A founder closes a Series A round. The board asks for a commercial plan. The founder hires a marketing manager, who returns a few weeks later with a document. The document lists a website refresh, a LinkedIn schedule, conference attendance, and a set of gated papers.Every item on it is reasonable. What the document does not contain is a list of the potential customers who have to say yes, and the decision that each of those people is making. The plan describes activity before it describes buyers.
What the plan leaves out
Purchases in life sciences often involve several people, particularly when the product affects an established laboratory, clinical, or procurement workflow. Decision-making could entail various parties, such as the director of the laboratory who is responsible for the workflow, the chief scientist who evaluates the process, the quality manager who defends the decision in an audit, the procurement manager who approves the vendor, and the CFO who allocates the budget. In this case, each party is asking different questions. For instance, the laboratory director may ask whether there will be any disruption to the accredited workflow due to the change in process.
A plan built as a channel list treats all of them as a single audience. The content produced under that plan can end up reflecting whichever role the founder knows best, often the scientific audience. In life sciences marketing, this can mean giving the technical proposition more attention than the other roles involved in approving a purchase. Scientists may be highly engaged with the content without being the only group involved in the decision, resulting in interest that does not progress to a purchase order.
How the gap shows up before launch
Consider a diagnostics company approaching the launch of a new assay. The plan calls for a technical blog, a webinar series, and a conference stand. The team delivers all of it. Scientists download the papers and visit the stand. Serious sales conversations do not follow.
The reason appears once those conversations begin. The hospital laboratory that wants the assay may need verification documentation, supplier approval, and a comparison with the method already validated on site. None of that existed as material the team could send, because nobody had written down that the quality manager and the procurement manager sit inside the decision. The company produces those documents late, under pressure, after the launch date has been fixed.
The other is that the marketing manager holds a record of activity and no record of which accounts moved, which makes the next budget request harder to defend.
What to write down before choosing channels
Before any channel appears in the document, the founder and the commercial lead can set out the following: the accounts that could realistically buy or partner within the planning period, the roles inside those accounts that have to agree, the decision that each role is making, and the evidence that each decision requires.
Most of this information already sits with the founder and the business development lead in unwritten form. Writing it down changes what the plan produces. The verification file can then become a defined deliverable with an owner and deadline. The conference stand can have a specific purpose, such as meeting relevant roles at target accounts. The website can also include information designed for the quality manager rather than adding another page aimed at the scientist.
A life sciences marketing agency can help run the mapping and turn the findings into a content plan, although the raw material usually sits with the people who have already held the customer conversations. The mapping itself is worth keeping in-house even when strategy work is outsourced.
Where this approach does not apply
The mapping matters less in some situations. A company selling research-use-only reagents to individual academic laboratories often faces a single buyer with discretionary budget, and
a channel-led plan may be sufficient there. A company at the discovery stage with no defined product may not know its accounts yet, and a detailed map of the buying group would be guesswork. In those cases, the more useful document states which commercial questions remain open and what would answer them. The channel list can wait until the answers arrive.
The channel list is often the easiest part of a marketing plan to write, which is one reason it can appear first. It tends to hold up better when the founder and the commercial lead have already written down who has to agree and what each of those people needs to see. That order costs little to change, and it is worth testing on the next plan.
Frequently asked questions
1. What should a life sciences marketing plan include?
A useful plan should name target accounts, the roles inside them that must agree, the decision that each role makes, the evidence each decision needs, and only then the channels.
2. When should a life sciences company build a formal marketing plan?
A formal plan makes sense once the company can name target accounts and the roles that decide within them. Before that point, a written record of open questions serves better.
3. How often should a life sciences marketing plan be revisited?
Review the account and role mapping whenever the target accounts change or the business development team reports a new objection. Channel activity can usually be reviewed on a shorter cycle.
