At every life sciences marketing conference, there’s a session on sales and marketing alignment. And yet, the problem persists.
Recently, I've been thinking about film production. As someone who hopes to sell a screenplay, I'm always struck by the movie credits: hundreds of people, multiple departments, competing creative and business interests. Yet somehow, they deliver a compelling product that connects with specific audiences.
If film productions can align hundreds of people toward a single vision, why do so many life science companies struggle to align just two departments?
I suspect that the answer isn't about organizational structure. It's something that happens earlier in the process. The root cause is a lack of clarity—about the audience and the story you’re telling them.
In filmmaking, success starts with clarity about two things: the audience and the story you're telling them. This drives everything else. Netflix has mastered it. Their algorithm tells them exactly what to produce, for whom, and how much to spend on it. Their key metric, monthly subscriber retention, depends on getting it right. According to this post, they even customize the teaser image you see based on your known preferences.
Contrast this with how many life science companies approach the market. We often try to be everything to everyone. We group functions based on traditional departments rather than natural workflows. Product marketing sits with marketing communications, even though it might have more in common with R&D in terms of "what we make."
When launches struggle, we blame poor coordination between sales and marketing. But what if misalignment is actually a symptom of poor segmentation?
I saw this in my own experience shifting a team from product focus to market focus. Sales reported that all the leads they were getting were already known to them. We were telling new stories to the same old audiences, instead of finding new audiences for our stories. In another case, the value prop wasn’t clear until just before launch, long after the deadlines for producing launch materials and campaigns. Because the story wasn’t clear.
The most successful launches I know about, like Rhinostics' innovation of nasal swabs in the pandemic, started with a crystal-clear understanding of specific workflow problems and the exact users experiencing them.
Like Netflix, they knew the story and the audience. It strikes me that if we got that right, the rest would fall in line. One can’t deny that a well-told story to the right audience is irresistible.
So maybe the lesson is this: Sales and marketing alignment doesn’t start with better communication between departments. It starts with knowing who you’re talking to and what matters to them. Everything else flows from that.
I’m interested in your thoughts. Is clarity the missing piece? Or is it something else?
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Excellent Article Chris. In all areas there has been the disconnect between Sales and Marketing, not just life science. In the entertainment world they are not trying to "cure Cancer" or treat it, so the personalization of Trailers etc. for the same product (movie) not a problem. Medicine it's a slippery slope in my opinion. What's needed is an organization that is aligned on one thing Serving People. Some life Science companies have done a great job bringing patient testimonies into their marketing and telling the story for sales. As you know with medicine it is a 'practice" and each individual's result may vary. Keep up the Great work Chris!