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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

Right before we dive in, If you are at Cell 2026 in London this week or just happen to be in town, then please stop by our drinks event we are co-hosting with Oxford Global
Details:
6pm Wednesday 11th November, Novotel London West, link to sign up here https://share.hsforms.com/1OX5lyekxSUSZDEtP1PDSHg56eif

NOW TO THE GOOD STUFF…

It's 11pm in Basel. A researcher opens ChatGPT and types: "Which CROs can run a potency assay for an AAV gene therapy?"

Five names, three links, and a tidy little summary. You've done that exact work for six years, yet, You're not in the answer. They book two intro calls.
But your rep never finds out the deal existed.

This isn't a scary story. We ran exactly that test for a client last month. Multiple questions a scientist would type. Every citation written down.When the question named the company, they came up every time, Great!

When it named the disease but not the company, they vanished, in this scenario the customer needs to not only know your name but what you do and how to solve it!

The AI handed the business to a competitor without considering you for a single second.

Same science. Better science, if we're honest. The machine just couldn't see it. Gutting!

So, AEO. Answer engine optimization. SEO's younger, little brother. So that's the scary bit but as always, a little knowledge can solve a lot….so lets get to the learning bit

There is no page two of ChatGPT

When Google gave you ten blue links and you are position four, that was fine. Then they put adds above you and then you were hoping to stay above the page fold (needing to scroll)

Now you need to show up in the AI summary that LLM’s give, one answer and cite two or three sources. If you're not one of them, you're not in the room. You're not even in the building.

G2 asked a thousand software buyers in March. Half of them now start their research in an AI chatbot, not a search engine. A year earlier it was under a third. That's up 22 points in eleven months. Where will it be next year?

Everyone's response is "we need more content". Correct. But content is the third job, and most companies haven't done the first two. It's like being handed a business card but you don't know how to phone or email them. Lovely card, mate. Fairly pointless, right?

So what are the 3 Jobs to solve your invisible products?

Job one: the bouncer

Every AI engine sends a crawler round to read your site. And every company website sits behind bot protection that some bloke in IT switched on in 2023 and nobody has looked at since.

We knocked on our client's front door wearing the names of fifteen search and AI crawlers. Eleven got in. Four got the "not tonight, mate" treatment, including Bing's and OpenAI's.

Nobody chose that. A box got ticked and everyone went for lunch. Same with the marketers who blocked "AI training" on principle and blocked the live-answer bots by accident. You've boarded up the shop window to make a point about the warehouse.

Ten minutes with your web team and it's sorted. But someone has to ask.

Job two: the Shed

Once in, the bot reads like a very literal junior on his first day. On our client site that we tested, every non-blog page was labelled as an article, including the privacy policy. The company was labelled as a person. The blog author was someone's personal Gmail. To a model judging whether you're a credible source on muscle biology, that's a hobby site run from someone's spare room. Default plugin settings, every one.

Then the big one. Twelve of forty-four pages asked for an email before you could download the poster or app note.

A crawler hits a form and BOLTS. It does not fill in its job title. So the most citable thing you own, the note with the actual data in it, is invisible to every AI engine on earth. You've locked the good stuff in the shed. Your competitor is out on the lawn, getting quoted, having a lovely time.

If you don't want to un-gate everything. Put the method, the data, the figure and a named scientist on an open page. Gate the extras. The page gets cited. The download still gets the email.

And freshness. Parse.gl looked at 8 million citations from ChatGPT Search and Google's AI mode this summer. Of the pages they could date, four in five were updated in the last 30 days. Fewer than one in fifteen were 31 to 90 days old. Median age: three days. (They could only date a slice, so hold it loosely.) Seer found most cited pages were updated this year, but fewer than half were written this year. Refreshing the old page works.
Leave it a quarter and its furniture. Nice furniture. But nobody's looking at it.

Job three: who vouches for you

Here's the bit the SEO crowd forgot, bless them. Of 323 citations in our test, the top source wasn't anyone's website. It was PubMed, in eighteen of thirty prompts. Then open-access journals, SelectScience, a competitor's app notes, patents, a CRO marketplace, distributor catalogues. Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn: Very little. Scientists ask scientific questions and the model goes where scientists publish.

Our client's SelectScience entries were from 2011. A tiddler of a competitor got cited for "best phenotypic screening CROs" purely because it had a Scientist .com profile. Cheeky. Also clever. That's the offsite game: open access, a live SelectScience page, a marketplace profile, proper distributor listings, an abstract at every conference, scientific webinars. Third parties saying you exist. The model trusts them more than it trusts you.

You find out by asking it

Twenty questions your scientist would type, into ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI mode. Write down who gets cited. Monthly. We built a tool for the technical checks and tried it on ourselves first. Fifty-eight out of a hundred. We hadn't even linked our own YouTube channel. Muggins here was lecturing clients about it. Physician, heal thyself.

Monday, sales managers

Not reps. Managers. This needs the clout to walk into marketing uninvited!

Ask for the audit. Can the bots get in, are pages labelled right, who's the author, what's gated, when was it last touched, who else gets cited. Give marketing and IT the tool linked below if they are confused.

Sort the door, sort the labels, unlock the shed, get cited by people who aren't you. Then write the content. That order, and Bob's your uncle.

2 ways we can help:

1 -Our free AEO audit tool - https://ai-visibility-audit-Successionbio.replit.app
2 Reach out to us…we can solve it for you!

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.