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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

If you have not been living under a rock or on a distant planet for the last two to three years you have most likely heard of and even started using AI in your day to day workflows.

Whether it be writing a quick email, hunting for a new account to break into or settling an office debate, you have most likely interacted with AI in some shape or form in your workplace up until now.

I remember the first time I used ChatGPT to write a prospecting email and how blown away I was by how fast it was. My thoughts were that this was going to be a game changer. I would never have to prospect again. Never have to trudge the internet for clinical trial news, funding rounds or job advertisements. The dream.

But of course then came the problems: the hallucinations, the overly enthusiastic bending of the truth, the em dashes. THE EM DASHES!

Of course if you use the technology for more than a hot minute you will see it can at times leave a little, and often a lot, to be desired when it comes to actually carrying out game changing work.

So with that in mind, in today's newsletter I am going to walk you through three different stages of AI use in GTM teams in life sciences today.

After reading I hope I can give you a better idea of where your team currently sits on the ladder of AI usage and point you towards some valuable next steps to help your GTM team keep incorporating AI into your day to day work so you can focus on selling.

Level 1: The ChatGPT Patchwork

Everyone has to start somewhere and for most of us ChatGPT is the gateway drug into streamlining your workflows with artificial intelligence.

This is where I started out. Honestly speaking, I still use ChatGPT when I need something basic done quickly and don't want to lose my train of thought. Something like "proofread and polish this email" or a simple search that just twelve months ago I would have done with Google.

But ChatGPT has its limitations, especially when it comes to generating longer and more complex outputs. It tends to hallucinate and can leave you with just as much work fact checking the output as if you had done it yourself.

There are also bigger problems with everyone using ChatGPT on islands of their own. It does not lend itself to cooperative work between team members. It leaves you with a Word document full of prompts saved on your computer and no real consistency in the output.

Additionally the outputs are generic because the inputs are generic. This is the real problem and it is keeping your team from unlocking the real capabilities of AI.

Level 2: Moving up the Ranks with Claude Skills and Custom GPTs

So you have been using AI for a while now, you can do some cool things with deep research and start to have an idea of what it is good at and what it cannot do.

Your prompt library is getting more and more complicated and your prompts are becoming like sacred scrolls, containing the wisdom of your repeatable GTM workflows and taking up a disproportionate amount of your time in the process.

At this point you probably also realise you are telling your AI model of choice the same thing again and again. There must be a better way. There is.

I can only speak from my lived experience of using ChatGPT and Claude. Each of these models has a means of systemising repeatable workflows in its platform to help you embed knowledge across your team and keep everyone on the same page. These are respectively known as Custom GPTs and Claude Skills.

Think of these as the first steps in embedding a custom brain for your business in an LLM. You can pre-populate these features with knowledge, context and direction to help you harness much more specific output, as opposed to the generic AI slop that a small child could tell was not written by a human.

You can use these more advanced features to pre-populate the LLM with knowledge about your industry and ICP and make tasks such as message generation and account research much more reliable than when just using a straightforward prompt.

Also at this point in your AI journey it could be the right time to start playing around with some vibe coding tools such as Replit. These can help your team quickly spin up custom applications that you can use internally to streamline workflows.

These applications can improve metric tracking and help move your team away from what used to live in an Excel spreadsheet. Additionally with the magic of API keys and webhooks it is far easier to get these applications to talk to each other and move data around than letting everything sit siloed across separate folders and spreadsheets nobody can find.

Level 3: Automating Complex Workflows

This is where it gets fun and your team can really start to feel the impact and power of AI in your day to day work. At this level you can begin to automate tasks that just one year ago were tying your reps up for hours every week and preventing them from actually selling.

Think automated tracking of buyer signals, meeting follow-up emails and launching sequences from your CRM or sequencer. Think account research that runs itself before every scheduled call so your rep walks in prepared without spending twenty minutes on LinkedIn the night before.

At this point in your journey Claude Code will become an important tool as it allows people with a non-technical background to start running automations at a level previously only reserved for developers.

Once teams begin to integrate Claude Code into their workflows the ceiling of what is possible begins to rise and the limits are set by how creative you can get.

Imagine your reps starting Monday morning with a prioritised account list that built itself over the weekend. Flagging which accounts showed movement, which CRM records went stale, which leads came back to life. Nobody asked for it. It just happened.

Data enrichment and CRM hygiene can be automated in the background, stopping you from reaching out to old leads with bad data and keeping your pipeline clean without anyone having to manually dig through a spreadsheet on a Friday afternoon.

I am not a big advocate of replacing people with AI but I am a big advocate of empowering high-quality salespeople to achieve their maximum potential by enabling them with powerful solutions under the hood of their GTM workflow.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Three levels, one ladder.

If you read this and recognised yourself firmly in level one, that is completely fine. Everyone starts there and honestly most teams are still there. The move to level two is simpler than you think and the payoff is immediate.

If you are somewhere between level one and two, pick one workflow this week, build it properly with the right context baked in, and see what happens to the quality of the output. You might surprise yourself.

And if level three feels a long way off, just knowing it exists is enough for now. It changes how you invest your time at the earlier stages and means you are building towards something rather than just tinkering.

The teams pulling ahead in life science right now are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most reps. They are the ones who figured out which level they were at and took one deliberate step forward.

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Episode 85: Your Next Hire Is an AI Agent: Paul Avery on Running AI Teams in Life Science

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.