Litmus Test for Event Led Growth

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Vantage's Value proposition:

Vantage provides modelling and simulation services to the pharma companies to support decision making across their drug development pipeline all the way from discovery followed by pre-clinical and to late clinical phases.

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Vantage's Business model: Low volume, high ARPU, positioned more towards the large to mid-pharma​

Vantage has a long-term working relationship with its "Legacy" clients. But, year on year as a CRO, Vantage gets about 3-5 new project for execution - making it a low volume CRO.

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Each project can be few months to an year long, hence the pricing can vary. But, on an average Vantage charges about $60K-$100K for a 4-5 months project. Ofcourse, it can also vary based on who (team of how many members and level of seniority) is going to work on the project.

Sales process:​

What is Vantage's current conversion funnel from pitch to actually starting the project?

Vantage does not yet have a dedicated sales teams. So, most of the projects are via word of mouth (WOM) and a few via pitching directly to the proposed grants. But lets make a few assumptions here,

So assuming Vantage currently converting 80% of word of mouth and 20% via direct pitch - this means 1 out 5 project is coming in via direct pitch and 4 are coming via word of mouth.

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So, via WOM, Vantage got about 5 project and converted 4 of them, while pitched to 5 clients but converted only 1. This also means out of 10 potential projects, Vantage has an average conversion rate of 50%. In addition, this process lasts about 4-6 weeks from pitch to proposal to SOW to start of the project.

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But, Vantage doesnt have a sales team yet. With a dedicated sales team, Vantage can increase the top-of-the-funnel very easily. Lets assume, Vantage hired a dedicated sales team while keeping the number of potential projects and conversion the same. Also, lets assume, the sales team is generating 3x leads ~30 contacts, which leads to 10 potential projects out of which Vantage gets 5.

Now, adding the time for generating leads for about 3 months of dedicated effort - this makes the whole sales process to be of around 6 months

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So, summarizing

30 contacts -> 10 potential projects -> 5 conversions in 6 months

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Vantage has clear answers to all 3 questions and hence pass the Litmus Test for Event Led Growth.

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Objective:

Lets define the objective of growth for Vantage:

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Here before defining the objective, let put some things in perspective. Vantage is a small company with a team of ~35 people and currently executing 8-10 projects across teams every year. One goal for Vantage this year is to hire 15 more people, making the total team size of 50. Given the team size of 50 people, Vantage can do 5 extra projects in addition to existing 5. So, lets hire Vantage 15 more people - and now the goal is to get 5 extra projects this year. Also, Vantage is thinking of expanding its business in the US.

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Hence back calculating the potential projects required at 50% conversion is 10 and from potential projects to leads at 33% is ~30 contacts. Now, converting the numbers into revenue will gives us around $2M in revenue. Take a look at the following equation

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5 projects * $100K * 2 times a year = $1M in revenue

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But, here is the catch, since Vantage is trying to pitch to new customers, this will bring down the contact to lead ratio from 33% to about 10%. Hence, to get 10 potential projects, Vantage has to do create 100 contacts.

Thus, the objective is pretty clear - in 6 months, Vantage want to reach out to 100 contacts which will give around 10 potential projects and eventually 5 wins thereby generating $1M in revenue.

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Note: Since Vantage is thinking of expanding its business in the US, few goals that Vantage is looking for are

1. Brand awareness
2. Lead generation
3. Build early relationships
4. Start sales pipeline for demand capture

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These are the jobs to be done and they will broadly classify under DISCOVER stage event.

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Event Structure

What kind of clients do we want to go ahead with?

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Mid to small pharma to small biotech are the ideal clients - reasons are the following

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(a) Vantage is trying to explore new market - so testing what kind of questions these small biotech are trying to answer will give a sneak peak into the big-pharma trends and this will also make Vantage aware on what kind of services they need to offer

(b) big-pharma are opaque and usually require much longer sales cycle (since things move rather slowly in big pharma) - showing ROI in 6 months would be impossible here

(c) small biotech would have contacts with some big-pharma, hence Vantage's indirect relation with big-pharma would be a warm connect rather a cold one

(d) Mid-small Pharma's challenge is to get their next drug to the market as quickly as possible since either they know that have their current revenue stream is going to come down once their drug A goes off patent in the near future or they want to establish a monopoly in a new disease area altogether or they have a next blockbuster drug which can "cure cancer" or they are trying to get a fast track approval for a drug for some rare disease.

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The attendees:

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The people who are actually responsible for drawing inferences and insights by analyzing the data that is currently being generated on a specific drug development program - (mid-senior to senior) Sr. Scientist, Principal, Sr. Principal and Managers.

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Hence, the ideal attendee persona (IAP) that Vantage should try to target has the following features

1. These are the people who are the voice in their internal teams
2. These are the people who are actually doing the work
3. These are the people who are trying to solve difficult problems
4. These are the people who are looking for getting promotion to the next level one impactful project at a time
5. These are the people/clients who either doesn't know about the services that Vantage offers and they ofcourse also do not know who Vantage is.

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The conversation:

Lets understand the current trends, problems of the IAPs, their career and their skills

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Trends:

1. Given tremendous amount of data being generated internally - pharma companies are heavily investing in AI & data analytics
2. A lot of pharma companies have atleast 1 drug in the pipeline on oncology. Bigger emphasis of the industry is to move towards "precision medicine" and away from one-size-fit-all concept.
3. Recently the regulatory authorities have taken a few "landmark" decisions around showing openness for using the M&S result as a part of submission documents.
4. Pharma industries do not always have the bandwidth to work on all the programs internally - and they have started to recognize the opportunity to get the work done by "external collaborators" who are the experts in a specific technology/services.

