May 03rd, 2018

Launch Realities and the Tough Questions to Ask Yourself to Ensure Success

Simple launch realities (source: McKinsey & Company, 2013)

• About 2/3 of launches fail analysts’ expectations
• Tight launch budgets result in increasing local and national hurdles to access, raising the bar on defining and demonstrating value, and requiring companies to develop a more granular understanding of physician and payor needs.
• 75% of a sample of 60 upcoming launches failed to show significant differentiation in a disease area with a high perceived burden
  • 53% showed moderate or no differentiation
• Typically, very few members of a launch team have launch experience – and alignment throughout an entire organization on all key aspects of a launch is rare

 
 
Critical questions to ask (and answer well) to put your brand in the 33% of those that succeed:

1. Are you abundantly clear about how are you are going to help your key customers get their most important jobs done and much better than they already are with what they already have – from THEIR TRUE perspective?
2. Is your product’s value exponentially greater than the degree of mental and behavioral change it requires for your customers to use it…10X better?
3. Are you being brutally honest about how mature, predictable, uncertain, and malleable your market is…from your customers’ eyes and with ALL that they think they already have to solve their problems…if they care much about the disease state market to begin with?
4. Are you able to clearly identify which of your product attributes address customer’s highest-ranking needs and better than your competition?
5. Have you boiled down your strategy plan to 7 slides so that EVERYONE can understand it, and tested to make sure they are on-board?
6. How strong is your catapult to get you across Moore’s Chasm once your early adopters have done all that they are going to do for you?
7. How sensitive are your customers going to be to your anticipated price based on a defined array of primary determinants of value?
8. When an assumption plays out in a very unexpected way post-launch, do you have a map that empowers you to identify the surprise and shift gears quickly and cost-efficiently?
9. Are you sure that you are working on the right business problems?
10. Have you dug deeply and confidently enough through the layers of your business issues?
11. Have you sufficiently explored the most important uncertainties that WILL dictate the success of your brand, including those that you cannot control but will still need to overcome?
12. How good is your home office training program that educates your teams on how to successfully launch a brand?​

 
 
Sources:

1. McKinsey & Company, Pharmaceutical and Medical Products Practice, 2013: Beyond the Storm: Launch Excellence is the New Normal