Why is a CRM needed for life science partnering and the commercialization of innovation?

Life science R&D spending has continued to grow rapidly over the last decade, with total global expenditure on R&D in the pharmaceuticals sector projected to reach $272bn in 2024, compared to $137bn in 2012. Therefore, it is no surprise that companies in the biopharma sector are constantly looking at ways to increase their operational efficiency when it comes to search and evaluation, managing opportunities and alliances, as well as in due diligence and security.

A good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is the beating heart at the center of research and development for life science companies big and small. A well-functioning CRM is fundamental in optimizing and streamlining operations and driving business growth in an increasingly complex landscape. In relation to the initial software cost, alongside the outlay for implementation and integration into team processes that may have previously relied on our old friend, the spreadsheet, it is crucially important to make the right choice from the start and the chosen life science CRM needs to possess many capabilities for the juice to be worth the squeeze.

One such capability is the streamlining and automation of workflows, the specifics of which vary from company-to-company. The automation of manual tasks and integration of disparate systems saves time and minimizes the chances of errors occurring. These outcomes are both central factors in calculating Return-on-Investment (ROI) in relation to the adoption of the life science CRM for the biopharma organization.

Secondly, it is imperative that a life science CRM enables simpler and more effective collaboration in both alliance management and deal evaluations. Prompt and thorough communication between internal and external stakeholders is key to ensuring that research projects and the commercialization of them continues to progress, and huge threats to alliances and good deals can ensue if the system responsible for these conversations is allowing information to slip through the cracks. For the highly regulated life sciences industries, compliance, security, and data protection are non-negotiable and these aspects of a CRM are the foundations that all-singing and all-dancing product features must be built upon.

This article will first explore the limitations, pinch points and inefficiencies of using an off-the-shelf CRM to manage partnerships, alliances, and a commercialization pipeline. We will then explore why the needs of modern life science have moved beyond the functionality of a traditional CRM, looking at how Inpart’s end-to-end partnering platform ‘Deal’, is helping biopharma leaders to source innovation, evaluate pipeline opportunities, as well as manage alliances and deliver due diligence. Finally, this article will examine other CRMs available on the market and evaluate these solutions in terms of their suitability to companies in the life sciences.

What are the main limitations and challenges of using a non-specialist CRM to manage life science partnerships, alliances, and a commercialization pipeline?

Unreliable data

From Inpart’s (formerly Inova)15+ years operating in the life science sector, we have found that unreliable, unconnected, and limited data is often at the heart of many companies’ issues. Time is wasted searching for information, and worse, precious data is easily lost through staff turnover or simple misplacement. This is mainly a symptom of not having a centralized system that builds and retains corporate memory. Aside from losing information, it is often very difficult for biopharma companies to aggregate the vast quantities of data that they have managed to generate and maintain. Without a specialist life science CRM solution, data is likely spread across multiple sources and the integration of these sources can be incredibly time-consuming and complex. If the system or technology in place has not been designed for scientific partnerships and commercialization, the company must try and force a CRM to suit its needs, consequently leading to further issues down the line – much alike trying to build a piece of flatpack furniture without all the necessary parts.

Scattered and unreliable data causes problems across the entire operational process, from technology searching and triage, all the way through to managing CDAs, negotiation and long-term alliances. If data is lost or poorly aggregated, there is often a lack of visibility for stakeholders because of data silos. It becomes extremely difficult to have a clear overview of partnering opportunities and visibility into what your team members are working on. It’s slow, inefficient, and makes fast, informed decision-making impossible. Furthermore, with multiple team members on the move, collecting feedback becomes painstaking. Information is scattered in emails, instant messages, or on spreadsheets. Thus, ensuring appropriate follow-up is difficult with no easy way to assign tasks or to track what has been done, resulting in duplicated effort, misalignment and worse - missed objectives.

Lack of life sciences industry knowledge

Perhaps the most obvious challenge for life science companies using a consumer-facing CRM is that these solutions lack the required knowledge of the sector, and therefore don’t possess the capabilities to maximize efficiency and drive growth for a specialist operation. Not having access to industry best practices, such as standardized and configurable templates for opportunity summaries and evaluations, makes it challenging for biopharma and life science companies to act quickly and decisively. In the biopharma industry, where new innovation is so lucrative, companies simply can’t afford to be slow to evaluate new opportunities and to close deals.

As we have briefly touched upon, a CRM often partly provides RoI through saving time on processes and procedures, but this is unlikely to be the case if the solution requires regular and extensive customization and reconfiguration to make it suit the organizations’ many evolving partnering needs. Thus, the general one-size-fits-all nature of a household CRM rarely fits the needs of biopharma companies who have more specific requirements.

Limited technology integrations

Similarly, with a lack of industry-specific knowledge generally comes limited capacity when it comes to integrating the required data sources or technologies to connect your everyday tools. When these integrations don’t form part of the CRMs package, the customer then must turn to yet another piece of integrative software like Zapier to stitch everything together. This costs time and money and requires extensive management and maintenance of the integrations. Having to manually set-up integrations through external software undoubtedly increases the risk for the company and simply represents another opportunity for operations to go wrong.

