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Welcome to the Succession newsletter where 2,000+ life science sales reps improve their skills in 5 minutes per week. If you’re getting value from these newsletters, we'd love it if you could forward it along to your sales colleagues. If you’re new here, subscribe below.

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 work your lists, you send the emails, attend conferences but you still end up with a patchy pipeline that goes dry and you spend the next six weeks apologising to your manager.

Nobody in sales development ever tells you: outbound is not your only pipeline problem, awareness is your silent enemy.

You've got three pipelines. Most of you have never thought of it that way, but you do:

1-The first is short-term, the deals you're actively working on, the calls you're in, the RFIs with a deadline. That one's fine. You know what that is.

2-The second is medium-term, the prospects who know your name, who've seen you around, who've maybe had a conversation with you at a conference or replied to a message three months ago. This is the pipeline that quietly disappears if you don't touch it.

3-The third is long-term brand, the deals that come through sponsorships and SEO and a website that actually works. That's marketing's job, mostly.

The problem is the middle one, number 2!

The medium pipeline. Marketing isn't optimised for it. Your manager isn't tracking it. And you, the individual rep, are definitely not building it deliberately. Which means it collapses. Every quarter. Like clockwork.

Most reps have never been taught or sought out the skills to drive the middle pipe so it's not surprising that we focus on known prospecting skills and also what marketing can bring as inbound.

The fix is not complicated, for most it's a slight augmentation rather than a complete reboot, want to know how…keep reading then!

I say "inbound" and I can see half of you reaching for the exit. "Nick, I'm not a content creator. I'm a rep." Fair enough.
But you already know more about what your buyers need than anyone in your marketing team. You hear the same objections every week. You know what questions come up in every discovery call. You've got a point of view on what's broken in your industry that nobody's writing down. That is the content, you're just not using it.

One post a week on LinkedIn about a real problem your buyers have. A short comment on someone else's post. A thirty-second video explaining the mistake everyone makes with a certain protocol. None of this is impressive on its own. Do it for twelve weeks and your medium-term pipeline stops being an accident and starts being a system. Inbound isn't a campaign. It's a habit. The compounding is the asset.

When you reach out to someone cold, you start from scratch. They don't know you. They don't know your company. You spend the first call establishing credibility before you can ask a single useful question. Now imagine that same prospect has seen three of your posts in the last month. They've watched a thirty-second clip of you explaining exactly the problem they're dealing with right now. They downloaded your free tool last week. When your email lands, they're not deciding whether you're credible. They're deciding whether to buy.

That gap, from cold stranger to familiar voice, is what marketing has always been for. It shortens your cycle. It raises your win rate. And it pulls deals that would've closed in Q4 into Q2. That is your number and your manager off your back, so stop treating it like a nice to have!

The bar has movedm but you're still playing last year's game.

If you're still opening your outbound with first name, company, job title, and a recent LinkedIn post you found, I hate to break it to you. Every rep with a Clay account is doing that. Every AI tool is doing that. Buyers can spot the spray-and-pray from the subject line. The "personalised" email of 2024 is the spam of 2026. We've written about this before, AI didn't ruin cold outreach. It's a case of brain rot. The tools got smarter. The thinking didn't.

To get above the noise you need substance. A tool. A framework. A point of view you've actually tested with real customers. Not a mail merge that proves you have access to LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This is the new baseline. Not optional. Not for the keen reps. The minimum to be heard.

Look at your last ten outbound emails. Count how many end with "open to a quick 15-minute chat?" Every. Single. One. And every buyer has seen it forty times this week, this doesn’t mean never use this, but it has a specific time and place

Marketing teams worked this out years ago. They don't ask for the meeting. They offer something useful and let the meeting come from it. You can do the same thing.

A short white paper on a problem your buyer recognises. A two-page framework you've used with three similar accounts. A calculator that tells them what their current process is costing them. A questionnaire they can complete in five minutes that scores how ready they are for the next stage.

A scientist will not book a call to "explore synergies". She will absolutely click a tool that quantifies exactly how much antibody yield she's leaving on the table.

Once someone has used your tool or completed your assessment, your follow-up writes itself. You're not chasing a meeting. You're responding to a result they just generated. That is a fundamentally different outbound conversation.

Why do you think we built all these tools https://succession.bio/free-tools, why do you think you are reading this newsletter, it’s part of our pipeline build, (SO PLEASE MENTION US TO EVERYONE WHO NEEDS LIFE SCIENCE LEAD GENERATION, sorry about the shameless pitch haha back to the newsletter).

Five years ago, the kind of asset I'm describing, a calculator, a self-assessment, a diagnostic, took six weeks and needed design, dev, and copy. You didn't have any of those things and you weren't going to get them from your manager. Now you can ship one in an afternoon. The barrier is gone. The reps who understand this are walking into account reviews with their own purpose-built tools while everyone else is still attaching the same PDF that's been in the shared drive since 2020.

A thirty-second animation explaining one specific problem your buyer has. Vibe-coded, run for a couple of hundred pounds against a tight target list. Watch what shows up in your inbox the week after. You may not even need permission from your team to test something at that budget.

Here's the part reps consistently underestimate. Post three times a week on the actual problems your customers are wrestling with. By month three, you will get inbound. Not a lot. Enough. Enough that you stop sweating a bad week of outbound. Enough that prospects walk into discovery calls already half-sold. Outbound compounds when it stops. Inbound compounds when it keeps going. That is the whole point.

None of this replaces your outbound. It makes your outbound work harder.

The emails still go out. The DMs still go out. The booth still gets manned. The discovery calls still happen. Nothing you're already doing stops. What changes is what you put inside it. Every asset you build becomes something you can drop into five different surfaces. You put the calculator in the cold email. You open the LinkedIn DM with the assessment link. You hand out the diagnostic at a conference instead of a business card. You mention it on the discovery call when the prospect describes the exact problem it solves. You attach it to a follow-up note instead of "just circling back". One asset. Five surfaces. That's the leverage marketing teams have been chasing for years. You can have it too. You just have to build the thing instead of asking for it.

Where to start.

Pick five companies. Five contacts. Build one thing this week, a calculator, a checklist, a two-page diagnostic. Something a buyer would actually use without speaking to you first.

Send it instead of asking for a meeting. Post about it on LinkedIn. Run a small ad against the same list. Mention it on your next discovery call. Hand it out at the next conference. Then come back in six weeks and look at your reply rate, your inbound, and the quality of the conversations you're having.

The reps who build pipeline like this aren't better salespeople. They've just stopped waiting for someone else to do their marketing for them.

Let us know how it goes.

Running your own outbound and want to know what's actually working in life sciences right now? Book a 30-minute call with Succession → We'll show you the actual playbooks, no fluff, no NCCN framework, just what we see closing in biotech and pharma.

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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.