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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

It is not an email campaign. It is a touchpoint system.

We have now sent over a million emails for more than 100 life science companies. Biotech tools. CROs. Reagents. Platforms. Services. Very clever bits of kit that can change a research workflow, rescue a development timeline, or save a scientist from losing the will to live at 7 pm because an assay has failed for the third time that week.

And after all that, here is the thing I keep coming back to:

Cold outreach works.

But not in the way most people want it to work.

Most companies still think outbound means sending a campaign, waiting two weeks, looking at the replies, and then deciding whether the whole channel works.

Which is a bit like going to the gym twice, looking in the mirror, and declaring biology a scam.

That is not outbound.

That is a test of whether your market was already warm enough to respond to one email or one LinkedIn message. Sometimes it is. Lovely. Take the win, book the meetings, pretend you knew it would happen all along. But often it is not.

And that is where people get outbound completely wrong.

The Email Is Not The Campaign

An email is a touchpoint. A LinkedIn message is a touchpoint.

They are not the whole campaign. They are not tiny sales machines that magically create trust, educate the buyer, beat every competitor, get legal approval, and book a meeting before lunch. They are touchpoints. Good ones, if done properly. But still touchpoints.

What we have seen, again and again, is that clients who already have some market familiarity often get early success. They have been posting on LinkedIn. They showed up at ELRIG, SLAS, AACR, BIO, or some deeply specific conference where everyone knows everyone and the coffee is somehow both expensive and terrible.

People have heard the name before, so when the outbound email lands, it does not arrive as a complete stranger. It arrives as, "Oh, I think I have seen these people."

That matters more than most teams want to admit.

Because when a buyer recognises your name, even slightly, the email has less work to do. It only needs to connect something they already half-know with a problem they might have right now.

That is a very different job.

The 95% Problem

LinkedIn's B2B Institute talks about the idea that roughly 95% of potential buyers are out-market at any given time, while only about 5% are in-market now.

Do not get too religious about the exact number. In life sciences, the "ready now" group might be smaller, weirder, or buried under a grant cycle or procurement process. But the principle is right.

Most of your market is not ready to buy today. Which means outbound has two jobs: find the buyers who are already in-market, and warm the buyers who will be in-market later.

Most teams only judge the first job. That is the mistake.

Because the real value of outbound, when done properly, is that it creates memory. It makes your company easier to recall when the pain becomes urgent.

So when they finally do need help, you are not Vendor Number 47.

You are "those people who have been talking sense about this problem for the last few months."

That is when cold becomes warm.

Outbound Is The Engine Behind The Warm-Up

This is the part I want to be very clear on.

When we say the audience needs warming, we are not saying "stop doing outbound and go write some blogs for six months."

That is not the lesson.

Cold outbound is one of the most important ways you warm the market.

Email and LinkedIn are not just channels for asking for meetings. They are how you put the right idea, webinar invite, customer story, or useful resource in front of the exact accounts you care about.

Bad outbound says, "Do you want a quick call?"

Good outbound says, "Here is something useful, relevant, and specific enough that it should be worth your attention whether you are buying now or not."

That might be a webinar invite. A technical guide. A customer story. A checklist. A conference follow-up. A LinkedIn message pointing someone to something useful.

The point is not to hide the sales intent. We are all adults. They know why you exist.

The point is to make each touchpoint do more than ask for time. It should build familiarity, teach something useful, and connect your name to a problem they care about.

That is what warming an audience actually looks like. It is not just posting and hoping. It is active distribution. Outbound is the engine underneath it.

Why Some Campaigns Work Straight Away

When a client gets fast results, it is usually not because the email was blessed by the sales gods.

It is normally because a few things were already true.

The audience was well defined. The problem was easy to recognise. The company had credibility before the email landed. There were existing touchpoints in the market. The message connected to a current trigger: funding, hiring, trial progress, conference attendance, publication, expansion, or an obvious operational bottleneck.

Event-led campaigns are a good example.

In our benchmark data, event follow-up schedules produced up to  20% reply rate, and event meet-up campaigns produced an up to 40% reply rate. Both were well above the overall email average.

Why? Because an event is already a touchpoint. The buyer has context. There is a reason for the message.

You are not appearing out of the blue asking whether they want to "explore synergies", which remains one of the fastest ways to make a scientist delete your email and possibly your entire existence.

The best campaigns do not feel random.

They feel like the next logical interaction.

Why Campaigns Fail

Campaigns fail when the email is asked to do too much.

The list is too broad. The message is too product-led. The proof is too weak. The CTA asks for a meeting before the buyer understands why they should care. Marketing is off doing "brand" somewhere else while sales is asking why nobody replies.

Leadership gives it four weeks, sees no miracle, and quietly decides outbound does not work.

I have seen this film. The ending is bad.

The biggest issue is expectation.

If your market has already been warmed through content, events, referrals, customer stories, and useful public expertise, outbound can convert quickly.

If none of that exists, outbound still works, but the first phase is often about creating recognition and relevance. You are not just harvesting demand. You are building the conditions for it.

What To Do If Your Audience Is Cold

If you are starting from low awareness, do not panic.

But do not just send emails and stare at the dashboard like it owes you money.

Warm the audience deliberately.

Start with 50 to 100 priority accounts. Not 4,000 vaguely relevant companies scraped from a database because someone got excited by filters.

Post about the problem you solve, not just your product. Give your sales team something worth sending: a checklist, a technical guide, a webinar invite, a case study with actual substance. Anything better than "open to a quick 15?"

Cold outbound becomes much more useful when it has something to carry.

That is the key.

Email and LinkedIn are not just there to ask for meetings. They distribute the thinking, proof, and useful content that warms the account. They drive traffic to the blog. They invite the right people to the webinar. They put a customer story in front of a prospect who is not ready yet.

And if you only track replies, you miss the warming effect. Look at who opens conversations later, visits the site, engages with posts, attends webinars, or suddenly appears in a discovery call saying, "I think I have seen your stuff before."

That sentence is gold.

It means the touchpoints are working.

The Bottom Line

Outbound works when it is treated as part of a go-to-market system.

It struggles when it is treated as a standalone email experiment.

If the buyer is in-market, a good email can absolutely create a meeting.

If they are not in-market, that same email or LinkedIn message can still do something valuable. It can teach. It can build memory. It can turn a cold stranger into a warm future buyer.

Email and LinkedIn are not separate from warming the market. They are how you warm the market when used properly.

They carry the content, invite people to events, distribute the proof, start the conversations, and keep your name attached to the problem long before the buyer is ready.

So if you are about to launch outbound, ask yourself this:

Are we expecting one email to create demand from scratch?

Or are we building enough useful touchpoints that when the buyer is ready, we are already the obvious people to speak to?

Because after a million-plus emails, that is the lesson.

Cold outreach works, But it works a lot better when your audience is not quite so cold.


Send us a message if you want some tips on lead magnets to add to your outbound.

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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.