Clarkston’s team of life sciences sales and marketing consultants have highlighted the top commercial trends that businesses should consider. Read all 4 trends for 2024 by downloading the full report here.

As we look to 2024, technology continues to enable the trends impacting commercial organizations within the life sciences industry. Whether it’s adapting to new regulations or evolving the path to content delivery, Commercial and Marketing Operations leaders will need to understand changes in the rapidly evolving technology that supports their business.  

Today, we’re breaking down the 2024 life sciences commercial trends, focusing on the impact of technology on commercialization key decisions, modular development of marketing materials, and evolution of commercial data.  

• How do organizational decisions around outsourcing operations impact the commercial IT capabilities roadmap? 
• What technology foundations can organizations get in place to support the modular revolution, and how will marketing and regulatory teams accept the change? 
• How can AI support data governance, data stewardship, and data management activities for new commercial data sources? 

2024 Life Sciences Commercial (Sales + Marketing) Trends

Trend #1: Commercialization – Key Decisions for Commercial Ecosystems

In a landscape of limited investment, life sciences organizations continue to prioritize choices on where to place their bets. This is most evident in their pipeline strategy decisions as organizations slow down and speed up development activities. However, companies are making similar choices in their commercialization strategy when selecting a commercialization model to take their first or subsequent drugs to market.  

Outsourcing various commercial functions – either through a partnership with another pharmaceutical company or a third-party provider – is often considered as commercial leaders make decisions on ways to limit investment.  

As organizations define the parameters around launch, it’s critical to understand how those decisions impact the necessary commercial ecosystem of capabilities that will be required to support them. For example, while outsourcing field engagement may save headcount costs, it will require a robust set of integrations to provide the necessary data from the third party.  

Organizations that facilitate cross-functional discussions across Strategy, Commercial, and IT organizations early in their commercialization journey will be ahead of the pack. By understanding the impact of outsourcing various commercial functions on the IT enablement roadmaps, commercial leaders will ensure capabilities are available in time for launch and appropriate data feeds are in place in key areas like transparency reporting, monitoring, and pharmacovigilance.  

Download the Full 2024 Life Sciences Commercial (Sales and Marketing) Trends Report Here

Trend #2: Marketing – Rise of Implementing Modular Marketing Content 

Foundations of Modular 

On the Marketing Operations side, the future of promotional and non-promotional materials is trending toward modular content. While the concept of modular isn’t new, 2023 was a year when organizations truly dipped their feet in the water to build an ecosystem to support modular. The idea behind modular content is that each component of a traditional piece of content – claims, logos, infographics, photos, etc. – can be reviewed and approved through the Medical, Legal and Regulatory (MLR) process at an individual level at the outset and then added to a content library. The promise here is a faster, more efficient MLR process, where content creators can pull pre-approved components as building blocks for new promotional materials.  

By having the MLR team review and approve individual aspects of content, building up a strong pre-approved content library and creating materials could be as simple as drag-and-dropping the appropriate claims, graphics, and logos. At this point, the need for rigorous stages of approval is minimal. The modular revolution pushes the concept that because the components are all approved, the sum of the parts (the finished promo or non-promo material) is approved. However, regulatory teams are still determining each organization’s comfort level with this approach. 

Modular Technology

While streamlined approval processes reduce the time from material creation to bring that content to market, the potential goes much further. Creating templates and using plug-and-play methodologies with approved modular content libraries makes creating promotional materials for different marketing channels extremely easy. Utilizing a few options for templates facilitates the creation of omnichannel marketing materials with ease, whether its pamphlets, posters, banner ads, or social media posts in the pre-approved formats. This can help organizations reduce reliance on agency partners and the investment in tackling every modular iteration as a new piece of creative – an approach that can make the push to personalized content cost-prohibitive.  

The capabilities of modular content also have immense potential for interaction with the budding use of generative AI. Organizations are piloting approaches for promotional material generation via artificial intelligence. Generative AI can be employed to create content for specific audiences, demographics, and marketing channels by pulling from the modular content libraries of the respective segments that align with your brand’s marketing strategy. Several foundations are required for organizations to take this leap.  

A robust Promotional Material repository, such as the Veeva PromoMats platform, supported by a Digital Asset Management library, is critical to provide a source of approved materials for the AI. These solutions can be supported by an existing claims library; however, organizations that don’t have one in place can employ AI to generate it. Finally, commercial teams need clear differentiation of target healthcare providers (HCPs) by market segment and stage of their adoption ladder so each piece of content can go to the appropriate audience. Continue reading by downloading the full report below.

Download the Full 2024 Life Sciences Commercial (Sales and Marketing) Trends Report Here

Read last year’s Life Sciences Sales + Marketing Trends Report here.

Contributions from Shannon Ohara