Continuity and Perseverance, Ingredients for BD Success
Date of publication: October 5, 2009
by Norbert Rau, Raucon
The story will sound all too familiar to you and the situation is very common, indeed. You meet dozens of people at an exhibition, a congress, or a partnering conference, exchange business cards and ideas, and mutually agree to pursue the opportunities right after the event.
Upon return to your office you have to catch up on your tasks, attend internal meetings scheduled in your absence, receive phone calls every few minutes, emails, memos, and draft contracts which require immediate attendance, and sort the material collected at the conference, too. The conference follow-up is postponed day after day until the opportunity’s importance gradually diminishes in your mind. Finally you decide to relinquish the opportunity, comforting yourself that it wasn’t that promising after all.
When you are lucky, your counterpart has the same problem. If you are not, he will wait to receive what you promised, until the time when he will sort you out as an unreliable character. And will not wish to meet you again.
One of the registrants for forthcoming euroPLX 41 Barcelona (2/3 November 2009) uttered his frustrating followup experience in his company profile, noting that he will be interested only in “serious partners with the ability to respond to an email within 24 hours”. Another delegate told me that they “pitch you with their ideas, promise to submit the required data and documents, and then fail to deliver for a year or more. How can I trust their reliability after the closing of a deal if they are unreliable before?”
No Harvest Without Follow-up Continuity
It is easy to make contacts at a partnering event, and it is even easier to promise whatever input is needed from your side. The quick exchange of business opportunities under time pressure (one half hour!) often leads to excitement, enthusiasm, and the urge to cement the opportunity by quickly agreeing on a defined follow-up action.
But the follow-up is tough. Therefore, be sparing of promises, don’t overextend. Keep track of the promises which you are making during a partnering event. And deliver. Because the benefits of a partnering event are harvested after the event, not during. And the follow-up is not a one-off action but a continuous activity until the deal is done or abandoned. As every sales man will tell you, perseverance is the key for closing a deal.
In an otherwise acceptable article on “Prepare to meet your partner” (www.nature.com/bioent, April 2009) by Gorman, Edwards and Meister, the authors devote a few meaningless sentences to the follow-up work after a partnering event, but a good 25 times more to its preparation, such as the best use of partnering software and other issues. These are important, but they are less important than the follow-up, because there is no harvest without follow-up. So why prepare?
It would be much easier, if you had only five or eight business discussions to follow up, not 20 or 30. In the back of your mind, five follow-ups will not appear to be as big a thing as 20 or more.
Annual Events Don’t Serve Continuity
However, if an expensive partnering event is held only once a year it is understandable that you want to make as much use of it as you can, which translates into as many contacts you can collect and, therefore, follow-ups you’ll have to do. Unfortunately almost all partnering events are held only once a year.
It would be much easier, too, if you had your contacts, business opportunities, and thus follow-up requirements more evenly distributed over the year, with the support of a focused partnering event that provides continuity by being held several times a year and not just once. A partnering event at which you can follow-up with old contacts and meet new ones. You would not only be prevented from being overwhelmed with follow-up work after a large event, you would also be pushed to do your homework now, because the next event is around the corner, not next year!
The realisation that partnering for business development is not an activity that is initiated and completed within a few weeks, consequently led to the conclusion that once-a-year partnering events are not sufficiently suited to meet the requirements of business development professionals.
With this in mind, the organisers of euroPLX introduced the concept of “Continuous Business Development” with a second euroPLX Meeting in November 1999 after having held only one in each of the four previous years. Later, the number was increased to three, then to four. Now, after 10 years of pursuing the “Continuous Business Development” concept, the number was reduced again to three per year. This appears to be an optimal number supporting the continuity requirement, although some regular euroPLX attendees even proposed to increase the number to more than four per year.
The aspect of continuity is also reflected by a new series of print media advertisements for euroPLX.
What about the cost aspect? Apart from the fact that attending three euroPLX Meetings is still less expensive than attending just one of the large biotech partnering conferences, euroPLX offers the “Frequent Attendee Subscription Scheme”, a very flexible possibility for regular participants to attend at an even lower fee.
For many frequent euroPLX attendees regular followup meetings with old contacts are just as important as making the acquaintance of a colleague for the first time. According to them, issues of time reduction for business development activities are essential in the current economic situation.
A number of tools that work at the backend of the euroPLX website also support the continuity concept, the most obvious one being a button to copy one’s partnering information for further editing from a previously attended euroPLX Meeting to the present one.