Yearly Archives: 2011

Comment on Webinars

Carlton Hoyt 6:33 pm , June 22, 2011

I saw a post on one of the LinkedIn groups I’m a member of for a webinar that was of interest to me. Long story short: it was terrible. So you don’t make the same mistakes that this company did when you’re creating life science webinars, I thought I’d share a quick tip.

Remember that a webinar (or an in-person seminar for that matter) is a form of content marketing. The lure is the promise of information that is valuable to the user. In order for your webinar to be a success, you must deliver on that promise. The content that you provide needs to address the reason that people are attending your webinar – the topic of the webinar in the first place. If your title and abstract don’t match the presentation, you’re going to hurt your reputation, not help your marketing effort.

Also, you need to balance the amount of content with the marketing message as is appropriate for your webinar. It is possible to have a webinar strictly about a product or service, and there’s nothing wrong with that and such webinars can have value to individuals who are seeking more information about such products and services, but if that is going to be the focal point you need to be up front about it. If you’re creating a webinar on “best practices in high-throughput nucleic acid purification”, for example, attendees are going to expect to learn something of value about high-throughput nucleic acid purification. If you make too much of a marketing pitch and don’t provide enough valuable information on the topic, you’re going to hurt your reputation, not help your marketing effort.

Life science webinars can be useful tools to gather an audience and positively project your brand image and services, but you have to do it correctly. Align the webinar with the desires of the audience to create value and you’ll find success.

"Want to create high-impact webinars? Not satisfied with the quality of your marketing efforts or marketing materials? BioBM Consulting creates high-impact life science marketing campaigns for life science clients that drive sales and improve ROI. To start attracting and influencing more potential customers, call us today. We’re life scientists just like your customers, and boy do we love marketing."

Expansion of Services

biobm 12:45 pm , June 22, 2011

BioBM Consulting has announced the latest expansion of its life science business and marketing services with new distribution management and online reputation monitoring services.

Distribution management services are available as a consulting or outsourced solution and are aimed to improve global life science distributor performance by improving communication, distributor motivation, training, and support through implementation of best practices in distribution management. Online reputation monitoring services allowing a company to efficiently and inexpensively guard its reputation through alerts and tracking of online sentiment via active monitoring by BioBM’s Internet Services division.

Principal Consultant Carlton Hoyt gave the following statement to commemorate the additional services:

Statement from Principal Consultant Carlton Hoyt

The new distribution management and online reputation monitoring leverage BioBM’s existing skills and capabilities to further expand our service offerings to clients. By taking advantage of existing competencies, these valuable services will be able to executed efficiently and as such we will be able to offer them at relatively low costs to both new and existing clients.

BioBM Consulting maintains a strong focus on providing a broad portfolio of business and marketing services, delivered at low costs, to create unmatched value for our clients. Our distribution management and online reputation monitoring services strengthen that focus, and we remain committed to developing new service and consulting offerings that create high value opportunities for life science products manufacturers.

Both services are currently offered. To learn more about our distribution management services, please view our business services page. To learn more about our online reputation monitoring services, please view our internet services page.

News 12:45 pm , June 22, 2011

Escaping the Bench part 2

biobm 1:38 pm , June 20, 2011

BioBM Principal Consultant Carlton Hoyt has written an editorial for PostDocsForum on graduate students and post-docs moving outside science titled “A Flood of Life Scientists: The Practical Guide to Escaping the Crowd by Escaping the Bench”. The editorial, which is broken up into multiple parts, frames the issue of the relative lack of quality life science jobs compared to the number of trainees then goes on to explain ways to build and execute a strategy for moving away from bench science. The second part in the series has been posted today and you can read it in its entirely on PostDocsForum. This post focuses on figuring out if you will be successful as a scientist and how to choose an alternate but related career as well as determine what skills you will need in your new career path.

The first post, which frames the problem of there being too many aspiring life science PhDs and post-docs and the need for self-driven career mobility and professional development, can be found here.

The third part will be posted next week. We’ll let you know when it is.

News 1:38 pm , June 20, 2011

Opinions of Biocompare

Carlton Hoyt 12:38 pm , June 16, 2011

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

Blog / Digital Marketing 12:38 pm , June 16, 2011

Supreme Court: Bayh-Dole Act

Carlton Hoyt 10:35 pm , June 13, 2011

Maximizing distributor performance allows bioscience companies to efficiently grow revenues. 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.

"Are you a life science inventor and have a great idea that you would like to commercialize? BioBM may be able to help you. Our inventor services allow scientist-inventors to inexpensively commercialize and profit from their inventions. We can guide you through all the necessary steps to sell, licence, or build a company around your intellectual property. Feel free to contact us and confidentially discuss your idea and desires."

Blog 10:35 pm , June 13, 2011

Escaping the Bench part 1

biobm 12:07 pm , June 13, 2011

BioBM Principal Consultant Carlton Hoyt has written an editorial for PostDocsForum on graduate students and post-docs moving outside science titled “A Flood of Life Scientists: The Practical Guide to Escaping the Crowd by Escaping the Bench”. The editorial, which is broken up into multiple parts, frames the issue of the relative lack of quality life science jobs compared to the number of trainees then goes on to explain ways to build and execute a strategy for moving away from bench science. The first part in the series has been posted today and you can read it in its entirely on PostDocsForum.

The first post frames the problem while subsequent posts will focus on figuring out what career path is right for you, gaining the requisite skills, and other issues pertinent to academic life scientists who want to change careers. We’ll let you know when the other parts are posted.

News 12:07 pm , June 13, 2011

Improving Distributor Performance

Carlton Hoyt 6:12 pm , June 7, 2011

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.

"Are you looking to improve your distributors’ performance? Do you have any problems with under-performing distributors? Do you want more efficient and effective ways of communicating with your distributors? Whatever your distributor-related needs may be, BioBM can help. Our on-staff life science business consultants are experts in distributor management, distributor selection, business development, and all aspects of bioscience product distribution. Contact us by phone or fill the form below for a free consultation and we’ll show you how we can help drive revenues through improved distributor performance."

Blog / Distribution 6:12 pm , June 7, 2011

Use Google Alerts

Carlton Hoyt 2:33 pm , June 2, 2011

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?

Blog / Digital Marketing 2:33 pm , June 2, 2011

Business Plans for Scientists

Carlton Hoyt 12:13 pm , June 1, 2011

With online leads, speed is a key factor in conversion. 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.

"Writing a business plan can be an intimidating thing for life scientists. If you’re not comfortable writing a business plan, or performing any functions on the road from innovation to successful commercialization, working with an experienced team can be invaluable to the success of your early-phase venture. Feel free to contact BioBM or use the form below if you have any questions that you would like to discuss. Our experience is at your disposal to help ensure your biotechnology start-up is successful."

Misconceptions About SMM

Carlton Hoyt 12:02 pm , May 25, 2011

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–combined

This 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.

Blog / Social Media 12:02 pm , May 25, 2011