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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

Is see the irony in this job post based on the subject line but…

We're hiring again!

Client Success & Operations Manager (Life Sciences)

In 2.5 years we've helped 100+ life sciences companies to build and improve their go-to-market motions. Now we want someone to help us run and scale that engine.

Here's the part most jobs can't offer. We use cutting edge AI tools and workflows that we pair with deep scientific and commercial judgment, and you are the human in the loop.

You bring the science, read the nuance, make the calls, and own the client relationship. You'll spend your days driving that system, tinkering with it, and learning AI at the cutting edge alongside founders who live in it.

The cool stuff you'll actually do:

- Direct AI agents that build a client's entire target list, then apply your own scientific lens to decide who actually fits. Find the right biotech and pharma companies, find the right people inside them, enrich every record, in minutes rather than days.

- Use buying-signal intelligence (funding rounds, exec moves, new trials, pipeline changes) to time outreach to the exact moment a company is ready to buy.

- Work with AI to draft outbound, then sharpen it with real scientific understanding so it lands with technical buyers. You decide what's credible and what converts.

- Launch and run multi-channel campaigns across 100+ clients from a single command line, with AI handling the volume and you making the judgment calls.

- Create web apps, content, and anything else that drives client results, no coding experience needed. The AI builds it, you direct it.

- Spot a repetitive task and turn it into a new automation. Your ideas become part of the system everyone else runs on.

This is a place to get genuinely good at applied AI without losing the science. We're experimenting with new tools and models constantly, and you'll learn directly from us on what's working at the edge. If you've ever thought "I could do this faster if I just built the tool," this is that job.

Who we're looking for

- A life sciences background. You understand the world of biotech, pharma, and academia, and can speak credibly to technical commercial teams.

- Genuinely energised by AI. Not "I've used ChatGPT," but someone who wants to live inside AI-driven systems, tinker, and push what they can do, while keeping a human's judgment over the output.

- Sharp, organised, and clear. You keep projects on track, communicate proactively with clients, and keep them confident throughout.

- Comfortable moving fast. We've built strong systems and want someone who'll master them quickly and make them better.

- UK preferred, remote. we're open to other locations.

You'll work directly with the founders (Nick Clare and Me) and the team: Jessica Evans, Keith Daly, and Divya Puri.

How to apply.

No CV needed. Your LinkedIn covers that. Send us a short LinkedIn video telling us why you'd be a great fit and why you want to join us. I think there is a 2 min limit on the video you can send FYI.

You've heard the names. You filed them under "developer tools."

There's a good chance you've seen Claude Code (from Anthropic) or Codex (from OpenAI) mentioned somewhere and moved on. They have "code" in the name. They get talked about at developer conferences. The screenshots show a terminal. So you reasonably concluded they weren't for you.

That conclusion is costing you the best GTM teammate available right now.

Here's the reframe that changed how we work. The thing that makes these tools good at engineering has almost nothing to do with code. It's that they can read your real files and tools, carry out long multi-step work on their own, remember how you like things done, and wait for your sign-off before anything goes out. Take away the code and that's a description of knowledge work. It's most of what a sales or marketing team does all day.

We started using them this way for our own outbound into biotech, pharma, and academia. They are now the closest thing we have to a teammate who never forgets, never gets bored of the repetitive parts, and gets sharper every week. Not a tool we open now and then. Something closer to a hire.

At the end of this newsletter, you’ll find 2 in-depth guides on how to use each of these different “hires” to both get started and get the most out of them.

So what actually are these things?

In plain terms: Claude Code and Codex are AI assistants you give a goal to in plain English, and they go and do the work, step by step, using your real information, and show you the result before anything happens that you can't undo.

A few things make them different from the chatbot you've probably tried:

• They remember. You write down who you sell to, how you talk, and what you're allowed to claim, once, in a simple file. They read it every time. A normal chatbot forgets the moment you close the tab. These build on what came before.

• They connect to your real world. Your email, your calendar, your meeting notes, your CRM, and outside sources like a company's website, ClinicalTrials.gov, or PubMed. So the work is grounded in what's actually true for your accounts, not generic filler.