Without integration to proprietary and third-party databases, pulling in rich data from pipeline and dealmaking databases, as well as to the companies’ own tools, it is a challenge to have all the relevant and up-to-date data needed to provide concise and reliable reports. Good reporting is fundamental to progressing the right pipeline opportunities and demonstrating value to stakeholders, so a lack of specialized life science CRM represents many strategic challenges.

How does Inpart Deal go beyond the functions of a traditional CRM

Inpart Deal is a trusted partner in the life sciences sector, with 45/50 of the top global pharma firms, including the likes of CSL, Abbvie, Servier and GSK, already using our partnering platform. Deal is the first and the only end-to-end partnering CRM platform tailored for the life science industry, driving innovation and dealmaking by streamlining the sourcing, collaboration, and alliance management phases of biopharma partnerships.

In this section, we will take a deep dive into how Deal has gone beyond the functions of a traditional CRM for the entire partnering process including technology sourcing, opportunity management, due diligence, and alliance management. To demonstrate this, case studies from leading biopharma companies have been included, alongside client testimonials.

Scouting, Search & Evaluation – Find the right partners faster

Inpart Deal has the advantage of direct feed-in from Inpart Connect. Inpart Connect is a global network of industry professionals, academic organizations, biotechs, pharma companies, R&D companies, and investors verified for their interest and ability to commercialize research. The network contains over 6,000 R&D professionals alongside over 8,000 academic researchers spread across over 2,600 institutes worldwide. Companies run campaigns on Inpart Connect to source new solutions for their requirements and technical challenges. Results from these campaigns are directly created in Inpart Deal without any manual data entry.

Another key feature enabling effective Search & Evaluation(S&E)is the integrations that Inpart Deal possesses. Below are just a few examples of these integrations and how they benefit biopharma and life science companies in their S&E efforts:

1. Outlook add-in

This integration allows companies to centralize and share documentation easily. Team members can quickly view records that are associated with emails without switching between Inpart Deal and Outlook. Inpart records appear directly within the Outlook Add-Ins side panel. Team members can also search and browse records stored within Inpart Deal directly from Outlook. It’s also possible to push emails and/or documents into Inpart Deal and create companies, contacts and opportunities with just a couple of clicks!

2. Evaluate pharma profiles

Inpart’s algorithms will automatically match opportunities in Inpart Deal to profiles in Evaluate Pharma, feeding in-depth information on companies and assets into Inpart Deal and the context needed to make the right decisions faster. This integration provides access to insightful information including:

  • Therapeutic category
  • Indication
  • Mechanism of action
  • Market status
  • Company R&D projects by development phase, therapeutic area or technology

3. External opportunity portal

Trying to manage scattered, unsolicited emails and submissions from a corporate website can get messy and slows the search and evaluation process. Inpart Deal’s Opportunity Portal offers a simple, efficient way for biopharma companies to collect and build a repository of all external pipeline opportunities submitted via their website, sort through them and find the most interesting ones.

Search and Evaluation case study – Ferring Pharmaceuticals

This case study demonstrates how one large pharma firm is using Inpart’s end-to-end partnering platform to improve their scouting outputs.

Context

Ferring wanted to create a central function for scouting new drug delivery technologies. They were looking for a solution that would help their newly established ‘External Technologies’ team be more efficient, agile, and well-integrated with Ferring’s overall R&D processes.

Approach

Ferring worked with Inpart to create and implement a workflow perfectly adapted to their new team’s scouting processes. Ferring’s R&D, BD, and AM teams were already using Inpart, which made the onboarding and infrastructure setup faster to implement and allowed all functions to work cohesively together.

Impact

The new process and workflow implementation allowed Ferring to track their team’s performance more effectively and gain clearer insights on each project’s progress. They use these insights for both technology assessment and product development.

Managing opportunities

Through Inpart’s CRM, which has been designed in collaboration with top biopharma companies for life science partnering, companies have seen their deal closing rates become 30% faster and their opportunities-to-deal conversion rate increasing by 23%. So, let’s take a look at how biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies worldwide use an end-to-end life science CRM to manage their pipeline opportunities effectively.

CRM features designed to help life science companies manage opportunities

Without further ado, let’s look at some of the key capabilities of a purpose-built CRM that helps biopharma R&D companies manage opportunities efficiently.

  • Easily track project statuses within activity streams. Team members can view next steps and report on activities in seconds.
  • Standardize partnership workflows for in-licensing, out-licensing, asset acquisition, M&A and R&D collaborations.
  • Streamline the review process with custom evaluation templates and invite internal contributors to participate in evaluations.
  • Add comments and mention others to capture feedback on promising opportunities.
  • Get instant visibility into partnering activities and reduce the time it takes to run reports to just a few seconds.

Leveraging Inpart Data for companies, assets and events

Inpart Data provides biopharma companies relevant partnering data, including company and assets profiles directly from within Inpart Deal. It includes partnering profiles from One-on-One Partnering™, the life science industry’s leading event partnering platform used by the biggest life sciences conferences, as well as curated data on innovative biotechs from biotech clusters, venture capital pipelines, and the Inpart Connect platform.

