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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
Free Event Lead Capture Tool
Every rep who's worked a conference knows this feeling.
You walk away with 40 business cards, a notebook full of notes, and no memory of which conversation went with which name by the time you're back at your desk.
Then you have to organize everything to get into your CRM to follow-up. By then 2 weeks have passed and the leads have gone stale.
I built a little app for Nick to fix this back when he was at JPM. Capture everything on your phone in the moment, while you're still standing there talking. After some pushing, we finally built a free version for anyone to use.
The whole point is that it lives on your phone. No laptop, no app store download, no setup:
- Take a picture of a LinkedIn profile, business card, or type details in manually
- Log your notes against each person while the conversation is fresh
- Invite your team so everyone captures into one shared list
- Download the leads or send them straight to your CRM or Clay via webhook
Most life science companies think outbound costs them one thing, the salary of whoever they've put in charge of it.
That salary is real money. But it's only the first line of a much longer bill, and most of what follows never gets counted before someone commits to building outbound in-house.
It's worth being clear about who "whoever's in charge of it" actually is, because it lands one of two ways. Either you hire a dedicated SDR or Inside Sales Rep, or, far more often in life sciences, you push prospecting onto your field reps and hope they fit it in around everything else. Both options carry a cost most teams never add up. So this week, let's actually add it up.
First, the true cost of the person
If you've hired a dedicated SDR (or inside sales), the salary is just the starting point. On top of it sit employer benefits, pension/401K contributions, healthcare, equipment, and whatever else your benefits package includes. The fully loaded cost of an employee is meaningfully higher than the number on the offer letter, often by 20 to 30 percent once you add it all up.
And that person is a fixed commitment. If outbound isn't working in six months, letting an employee go is slow, awkward, and expensive. Notice periods, severance, the management time, and the morale hit. Cutting an external partner that isn't performing is a single conversation and a final invoice. That flexibility has real value, and it almost never makes it into the comparison.
Then, the tooling costs
Before your reps writes a word, you're signing up for a tool stack. This is real, recurring, hard cost, and it lands every single month whether outbound is working or not.
Here's the minimum viable stack for outbound done properly:
A general data and enrichment provider to find and verify contacts (Apollo, ZoomInfo, Clay and others)
Life-science-specific data tools like SciLeads or GlobalData, because the generalist providers miss huge chunks of the biotech and pharma world, and the right targeting in this market lives in specialist sources
LinkedIn Sales Navigator for finding, mapping, and researching the right people inside an account
A sequencing and sending platform to actually run the campaigns
Deliverability and warmup tooling so your emails reach the inbox instead of the spam folder
A pool of domains and inboxes to send from, because you can't blast everything off your primary domain without torching it
An email verification tool so you're not nuking your sender reputation on bad addresses
Add it up and most teams are at a few thousand a month in software before anyone has replied. That figure never makes it into the hiring business case, but it's the floor, not the ceiling.
And the part that the tools don't do for you
Buying the tech is the easy bit. But it doesn't run itself, and most of the work that determines whether outbound succeeds happens in the gap between the tools.
Here's what your one hire is now responsible for:
Building and qualifying lists so you're targeting the right people at the right companies, not spraying a generic export
Writing messaging that scientists don't instantly delete, which is a genuine skill and one most reps get wrong for months
Actually testing that messaging, with enough volume and discipline to know what's working instead of guessing
Maintaining the sending infrastructure so deliverability doesn't quietly degrade and take your results with it
Analyzing what's landing and rebuilding what isn't, week after week
Doing the research, the list pulls, the writing, and the analysis, which is hours of work that never appears on a calendar but eats the week
That's a lot to put on a person. And most he people who are genuinely good at all six of those things are expensive and rare, and they usually aren't the same person you hired to also hit a meeting quota.
The cost nobody ever prices in
Now layer on the two costs that never make the business case.
The first is opportunity cost. Every hour your best closer spends researching accounts and building lists is an hour they aren't multi-threading, networking, or actually closing. You hired them for the second thing. You're paying them to do the first.
When pushing prospecting onto field reps it's the first thing to fall off their plate. The moment they're out at a conference, working live deals, handling customer questions, or just having a busy month, prospecting stops. It has to, because it's the only task with no immediate deadline attached. The problem is that the gap doesn't show up this quarter. It shows up two quarters from now, when the pipeline they didn't build isn't there to close, and by then nobody connects the empty funnel back to the three weeks of prospecting that quietly didn't happen. Outbound is a lagging input. When your closers own it, it's always the input that gets sacrificed first and felt last.
The second hidden cost is working in isolation. A single internal hire has no view of what's working across the market right now. They're learning in a vacuum, on your dime, rediscovering lessons that hundreds of other teams already learned the hard way. Every dead message and every blown domain is tuition you're paying for knowledge that already exists somewhere else.
The economics have flipped
There was a time when building outbound in-house made sense, because the alternative was an offshore appointment-setting shop that blasted the same template at everyone and burned your reputation in the process.
That's not the alternative anymore.
A team that has run 3,000+ campaigns and sent over 1.5 million emails across 100+ life science companies already owns the entire tool stack, already maintains the sending infrastructure, and already knows what messaging resonates with skeptical scientists versus generic e-blasts. You're not paying them to discover the answers. You're paying for the answers they already have.
When you stack it side by side, salary plus a few thousand a month in software plus months of ramp plus the opportunity cost of your best people, building it yourself is now the slower and more expensive route to the same destination. The math used to benefit in-house teams. It doesn't anymore.
The caveat
Outsourcing isn't right for every company. If your total addressable market is fifty accounts, an outsourced team may not be your best channel.
But if you've written outbound off entirely, it's worth asking the honest question “have you actually seen it run well?, or have you only seen it run badly?” Most of the people convinced outbound is dead have only ever watched the cheap, lazy version of it fail. That's not evidence the channel doesn't work. It's evidence it wasn't done properly.
So, what does it actually cost you?
Add up the real number for your own team. Salary, every tool in the stack, the ramp time before it produces pipeline, and the hours your closers spend on work that isn't closing.
Most people have never run that calculation. Once you do, the build-versus-outsource decision tends to make itself.
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.
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.
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.