Business Development Part IV – Blog Post by Asrar Qureshi


Dear Colleagues!  Today is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #136. Pharma Veterans shares your wealth of knowledge and wisdom with others for the benefit of entire Pharma Community. It aims to recognize and celebrate the Pharma Industry Professionals. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please share your stories, ideas and thoughts. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here.

Business Development – What kind of products to look for (ii)?
In the last blog, I talked about product selection vis-à-vis organization needs. We move this discussion further towards organization capability.
Organization Capability
May be defined more specifically as what the organization can handle effectively.
1.     Organization Infrastructure. Licensed products usually require good marketing vision and capability, a developed regulatory function and proper distribution/storage network. Regulatory capability is particularly important to do proper documentation and getting registration as soon as possible. There have been examples where companies somehow managed to in-license some really good product but then could not handle it due to inadequate in-house capability. Result was that the product could not achieve what it could potentially do.
Currently, a lot of people from Pakistan scour the internet and try to approach various companies for products. Many of these are individuals who believe that they will entice a company with sweet talk but don’t know what they will do with the product. The credibility of genuine business development has also been hurt in this process.
Sometimes the companies giving out license may also choose wrong partner. We once, followed the Regional Head of Ferrosan who market the brand Imedeen®. It is an established anti-aging tablet which is available in many countries. The RM was based at Abu Dhabi and finally came to visit Pakistan. The product at that time was imported by a small-time importer in Karachi and was only made available; no marketing. The RM spent a day with us in the head office and in the market and was suitably satisfied with our capability to effectively market the product. Next day she went to Karachi and finally decided to continue with the same importer. Imedeen® is nowhere in Pakistan now.

2.     Customer base. Another very important consideration is the reach and penetration of the organization with regard to the product(s) being sought. Is the company already present in that specialty? Or they plan to open the specialty with that product? Let us say you are pursuing a product for pediatric application such as lung surfactant for pre-maturely borne babies. The parameters to gauge are the presence of company in Pediatrics, level of customer base and quality of customer relations. For such kind of product, an organization really needs to have access to the senior most pediatricians and well-qualified neonatologists.  If the answer is in negative, it may be futile to bring such a product.
The existing customer-base also determines the company’s standing and its ability to market different kind of products. Another live example in my tenure was a prostaglandin-E product with a novel drug-delivery system. It was meant for facilitating normal delivery through increased uterine contractions. Our marketing colleagues dropped the product because they thought it was too pricey. The product was later taken up and introduced by another company which offered IVF and other such products, equipment and technology services. Obviously, they had deeper relation with the target customer and could market the product well.
3.     Allocation of Resources. The last important thing is the capability of organization to allocate adequate resources for the product. The resources include human resource, time resource and financial resource. Given enough input at the right time, the results would be guaranteed. Not doing enough or not doing at the right time will adversely affect the anticipated results.
Business Development is a buzz-word currently. It is important that the organizations do not just fall for it, but assess their needs and capabilities objectively and pitch themselves accordingly.
To be Continued……

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Personality Assessment Using AI – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post 1046

Image
Personality Assessment Using AI – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post 1046 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post 1046 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com for publishing our contributions here. Credit: Andy Barbour Credit: Antoni Shkraba Credit: Eden Kefale This post is inspired on an article written by Eliot Gattegno and Nadav Klein, and published in Knowledge by INSEAD. Link at the end. Preamble This post may be considered as an extension of the previous post with particular focus on AI. One opportunity for deploying technology is to assess personality, an individual’s characteristics that remain consistent across different social situations. People with similar personalities will act similarly in important ways. This means that personality information can be used to predict likely matches and mismatches between colleagues who work together in teams, ...
Read more

Pharmaceutical Business – Trends and Challenges – Part 4 – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #670

Image
Pharmaceutical Business – Trends and Challenges – Part 4 – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #670 Dear Colleagues!  This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #670 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on  WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Continued from Previous…… This series is based on a report from StartUS insights. Trend #5 – Additive Manufacturing The scale and scope of development still baffles at time, though we know the technology is moving very fast. Additive manufacturing is being explored in two dimensions: one, the use of 3D printers to develop human tissue which could be used for drug development, organ engineering, and regenerative medicine; and two, another kind of 3D printers to make personalized pills. This will also allow to develop age or physiology related medi...
Read more

Generations at Work - Overview – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1006

Image
Generations at Work - Overview – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1006 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1006 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to aq.pharmaveterans@gmail.com for publishing your contributions here. Credit: Aa Dil Credit: Alena Darmel Credit: Alex Green Credit: Askar Abayev Thirty/ Forty years ago, people in Pakistan were also talking about ‘generation gap’. Newspaper articles, TV programs, and even TV plays talked about how the older and newer generations were not able to understand one another. There were no real explanations except that the times had changed. Several years later, the anthropologists and social scientists came up with the concept of generations.  In this short 3-part series, we shall try to understand the basis of classification of generations, their unique characteristics, the implications of multiple generations at the same workplac...
Read more