The launch of a new product can be a daunting task. The main reason this happens is that no matter how many times your company has managed to enter new products on the market, chances are that not one initiative entirely resembled another.
For better or for worse, there is not a single recipe for success as well as one that would lead you down the path of total failure. In fact, your entrepreneurial longevity is dictated by how much you learn from both instances, favorable or hindering as they were.
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What can jeopardize the launch of a pharmaceutical?
With a product launch, there are many factors that can add to increasing the chances of successful market entry. However, there are just as many things that could impede the process.
But since it is a bit of a relentless human flaw to not have open and regular conversations about failure, entrepreneurs are largely deprived of the opportunity to study common mistakes made in their respective fields.
At DrugPatentWatch, we think of mistakes as an ordinary and inevitable part of evolving. Thus, if your company is looking to expand into new markets or is preparing the launch of a new product, here are the 3 things to avoid so that you don’t involuntarily create unnecessary complications:
1. Omitting the big picture
In any business endeavor, it is best to keep an eye on the big picture, yet in the case of an industry such as Pharma, the reality is that what that encompasses can be too much to comprehend. In other words, the sheer volume of things that need to be properly addressed for a product launch to be successful can be a burden, to say the least.
A quick fix that is usually implemented in such circumstances is to focus on very specific aspects while letting everything else become background noise. However, cherry-picking the parts of the process that you want to be focusing on can backfire heavily.
That being said, instead of selective focus, you can choose a step-by-step approach since the latter implies gradual but thorough action. In this way, each stage is dealt with one at a time and not one is left unexamined.
2. Operating in silos
The interdependence of the various elements involved in a market entry informs the entrepreneur of the complexity characterizing the pre-launch period.
In order to achieve a successful launch, cooperation between all the sides involved is vital. Thus, it is the active involvement and collaboration of all teams assigned on the project that can guarantee a favorable outcome for the product.
By keeping an open channel between various departments, not only do they get to exchange valuable information and insights, but they can also, implicitly, solve each other’s pain points. For instance, the group in charge of sales can share their needs and apprehensions with the people figuring out brand management.
With pharmaceuticals more so than with other products, information should be shared among teams so that everybody involved in the process, no matter the branch, is on the same page at all times. While task division within a large company is helpful, operating with as many versions of the truth as there are departments can keep your product away from the market longer than it needs to be.
3. Lacking product knowledge
Undoubtedly, the pharmaceuticals you want to launch have value in themselves. That being said, it is critical for marketing representatives to work on rendering an accurate image of the benefits that could result from purchasing them.
Thus, the person in charge of pitching the product has to be able to measure up to an in-depth inquiry of an interested physician. In this case, meticulous preparation is of the essence.
Even though large gaps in knowledge speak nothing of the product, but rather of the degree of preparation of the person pitching, doctors are likely to be put off and respond positively to a competitor product instead.
It is important for an entrepreneur to be able to roughly anticipate their product’s performance so that they can identify early on the areas they need to focus on as well as the most cost-efficient ways to distribute all their available resources.
Envisioning the journey of your product also pushes you to define potential issues and then to face them head-on, saving you the anxiety brought about by a bundle of unnamed looming concerns.
DrugPatentWatch can provide you with the relevant context for your product launch. In fact, our practical algorithms have been tailored with the purpose of helping you extract valuable insights from massive datasets.
Commit to the responsibility of familiarizing yourself with the pharmaceutical landscape as illustrated by cold, hard data, and your next business move can be a success.
