About this Report

This report is based on work with Insight Revenue’s life sciences companies. Some very large ones, global companies with a strong brand presence. Others are early-stage companies looking to innovate. What they all have in common is that they’re looking to lead their market. Thismeans that they need to introduce new solutions and to shift the way things are done. If theyare already market leaders, then they also need to protect market share, constantly re-inventingtheir offerings against large numbers of competitors.

Insight Revenue would like to offer a special thank you to Daniel Dellaferrera, a leader in life sciences strategy & transformation, for all his help in writing this report.

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Introduction

Fundamentally speaking, everybody agrees, the goal is to provide patients the best possible care, efficiently and with a high degree of reliability. The reality, however, is that Life sciences buyers are overwhelmed:

• On one hand, demand is strong, as the global patient population requires more care. Not only are people living longer with complex diseases but a growing number of younger patients present with increasingly serious conditions.
• With demand outstripping supply, payers everywhere grapple with rising costs and shrinking budgets. Recent geopolitical turmoil means that governments are unlikely to be able to deliver even the modest increases that various health systems are accustomed to. A global shortage of qualified life sciences professionals makes things worse.
• At the same time, innovation is fast and furious. Everybody has heard of GLP-1s and their potential (the statins of our time). Beyond that, the pipeline promises more: personalized cancer treatments and vaccines, novel diagnostics as well as the hope that AI will be able to seamlessly stitch together patient data, to improve productivity by simplifying diagnoses, creating care plans and even identifying novel compounds and treatments.

All of this means that life sciences buyers keenly feel the need to do more with less. Every dollar they waste making a bad purchase means another dollar that can’t be spent on patient care. All the new choices also make it harder to know how to prioritize and what to choose.

In this environment, sellers often find themselves wrong-footed, especially if they are up against lower cost competitors who promise many of the same benefits but at a large discount. In this report, we explore some of the main gaps we observe.

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Understanding new life sciences buyers

Many of the world’s most successful life sciences companies were founded by physicians. It’s a long list: everything from BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine to the da Vinci Surgical Systems created by Dr. Fred Moll, a surgeon. Not surprisingly, life sciences companies are often intensely product-driven, focused on the important things that they excel at.

Increasingly, administrators, regulators, and payers push for the adoption of evidence-based standards of care. They observe both too much unwarranted variation and unnecessary spend. Simply put, they want better value for money.

What we find is that life sciences sales professionals often struggle to identify the additional members of the buying group beyond the people whose work will be directly impacted:

• Executives who set strategy. Is the solution aligned with a given facility or provider’s strategy? For example, it’s harder to sell an outsourced diagnostics solution to a facility that generates income by providing diagnostics services in-house.
• There are a number of strategic decision makers such as a VP of Quality or Transformation to talk to.
• With many life sciences solutions also including software, IT is increasingly important. Will the solution address the needs of the CISO, allow for easy integration into a facility’s EHR and allow the informatics team to extract useful clinical and operational data?
• More obviously, does the solution make it easy for procurement to demonstrate value and reduce cost over time?

Depending on the system, it will be important to identify key regulators, opinion leaders as well as patient advocates who might all be able to veto a purchase if they find that they haven’t been consulted. This is especially true if a system has grown by acquisition. It might be that the system is a system by name only and that each facility still operates autonomously.

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Beyond clinical value

Key to uniting all these different members of the buying group, often depends on being able to demonstrate value that goes beyond clinical metrics. The intense competitiveness of the industry ensures that few solutions remain unique for very long.

It’s an over-simplification but we find that sellers struggle to answer many of the following questions around value:

• Does the solution reduce operational costs by, for example, simplifying the supply chain?
• Does the solution improve throughout issues, for example, by reducing length-of-stay?
• Does the solution reduce the need for capital expenditures, or at least help delay them until the macroeconomic scenario improves?
• Does the solution support alignment with new and different incentives that are part and parcel of the transition from Fee For Service to Value Based Care?
• Perhaps most challenging, will the solution reinforce an existing standard of care or will it upend carefully negotiated practice?

