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Succession Bio works with life science/biotech companies to help drive sales, licensing, and partnership opportunities.

We do this through market research to identify the right companies and people, craft scientifically credible messages, and then perform the outbound sales and marketing tactics on your behalf to facilitate meetings with the right people at the right companies.

Succession

• Specializes in life sciences/biotech (it's all we do!)

• Provides market research, messaging, and outbound sales/marketing services

• Facilitates meetings and opportunities with the right people at the right companies for our clients

• Sales training for teams of 10+ who want to find and close more deals with biotech and pharma

You have the same territory as the rep who is beating you. The same product, the same market, the same accounts sitting in the same CRM. You think you are doing enough. You research your prospects, you write your emails, you follow up, you book the meetings, you run the demos. From where you sit, you are doing the job well.

So why are they closing and you are not?

Here is the entire sales cycle run two ways, step by step: what you do, and what the winning rep does at the exact same moment, with the exact same tools sitting in front of both of you. Read it top to bottom.

Stage 0. Know what you sell and to whom

You: You know the product well. You have done the training, you know the features and the specs, you can run the pitch cleanly and handle the usual questions. When a deep technical question comes up, you bring in an application scientist, which is exactly what that resource is there for.

The winners: They know the product like they built it and the science around it like they practice it. They know the exact workflow step it replaces, what fails without it, how it stacks against the three alternatives the customer is weighing, and the objection the lab's most senior scientist will raise on slide two. They go toe to toe with a PhD on the assay before support ever joins the call. To the prospect, one rep sounds like a salesperson and the other sounds like a peer who happens to sell something.

Stage 1. Build the ICP

You: You work the ICP you were given: mid-size biotech, R&D, US and EU. It is clear, it matches the accounts you have seen close before, and it gives you plenty of good names to work.

The winners: They rebuild the ICP from evidence. They study every account that closed last year, what those accounts had in common, and the signal that showed up right before the buy. They split "could use this" from "has a reason to buy this quarter": a funding round, a new program, a scaling bottleneck, a published method their product fits exactly. AI clusters the closed-won accounts and surfaces the pattern in minutes. While you work a list of companies that look right, they work a list of companies that are about to buy.

Stage 2. Build your lead list

You: You pull companies and contacts from LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, and GlobalData, filter by your ICP, find the decision-maker at each account (usually a Director or VP), and load them in. It is a strong, sizable list drawn from the sources the whole industry trusts.

The winners: They use those same three tools and then keep going, because the reps they are beating stop there. They pull from everything: Sales Navigator, Apollo, GlobalData, Gosset plus this year's and previous years' conference attendee and speaker lists, author lists on recent papers, clinical trial investigator records, grant and funding databases, and their own CRM history. They work the signals too: who just got hired into a relevant role, who moved companies, who just raised a round, and the gossip moving through the field about which lab is expanding and which program is in trouble. And they never settle for one name per account. They map the whole buying group, because in life sciences it is almost never one person: the scientist who will use it day to day, the lab head who wants it, the procurement lead who can stall it for a quarter, and the VP who signs. Titles mean different things across pharma, biotech, and academia, so they target by function, not by the words on the badge. You build a clean list from three tools. They build a deeper list from a dozen sources and already know the champion and the blocker at every account.

Stage 3. Research the person, company, and science

You: You review the prospect's LinkedIn and the company website, and you have AI pull a quick summary of the company so you walk in with context before you reach out.

The winners: They build a real profile on the person and the account. They read the prospect's full career, where they trained, who they trained under, where they worked before, the people you both know, and they read the company at the level of the exact team the prospect runs. They find last month's funding round, the pipeline update, the trial that just moved phase, the grant that just landed, and the paper the prospect co-authored along with what it actually concluded. They know what the company sells, who it competes with, and where this prospect's work sits in the roadmap. AI pulls and synthesizes all of it, the publications, the trials, the news, the filings, in seconds, and they read it for the one detail that proves a human paid attention. You reference the company. They open with the specific result from the prospect's last paper and the problem it points straight at.

Stage 4. Write the message

You: You paste the prospect's company, job title, and what you are trying to sell into ChatGPT, ask for a cold email, get a clean and professional draft, adjust the opener, and send. It reads well and it goes out fast.

The winners: They write to the person, not the title. They lead with the prospect's problem instead of their product, and they make the email useful on its own: a relevant benchmark, a result from a similar lab, a link to something worth reading, so the prospect gets value even if they never reply. They map the tone to the persona, because a bench scientist and a VP do not read the same way, and they write several angles on purpose: a pain-led version, a peer-proof version, a curiosity version. They use AI to draft and to spin up those variations at scale, then they actively test the angles against real replies and keep what works. The hook still comes from the research, and they edit every version until it sounds like a person who did the homework. The result is an email the prospect is glad they opened.

Stage 5. Sequence and go multichannel

You: You run a solid sequence: a strong opener, a few well-timed follow-ups, and a LinkedIn connection request to stay on their radar.

