Problem:
The new, PE-selected CEO of a mid-level provider of marketing solutions for life sciences companies assessed his company’s marketing capabilities as part of his review of the business. He was not impressed with existing internal capabilities or ROI but did not have time to build a new marketing team from scratch to achieve his aggressive short-term goals. In addition, he decided to rebrand the company, changing its name and updating its offerings to reflect its clear focus on health and departure from its direct marketing roots.
Approach:
The CEO had previously worked with Health Accelerators’(HA) co-founder Joe Meadows and hired HA as the B2B AOR soon after he started. After six months of HA marketing support, the CEO appointed HA’s president and co-founder, Joe Shields, as the company’s chief marketing officer (CMO), with the HA team becoming the de facto new marketing department. The scope for HA included participating in leadership team meetings; the annual marketing plan and budget; executive coaching and presentation support; collaboration and communications planning with internal staff; research, writing, and creative development, including creating the company’s new website; social media posts; paid search; trade media planning, buying, asset trafficking, and vendor management.
Due to its extensive experience working inside many of the top pharma companies, the HA team was also consulted to help the client’s business development and sales teams with account strategy, event presence, and collateral.
Results:
With the support of HA, the client’s marketing function evolved into a true marketing system, even adopting the client’s own Patient-HCP CRM engine to power its B2B communications with pharma prospects and clients. The CEO and rest of the leadership team were so pleased with the turnaround, they asked HA to deliver several projects for the client’s pharma customers.
During our engagement, lead generation increased by 400%; brand awareness of the new company name and capabilities increased from zero to 65% among the pharma audience; and topline sales increased 19%. Finally, the company was acquired several months after our engagement ended and the CEO was replaced.