perhaps two would be more appropriate.
Optimal presentation of a scientific marketing message is not a simple thing. It is a balancing act between providing sufficient information and being succinct while taking into account the psychology of the customer, the medium, and other factors which we have not yet discussed. Many small companies fall into the trap of “marketing like scientists” and turning marketing messages into information dumps, but doing so will never maximize results. By escaping that thought pattern and thinking critically about key marketing issues as well as scientific issues, only then can the ROI of life science marketing be maximized.
Online Leads: It’s All About Speed
Carlton Hoyt
Almost all life science companies market via the internet these days. Of those, a vast majority have a method of capturing leads online – be it a contact form, an e-mail address, or even a post on the wall your company’s facebook page. Everyone always tried to have a fast response time to display their superior customer service to prospective customers, but it wasn’t until recently that we realized how important it is to have excellent response time to online leads.
A recent Harvard Business Review study found that online leads go cold incredibly quickly. Quoting the article: “Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead (which we defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour laterâand more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.” Wow. This data implies that companies that responded in 24 hours or more are potentially losing 98% of their sales from online leads.
Not to say we shouldn’t take that information with at least a little independent thought of our own. This information was compiled by tracking leads across 42 different companies in no particular sector, and includes both B2B and B2C sales leads. I can personally speak from my own experience both as a former scientist and as one who sold to them that scientists act more deliberately than the average consumer and therefore leads likely don’t go cold quite as fast. Still, even if you apply such an assumption, the data is still overwhelmingly supportive of cutting your lead response time down to a few hours at most.
The researchers go on to offer some reasons as to why companies aren’t responding faster to online leads: “Reasons include the practice of retrieving leads from CRM systemsâ databases daily rather than continuously; sales forces focused on generating their own leads rather than reacting quickly to customer-driven signs of interest; and rules for distributing sales leads among agents and partners based on geography and âfairness.â ”
What is your company’s average or median response time? Do you keep track of it? If not, this data certainly encourages you to do so. After all, you wouldn’t want to be the company losing 98% of its leads.
Site Metrics: Where to Focus?
Douglas E. Rogers
Website analytics can provide very useful information to bioscience companies. It can be used to assess the effectiveness of your marketing messages, optimize your site navigation, and track external marketing campaigns. At it’s most basic, and without spending too much time on the matter, most companies want to know one thing: how much traffic are we getting? For most purposes, however, this isn’t the question they should be asking.
By “traffic”, most people are referring to visits – how many people viewed their website over a given period of time. Alone, that doesn’t really tell us much. Another measure of traffic is pageviews – how many pages on a website were viewed over a given period of time. Again, that doesn’t really tell us much on its own. Where you get to some rich metrics is in the pages per visit and the bounce rate. Pages per visit is exactly what it sounds like – how many pages the average visitor is viewing. A “bounce” is when a visitor views a page and then leaves the site without viewing any other pages. Having high pages per visit and a low bounce rate is indicative of quality visits. It is an indication that your content is relevant to the people that are finding your site, and you are successfully engaging those people with your content.
Another good thing to focus on is your search engine optimization as measured via search rankings for relevant search terms. While you can’t get your search rankings via Google Analytics or similar free analytics tools, there are tools on the internet for determining your search rankings. Our favorite is Rank Checker from SEO Book. It’s a plugin that operates in the Firefox web browser and can tell you your rank for up to 100 different terms at a time in Google, Yahoo, and Bing search engines, save searches and output results into .csv files which can be opened in Excel. Knowing where you stand in search rankings, and keeping track to see if you’re moving up or down in key search terms, is key for driving relevant (and free!) search traffic. This information can be analysed in conjunction with search traffic data from Google Analytics to determine if you’re optimizing for the right terms. If you’re very high in the search rankings for a particular term, but you’re not getting much traffic from searches for that term, then it’s likely that few people are searching for that term in the first place and you should consider how you can re-optimize for a more popular but still relevant term.
If you dig just a little deeper into your analytics instead of just looking at raw traffic, you can learn a lot more useful information.
What Inventors Don’t Think Of
Carlton Hoyt
Most great life science inventions come straight from the bench. That also means that most great life science inventions come from career scientists, who are most often inexperienced in commercialization. There’s a host of things that you should think about before rushing to commercialize and many scientists turned first-time inventors often neglect one or more such issues. We’ll go over a few commonly skipped considerations so when you have the next great idea, you can properly vet it before you run to your patent attorney.
1) Be sure you own your IP!
There’s a good chance that great idea of yours may not belong to you (at least not totally). If you developed it at work or school, your institution may have a partial or full claim to your IP. Check your employment contract or other signed employment documentation. A similar issue: if you have a great idea that is essentially an improvement of another technology but is based on that other technology (in other words, your invention would require the existing technology in order to operate) you can claim rights to the improvement and file a patent, but will most likely be unable to commercialize it due to needing protected technology in order to do so.
2) Is your idea as good as you think it is?
It’s easy to get really excited about an idea for a new invention, but your emotions have to be tempered with reality and pragmatism. Is your idea really as good as you think it is? Understand the key differentiators of your technology. For example, would it be cheaper, faster, easier to use or would produce better results? What Ask some trusted friends and get some feedback or set up a survey using a free online survey tool (without giving away the idea!) and leverage social networks, forums, colleagues, professional networks, etc. Be sure others think your idea is a good one as well.
3) Is there a market for your invention?
Just because you need something doesn’t mean anyone else does. Would this product be used by a large enough market in order to justify pursuing it? This decision will need to be based primarily on three things: market size, price of the product, and cost to develop it. Ballparking at this stage is perfectly fine, but you want to be reasonably certain that your development costs would be far less than your total potential lifetime sales.
4) What would it cost to make / what would scientists be willing to pay?
This is a frequently overlooked issue early on. While without manufacturing experience or having worked in a manufacturing environment the cost of building a product can be difficult to quantify, you can think in terms of simplicity. Simple things are usually cheaper and easier to make than more complex things. If your invention would be approximately 20% better in a certain performance metric than the next best technology available but would be 100% more complex, think long and hard as to whether researchers would pay about twice as much for that 20% increase in performance.
Another small piece of advice for those innovative minds out there – don’t always think big. Some incredibly profitable yet relatively simple inventions have come in areas that were ignored for decades. Things slip under the radar all the time, and if no one else is thinking about a topic the lack of competition among innovators in that area can make commercialization much easier and improve your likelihood of success.