The winners: They build a cadence where every touch earns its place across email, LinkedIn, and events. Each one adds something: a paper worth reading, a customer result, a question the prospect actually wants to answer. They follow and engage the prospect's posts and the company's LinkedIn page, so they catch every value point the account is publishing about itself and can reference what it is actually talking about. They show up at the one conference the whole field attends and shake the hand behind the email. Your follow-ups say "just checking in." Theirs give the prospect a reason to reply every single time.

Stage 6. Land in the inbox

You: You send from your inbox at a healthy volume and keep the campaigns moving.

The winners: They treat the inbox itself as infrastructure, and they build it properly. Instead of blasting from their main company inbox and risking its reputation, they set up separate sending domains and fresh inboxes made just for outreach, then "warm" them over weeks by slowly ramping real email activity until the mailbox providers learn to trust them. They rotate sends across many inboxes so no single one looks like a spam cannon, and they honor every suppression and DNC list to the letter. They watch the numbers that predict trouble: bounce rates checked regularly and kept low, open rates monitored so a sudden drop gets caught early. The prospect never sees any of this, which is why it is the easiest thing to overlook and the fastest way to lose a whole channel. Their emails land in the inbox.

Stage 7. Handle the reply

You: A prospect replies, and you send back a friendly, thorough response with a link to book time.

The winners: They reply within minutes, because they know a lead is far more likely to convert when you respond in the first few minutes than an hour later, and the odds keep falling the longer it sits. They read the intent under the words, answer the actual question, and treat "not now" as information: a referral to the right person, a smaller ask, a date to come back.

Stage 8. Book and prep the meeting

You: You get the meeting booked, have AI give you a quick rundown of the company and the attendee so you are not walking in cold, and review the thread beforehand so you are ready.

The winners: They prepare like the whole deal rides on this half hour. They know exactly who is joining and why, and they bring the one piece of proof this specific buyer needs to see. They have AI pull a full brief from the research, the earlier emails, and the account history, then they cut it down to the two or three points that will actually move this buyer. They walk in with a clear view on how this account should evaluate the product, not just answers to whatever gets asked.

Stage 9. Run discovery and qualify

You: You run your discovery questions, get good engagement, hear that it is interesting, and set the next step.

The winners: They leave discovery knowing the real pain, the timeline, the budget, and every name that has to say yes. They will walk away from a deal that will not close to protect the time for one that will. They record the call, let AI transcribe it and pull out the pain points, objections, and next steps, and they fold what they learn across many calls back into sharper questions and better targeting.

Stage 10. Proposal and pricing

You: You send a clear, professional quote at list price and follow up to answer any questions.

The winners: They frame the number against the outcome: the weeks saved, the failed batch avoided, the program pulled forward a quarter. They scope the proposal to exactly what the buyer needs and make it easy to approve. They draw on what closed before, so the value story is built from real numbers other accounts have actually seen. You are defending a price. They are describing a return, and those are two very different conversations.

Stage 11. Procurement, negotiation, and legal

You: You get the verbal yes, send the paperwork into purchasing, and check in while it works through the process.

The winners: They know this is where good deals go to die, so they never go quiet. They map procurement early, they get the MSA and the security review moving before either becomes a blocker, and they hand the champion everything they need to sell it internally when the rep is not in the room. They keep a playbook of how past deals cleared legal and procurement, so they see the next holdup before it happens.

Stage 12. Close

You: You keep the deal warm and wait for the buyer to confirm the final steps.

The winners: They ask for the business plainly and clear the last piece of friction themselves, whether that is a signature, a start date, or one more sign-off. They make saying yes easy and low-risk. For them the close is the quiet end of a process they ran well from the first email, and it lands on time.

Stage 13. Log everything and keep the CRM honest

You: You keep your CRM updated with the key details on your active deals so the pipeline reflects where things stand.

The winners: They log as they go, in the moment: the notes, the real next step, the true stage, the exact words the buyer used. AI transcribes the call and drafts the summary, and they keep the record honest because they know what it feeds. Next quarter's list, next year's ICP, and every clean handoff come straight out of it.

Read back through the "you" column. Every line is reasonable and you probably relate. Every line is what a good rep does, and most of it is probably close to what you did this week. That’s the point, you aren't doing anything “wrong”. The winner is simply doing more at every step, and using the same AI you have to go further instead of just faster. The gap at any one stage is small enough to ignore but when you stack it across the whole sales cycle, against the same territory and the same product, it’s the entire difference between the rep who makes the number and the rep who explains why they did not.

Make “you” the “winner”.

1. Lead Generation: We’ll build target lists, write scientifically relevant messaging, and send messages on your behalf to book qualified sales meetings with biotech and pharma companies.

2. Training for Teams: If you want to upskill your team around prospecting, driving to close, key account management, AI, or any other topic, we can put together a training plan specific to your organization’s needs.

3. Strategy Call: Need more than training? Want help implementing and executing your sales strategy? In a 30-minute call, we will assess your company’s current situation and identify growth opportunities.