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From these trends, it would be best to have 2 topics

1. Use cases for oncology where inferences from mathematical models was used to drive an impact in decision making for a specific drug development program. Hence a master class on project execution framework encompassing model building for a specific cancer to and generating results and different visualizations using a virtual population and finally answering the question of interest of the drug development team.
2. What kind of results are "required and accepted" by the regulatory authorities in the submission documents? Master class on what to pay the most attention to while submitting the documents with modelling results e.g. calibrating and validating the model, confidence intervals, statistical significance p-value, inputs of the model, reliability of the data, etc?

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Lets finalise the topics and fill in the blank to formalize the event structure

If we pick "how to answer questions across different stages of drug development" as a topic, then the attendee will realize "how mechanistic modelling can be a great tool to answer the research and exploratory questions" resulting in "a future pipeline because they will think of Vantage next time when a potential project comes in which they cant handle internally due to limited bandwidth"

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​The speakers:

People who have solved for the trends and problems already in the community

1. People at the associate director or director level who have supported the decision making using mechanistic modelling
2. Methods experts who have done many iterations of the projects and know where do they use what kind of models for answering questions at various stages of drug development
3. Since oncology, auto-immune and metabolic are the big disease areas where a lot of pharma companies are trying to develop drugs - maybe pick 2-3 methods experts, 1 on oncology and 1 on auto-immune and 1 on metabolic disease.

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This table gives us 3 strong candidates-

1. Akintunde Bello
2. Kapil Mayawala
3. Indrajeet Singh

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Speaker Outreach

In our case first 2 categories makes the most sense

1. Social capital (Speaking to other leader in the community)
2. Opportunity (This speaking gig got me a new opportunity)
3. Money (Getting paid to speak for 60mins)
4. Distribution (Influenced my future customers)

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Here is an email to be sent out to the speakers

Dear Indrajeet,

I hope this email finds you well. My name is Anuraag, and I am the Vice President of Marketing at Vantage Research. I am reaching out to you with an exciting opportunity to share your expertise and insights with a highly engaged audience of pharmaceutical industry professionals at our upcoming Pharma Insights Summit.

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The Pharma Insights Summit is a one-day conference focused on accelerating drug development through modeling and simulation. We are bringing together industry leaders, researchers, and decision-makers to explore the latest trends, challenges, and innovations in this field. Given your extensive experience and thought leadership in mechanistic modeling, we would be honored to have you present a one-hour masterclass on "Harnessing the Power of Mechanistic Modeling to Answer Research and Exploratory Questions." Your session would be a valuable addition to our program, providing attendees with practical insights and strategies for leveraging mechanistic modeling to drive innovation and accelerate drug development. As a respected expert in your field, your participation would not only enrich the conference experience but also contribute to the advancement of knowledge and best practices within the pharmaceutical industry.

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The Pharma Insights Summit is an online event that is scheduled for [date]. I understand that your schedule is likely very busy, but I hope you will consider this opportunity to share your expertise with a highly engaged and influential audience. Your participation would be a significant contribution to the success of the event and the advancement of the pharmaceutical industry.

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Please let me know if you have any questions or if you require additional information. I look forward to the possibility of having you as a featured speaker at the Pharma Insights Summit.

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Best regards,

Anuraag

Vice President of Marketing

Vantage Research

Solving for Logistics now - Landing page - Copy - Form Design

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Event tools - Zoom or Webex

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Social announcement for IAPs - Introducing the event to the world on LinkedIn

Vantage Research hosting an event/masterclass on "Harnessing the Power of Mechanistic Modeling to Answer Research and Exploratory Questions". The speakers are Akintunde Bello, Kapil Mayawala, Indrajeet Singh.

Partner Distribution

1. PumasAI - Working with PumasAI will be best as a partner since they are already have working relationship with Vantage and arent competitors. PumasAI is well known in the industry and Vantage can leverage on the network and trust. There is a mutual benefit. If PumasAI has events, Vantage can also go and speak about QSP in their events.
   Offer to PumasAI - Cross promotion via email, share access to content recordings, share data from Polls from questions they might want to ask to the IAPs
   Offers to IAPs: Vantage can provide 24hrs worth of credit for PumasQSP platform as a freebee for the audience.
2. Matlab - Again Vantage has working relationship with Matlab. Vantage can promote SimB as a platform. This is a mutual benefit.
   Offer to Matlab - Cross promotion via email, share access to content recordings, share data from Polls, from questions they might want to ask to the IAPs
   Offers to IAPs: Vantage can provide a workflow in SimB for a typical QSP model dev (ref calibrations, sensitivity analysis, cohort to vpop, etc).

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Email announcement - Email outbound list with a CTA to event invite.

Referral Distribution - 15 % attendee to come via referrals

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IAP outreach

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Day of the event

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Opening act - Character building, introducing the speakers - all are working in great comapnies and have a brilliant track record of seeing through the drugs to their end goal across multiple drug development pipelines. While doing so they leverages heavily on the insights generated from mechanistic models which were actively used in answering research questions, patients selection, etc

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Middle act - Speakers talk about actual examples from oncology space on answering 1 specific and most relevant question of all "How model results were used to make decisions"

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Closing act - Towards the end, Vantage will provide the freebees to the attendees (QSP model workflow in Matlab) and a coffee table book summarizing multiple projects done in course of 10 years of Vantage's existence showcasing multiple use cases.