Ultimately, we find that sellers need to be able to have conversations beyond the clinical applications of their solutions. They need to be able to talk to the VP of quality, the head of IT security, as well as procurement, so that they can align behind a solution. Additionally, sellers who understand the unique interplay between Chief Operating Officers and Chief Medical Officers will benefit from this knowledge. At the risk of oversimplification, the tension often comes from clinicians who are focused on the care they provide within a discipline while executives are trying to provide efficiencies that cut across the different care pathways. Complicating all of this is the fact that power often does not cleanly map to titles as it would in a corporation. A revenue-generating surgeon, for example, can often veto a purchase.

Being able to navigate these conversations requires a more in-depth understanding of an organization’s strategic goals as well as their appetite for risk. We find that sellers often do not have access to case studies and examples that would allow them to be more comfortable navigating these additional conversations. Instead, they often revert back to selling features and benefits and thus find themselves in situations where they often end up giving unwarranted discounts or additional services.

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Making the most of the platform

Insight Revenue’s larger life sciences industry clients face an additional issue: they often fail to articulate the value of the entire platform as opposed to the value of the individual pieces. Wanting to spread out risk and play companies against each other, procurement officials play into this hesitancy and often play up bureaucratic decision-making and perceived lack of responsiveness.

Our experience is that sellers consistently make a couple of bad assumptions that undermine their efforts to sell the platform:

• Accurately noting that only a small percentage of the customer’s total spend goes toward their solution, they underestimate the lengths that more sophisticated procurement organizations go in their quest to reduce overall spend within different categories. It’s important to have a strategy in place and to identify the non-price negotiables ahead of any contract discussions.
• In a bid to improve the offer, sellers often end up giving away value-add services that they buyer often didn’t ask for. While somewhat effective in the short run, this can then make it very tempting for the buyer to turn around and to ask that the cost of the extra offering is removed, if not in year one, then in year two. This can also mean that additional services end up being starved of funds as they fail to earn their keep.

Above all, we find that sellers underestimate the degree to which their size can make it possible to offer their clients with more sophisticated options that protect the buyer from adverse events. Capitalizing on this, however, requires that life sciences industry providers continue the conversation with the buyer long past when the deal has been signed. They need to continuously work to educate the buying team on how else value is being delivered. It’s no longer enough to hand the relationship over to a service team and hope that product performance alone will translate into expanded relationships.

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Conclusions

Despite a surge of innovation and opportunity, life sciences sellers remain at a disadvantage—often not because of the quality of their offerings, but because of critical gaps in how they engage with life sciences buyers.

We observe a persistent skills gap: sellers frequently struggle to position value beyond narrow clinical use cases. In high-stakes, budget-constrained environments, the ability to articulate broader operational, strategic, and financial value is no longer optional—it is essential. Without this ability, even strong solutions can be reduced to commodities and subject to unsustainable price pressure.

Our Insight to Value program helps close this gap by helping sellers take a fresh look at how they manage conversations. This is compounded by a knowledge gap: many sellers lack sufficient fluency in how health care systems function beyond the point of care. Success depends on more than understanding how a product benefits an end user (or provider)—it requires a nuanced grasp of how different stakeholders (from procurement to quality, from IT to strategy) influence decisions, and how their incentives are evolving in a shifting landscape of regulations, reimbursement models, and resource scarcity. At Insight Revenue we find that the knowledge is unevenly distributed within organizations and that just bringing together all the right people in a structured environment goes a long way toward closing this particular gap.

To succeed, commercial teams must do more than communicate product benefits. They must become trusted guides—able to connect their solutions to the complex, cross-functional pressures that life sciences organizations face. This requires a concerted investment in both the "skills to position value" and the "knowledge to navigate life sciences systems" with credibility and insight.

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Insight Revenue Recommendations

Planning, we believe, is never more important than when things become uncertain as the process forces people to think through options and ideally even come up with novel solutions.

Insight Revenue’s solution, the Customer Value Roadmap, is based on work done by buyers at enterprises who were looking to compare and prioritize possible investments. We believe that sellers can use the same framework, and ask themselves some of the same hard questions, to understand how to best collaborate with their customers.

Our experience with working with teams on these plans is that the groundwork needs to be carefully prepared. While high performers typically need little support to operationalize these plans, most sellers will need training and coaching before they are ready to have these kinds of more strategic conversations with their customers

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