Opportunities that companies create will be automatically linked to Inpart Data profiles, and if there is an update in Inpart Data, the linked profile will be updated. To make fully informed decisions, biopharma firms need to have the latest information at their fingertips, and Inpart Data gives companies just that. Manager-level users can view enriched data when opportunities are linked and manage the connection between Inpart Data and opportunities.

Profiling and reporting with Evaluate Pharma and Power BI

In life science partnering, effective collaboration is the name of the game, and that doesn’t just go for the R&D companies and research institutes bringing discoveries out of the lab and into the world. In the modern age, life science CRMs also need to integrate effectively to give companies the information to manage and make decisions on opportunities effectively. 

As previously touched upon, Inpart matches opportunities in Inpart Deal to profiles in Evaluate Pharma, and Extended Profiles enable teams to investigate company and asset data such as FDA Approval date, EMA Approval date and WW Annual sales (m$) for in-depth evaluations and making well-informed decisions to maximize impact on deals.

A key aspect of opportunity pipeline management is the ability to produce clear, concise reports to track and monitor opportunities. Such reports keep stakeholders informed and onboard and help turn opportunities into deals. Inpart Deal’s integration with Power BI leverages advanced analytics and helps companies to perform customized reporting.

Managing alliances and maintaining meaningful partnerships

When it comes to external innovation and managing alliances, the value of strong partnerships cannot be underestimated. For strong partnerships to be fostered, alliance managers must be supported by life science CRM that can expertly track, run, and report on collaborations.

Inpart Deal allows biopharma and life science companies to store and manage their partnering data in one comprehensive repository, holding details about the following:

  • Alliance types
  • Project descriptions
  • Territories
  • Important communications
  • Obligations
  • Key dates

...and more! This aspect of the Inpart Deal biopharma CRM ensures a holistic view of both individual and company-wide alliances. Additionally, the peer matrix identifies key contacts on both sides of an alliance for consistent communication throughout the collaboration and maximizes the potential of existing alliances.

Aside from centralized and accessible data, what does collaboration almost always require? You guessed it – meetings! Prior to a stakeholder meeting, members can set up a meeting on Inpart and invite the governance team. This grants them access to vital documents, facilitating early collaboration. Post-meeting minutes are disseminated to everyone invited, making tracking and follow-up straightforward and efficient.

Reliable monitoring of both financial and non-financial commitments is crucial for any firm looking to establish themselves as a preferred partner. With Inpart, automated reminders ensure no obligations are overlooked.

It is also vital that stakeholders across the alliance teams are uniformly informed and aligned. Unlike traditional CRMs that would require relevant alliance data to be exported and curated completely manually, Inpart Deal enables teams to generate a PowerPoint one-pager for every alliance, encapsulating essential background, pivotal details, current status, and upcoming steps for each project.

Our end-to-end partnering platform also provides alliance health checks that offer insights from partners and colleagues about the alliance's progress. Analyzing this feedback can uncover disparities and mitigate problems.

Due diligence

Despite the obvious need to safeguard confidential information and maintain the highest level of data security, there are many things that a well-designed biopharma CRM can do to ensure that due diligence is being carried out properly. Below are some of the ways that Inpart Deal helps leading R&D companies maintain the highest level of due diligence throughout the science partnering process:

  • Capture specificities: With the additional fields features, users can record important information required for successful due diligence, including financial KPIs, asset assessment, and more
  • Industry-standard assessment templates: Complimentary assessment templates with built-in best practices for small molecule, large molecule, legal compliance, pre-diligence, and more.
  • Email notification templates: Personalized email notifications to keep key internal and external stakeholders updated.
  • Flexible reporting templates: Save time with ready-to-use reporting templates, with options to customize based on need.
  • Tailored user management: Add and manage user roles and permissions for key stakeholders within the due diligence process (due diligence managers, external experts, etc.).
  • Access control: Ensure compliance by controlling and monitoring who has access. Keep confidential data compliant and secure.

“Through due diligence, investors and pharma companies take a closer look at their potential partner, the asset, and the deal itself to validate claims and evaluate risks. With many millions of dollars riding on the success of licensing and acquisition activities, a deal gone wrong can mean significant debt and wasted resources.” - William Vickery - Due Diligence Director, Global Business Development at Servier

Case study - Eli Lilly reinforces its due diligence process

Context

Eli Lilly had a well-defined due diligence process but was struggling to manage it with legacy technology. They needed a solution that would help optimize collaboration with subject matter experts, securely share confidential data, make assessments easy to complete, and create clear, consolidated reports.

Approach

Eli Lilly worked with Inpart to create a modern and secure module for due diligence that would seamlessly integrate Inpart into their internal systems and workflows. It featured a wide array of assessment templates, secure storage for documents and emails as well as full control of user management and access.

Impact

Eli Lilly gained clear oversight across all their due diligence activities, letting them track activity status and identify and resolve potential problems. The module strengthened their established process, keeping reviews efficient and systematic.

Comparing other life science CRMs on the market

There are many solutions available to life science R&D companies, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. In this section, we will explore a few of these CRMs and evaluate them in terms of their suitability to life science and biopharma partnering.