• They do multi-step work. Not just "answer a question," but "research these twenty accounts, write a brief for each, and flag the three showing buying signals." They can stay on a long task without you steering every move.

• They ask before acting. Anything that leaves your domain, an email, a CRM update, waits for your approval. They draft and propose. You decide. Nothing sends on its own.

Claude Code and Codex are two versions of the same idea, from the two leading AI labs. You don't need both. Pick whichever your team already has access to and start there. The guides below cover each one.

Why "hire," not "tool"

A tool does one thing when you pick it up. A hire learns your business, takes work off your plate, and gets more useful the longer they're around. These behave like the second one.

You give it context once and it applies it everywhere. You correct it once and it stops making that mistake. You connect a new source and every future task gets sharper. After a few weeks it holds your ideal customer profile, your voice, your account history, and your best-performing messages, all in one place that compounds. That accumulated knowledge is the part a competitor starting from a blank chatbot simply can't match.

It’s also like a hire because you need to properly onboard and train them. Neither is a silver bullet right out of the gate, just like you wouldn’t hire an employee and give them 0 onboarding. You need to ground them in your business and your goals. With that context, they truly become an extension of your team.

What this looks like for a GTM team

Here's the part that makes it concrete. Once it's connected to where your work lives, the same assistant can do all of this, in plain English, no code:

Account research and intelligence

• A one-page brief on any account before a meeting: their pipeline, latest trial or funding news, likely buying committee, and the sharpest reason to reach out now, with every claim sourced.

• A standing weekly digest of what changed across your top accounts: funding rounds, trial readouts, executive moves, new publications.

Prospecting and targeting

• Turn a 600-name conference list into a ranked set of 25 accounts worth your time, each with an opener tailored to their science.

• Score a list of companies against your ideal customer profile so you spend the week on the twenty that matter, not the two hundred that don't.

Messaging that sounds like a peer

• Draft outreach that opens with something true and specific about an account's work, in your voice, making only claims you can back up. It reads like a colleague wrote it, not a spam tool.

• Find the warm path into an account: shared investors, advisors, co-authors, prior colleagues.

Inbox, replies, and follow-up

• Triage your inbox, draft the replies that matter, and queue them for your approval.

• Read a call transcript and write the follow-up that proves you listened, plus the CRM notes, in the time it takes to refill your coffee.

Content and planning

• Draft a LinkedIn post or newsletter section that reacts to a real paper or readout and stays scientifically honest.

• Build a quarter plan ranked by fit, signal, and deal stage, with the single highest-leverage move for each focus account.

That's a sampling. The guides include sixteen ready-to-run workflows you can copy.

Why this is for everyone, not just the technical few

The real barrier was never difficulty. It was the framing. These tools were introduced to developers, so everyone else assumed they had to be a developer to use them.

You don't. You need a folder, a few notes about who you sell to and how you sound, and a willingness to read what the assistant drafts before you send it. That's the whole on-ramp. Most people we've helped get started have something useful running the same afternoon.

One honest caution for our world: a careless setup will let an AI invent a trial phase or a citation, and that ends your credibility with a scientific buyer fast. The good news is that's a setup problem, not a fact of life. Both guides show you exactly how to keep the output honest and grounded in real sources, so it earns trust with technical buyers instead of losing it.

Where to start: two step-by-step guides

We wrote two field guides so you can pick the tool you already have and get going today. They cover the same ground for each one: how to connect your systems, what to put in your context files, a simple five-level path from your first task to a full system that runs itself, and a library of sixteen ready-to-use GTM workflows.

→ How to use Claude Code for life-science sales and marketing The full playbook for Anthropic's Claude Code, from your first account brief to a team-wide system.

→ How to use Codex for life-science sales and marketing The same playbook, built around OpenAI's Codex.

Both are written for sales and marketing, not engineers. No coding experience required.

If you do one thing this week, open a guide and run the first workflow on a single real account. That first brief is usually the moment it clicks.

How to Install them:

• Install Claude Code

• Install Codex

If your team wants help setting up these types of systems and integrating them into your day-to-day workflows, reach out to us, and we can help!

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.