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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
Every commercial leader I talk to overestimates where their team sits on the AI curve. Usually by one or two levels.
That gap costs real money. Because if you think you’re at Level C but you’re actually at Level B, you’re trying to build Level D solutions on top of a foundation that can’t hold them. Your agents produce mediocre output, you blame the technology, and you go back to ChatGPT for drafting emails. The technology isn’t the problem. You skipped the layers underneath.
So before you spend another quarter telling yourself you’re “using AI”, here’s the honest scale. Read it and pick the level that actually describes your team today, not the level you wish you were at.
The 6 levels
Level A: Manual. Someone on the team uses ChatGPT or Copilot occasionally to draft an email or summarize a document. There’s no shared prompts, no integration with your stack, no institutional knowledge being captured. If the person who uses it most leaves tomorrow, nothing changes for the organization.
Level B: AI-assisted tasks. Your team uses AI to speed up discrete tasks. Faster first drafts, research summaries, call note cleanup. Output gets reviewed and executed by a human. People are slightly faster. The operating model hasn’t changed.
Level C: Agent-drafted, human-executed. You assign real work to agents. They produce full outreach sequences, research reports, content plans. You review, edit, and execute every action yourself. The agent is a contractor, not an employee.
Level D: Human approval, agent execution. The agent doesn’t just draft work. It sends the email. Updates the CRM record. Triggers the next workflow step. You review outcomes, not actions. This requires real infrastructure: integrations, permissions, observability.
Level E: Continuous operations. Agents aren’t waiting for you to assign tasks. They monitor signals, propose actions within defined scopes, and execute on a schedule. One agent watches your target accounts for hiring signals. Another flags deals that have gone quiet. Another runs A/B tests on your sequences. You manage objectives, not tasks.
Level F: Agents managing agents. You set goals and guardrails. An orchestrator agent breaks down objectives, assigns work to specialist agents, monitors execution, handles exceptions, and reports back. You review dashboards and adjust strategy.
Most life science commercial teams are at Level A or B. A small number are at Level C. Very few are anywhere near D.
Why the honest read matters
Here’s the test. Walk down to whoever runs your CRM and ask them three questions:
If an agent needed to write a personalized first touch to a VP of Quality at a mid-size CDMO right now, where would it pull the messaging context from?
Where does the agent get the up-to-date competitive positioning?
If the agent sends that email, where does the activity get logged so you can review what it did and whether it worked?
If the answers are “I don’t know,” “we don’t have that documented anywhere,” and “it doesn’t get logged,” you’re at Level B. Doesn’t matter how many AI tools you’ve subscribed to.
If the answers are “from our knowledge base,” “the battlecard we update monthly,” and “in our agent activity log with the outcome tagged,” you’re at Level D and your competitors are in trouble.
Everyone else is somewhere in between, usually closer to B than they want to admit.
The gap from B to D is not a technology problem
This is the part that frustrates people. The models are good enough. The tools exist. You can buy them today. The gap is three things, and none of them are exciting:
Data quality. Your CRM has incomplete contact records, inconsistent stage definitions, and activity logs that reps fill out with the minimum required information. Agents amplify what’s in front of them. Messy data in, messy outputs out, faster.
Context. Your positioning lives in a deck someone made 18 months ago. Your objection handling lives in three reps’ heads. Your proof points are scattered across case studies, one-pagers, and Slack threads. An agent drafting outreach can’t ground itself in any of this because it isn’t written down in a place the agent can read.
Governance. What can each agent touch? What requires approval? What gets logged and for how long? Without this, you can’t trust agent-executed work, which means you can’t let the agent execute, which means you stay at Level C forever.
Closing the B-to-D gap is unsexy work. You document your ICP with specificity. You write your positioning in one place. You build an objection library. You clean up your CRM. You define which actions need human approval. You set up logging. None of it is technically hard. All of it requires someone to actually do it.
This is also where life sciences companies have a structural advantage most people miss. The regulated content culture in pharma, biotech, and medical devices — controlled documents, version histories, review trails, mandatory update cycles — maps almost perfectly onto the rigor a good knowledge base needs. The compliance discipline that felt like drag is exactly the muscle you need. Use it.
The gap from D to F is a trust problem
Once you’re at Level D, the rest is cumulative evidence. The system worked yesterday. It worked last week. It worked across 200 sends, 40 enrichment runs, 12 competitive briefs. Edge cases got handled. Nothing embarrassing went out the door.
That evidence is what lets you expand scope. Tighter human review on the workflows that have proven reliable. New workflows added to the autonomous tier. The system grows because it earned the trust, not because someone bought a more expensive tool.
There is no shortcut here. The companies running at Level E and F today started at B two years ago and put the work in. The gap they’ve opened over the field is real, and it compounds every week they continue running while their competitors are still debating whether AI is overhyped.
What to do this week
Take the honest read. Pick the level that describes your team today. Use the self-assessment we built. It takes 2 minutes, no email required.
Identify the next level up that would actually create value in the next 90 days. Not Level F. Not “full automation.” The next level. For most teams reading this, that’s B → C or C → D.
Pick the single biggest gap blocking that move. Almost always one of: knowledge base doesn’t exist, CRM is dirty, no logging infrastructure, no defined approval tiers.
Fix that one thing this quarter. Not all of it. The one thing.
The rate of change in this space isn’t decelerating. Every quarter you wait, the gap between the teams that are building and the teams that are debating gets wider. Today’s models are the worst they will ever be, and they’re already good enough to run most of what’s described here. The architecture you put in place now upgrades automatically as the models improve. You don’t rebuild. You swap the model and every workflow gets smarter.
If you want the full breakdown — the 8-layer architecture, the use case library with actual skill files, and the governance structure that holds it together — the long-form piece is here:
Read it with your favorite AI tool. Pick the one workflow you’ll build first. Then build it.
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.