It’s summertime and the living is supposed to be easy, but the speakers at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the SAMPS (September 18-19 at at the Boston Marriott Quincy) are busy preparing their presentations. Last year’s speakers set the bar high (before continuing the discussions at the bar), but organizers Guy Page and Kevin Goudreau and the program team have secured a killer lineup of commercial life science talent to lead discussions centered around this year’s theme, Strategy Becomes Reality.Throughout the summer we’ll pull back the curtain and provide sneak previews of the content that will help make history in Quincy.

Plan Your Marketing as if You Were a Start-up
Guy Page, President, The Pacific Biomarketing Group

Start-ups face unique challenges that demand a different kind of marketing. Essential principles for start-up business development are now well established and very effective. But these messages are not just for start-ups. Any marketing program — no matter how large the company — will benefit greatly from the specialized start-up techniques for critical analysis, comprehensive planning, flexibility, and market engagement. During this presentation I’ll review start-up best practices and discuss how to apply them to your own marketing programs.

Voice of the Customer – How to Get It, Interpret It, and Communicate It Internally
Sheila Burns, Managing Director, Building 12 Communications and former Global VP of Marketing, Molecular Biology, Life Technologies

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is something everyone talks about, but few do effectively. VoC makes perfect sense, but getting the most out of the program requires foresight, understanding, and good organization. In this session, I’ll explore how you can build a VoC program that actually works and share several experiences with successes and failures.

Competing in a Digital World
Aaron Burke, Head of Marketing and Sales, Pacific BioLabs

The ability to connect rapidly with nearly anyone worldwide means that information and knowledge are king. Those who effectively utilize digital tools can discover and win new business on any budget. Throughout my discussion I’ll examine the best ways to do this and identify how your peers have created their own effective digital programs.

Effective Marketing and Sales with Limited Resources
Jack Ball, President, Tyball Associates

With tight capital markets, it’s more important than ever to ensure that you’re spending your limited sales and marketing dollars in the most cost-efficient way possible. Hiring sales people too early or in numbers that aren’t appropriate to the opportunity is the fastest way to bankrupt a young company. Marketing budgets are always tight, so quantitative marketing ensures that you measure all of your marketing activities for their return on investment (ROI) and thus justify your budgets. At this session I’ll discuss how to size and time your sales-force hiring decisions to be the most cost effective. I’ll also discuss how to make sure that all your sales and marketing activities are cost effective and measurable to ensure the highest return on your activities.

The Best Sales and Marketing Practices – A Comparison of Small and Large Service Organizations

Tom Sellig, Global Vice President Clinical Sales and Client Services, Covance, and Kevin Goudreau, Vice President Commercial Development, DaVita Clinical Research

In the life sciences market, all companies are not created equal. Market leaders leverage scale and reach to amass global capabilities and global brand, whereas rapidly growing niche players use their strengths to disrupt the market and leverage their core capabilities to drive rapid growth.

Based on these and comparable differences, the marketing and sales strategies employed at small and large firms can differ radically. For example, it might not be as important for a market leader to attend small regional trade shows to promote their brand—the ROI from attending may be marginal at best. But for a small organization entering the market, these smaller trade shows might be their lifeblood.

Similarly, a market leader might develop a strategy to invest heavily in global key account management and reap the rewards of relationships with the largest clients on the globe, stabilizing their revenue stream. Because small companies can’t play in that market, investment in a formal key account infrastructure would have minimal ROI.

During this presentation we’ll identify the similarities and highlight the differences in commercial strategies between large and small companies that we’ve observed while leading both market-leading and start-up commercial organizations over the past 25 years.

Your Handbook of Digital Marketing for Today and Tomorrow
Catherine Juon, President, Beyond Startup, and author of Internet Marketing from Start to Finish

If you’re overwhelmed by all of the digital choices out there for marketing your product or service, welcome to the club! The Internet continues to reinvent itself and manages to maintain that “Wild West” flavor year after year. Meanwhile, you have a job to do, and not nearly enough time to do it. What you’d love to find are tried-and-true tools and techniques you can use to help achieve your marketing and sales goals.

The good news is, there are couple of key techniques that have stood the test of time and will continue to provide results in the foreseeable future. We’ll review what those are and how you can incorporate them into your marketing mix. That’s pretty straightforward. Where I’m willing to bet you’ll see the most significant bump in results is by thinking differently about why your buyers do business with you, how you can find more people like them, and how you can encourage them to do business with you. There are a couple of common traps I’ll teach you to avoid, and a lot of science behind how people think and what motivates them to buy that we’ll look at as well. So while everybody else is scrambling to check out the next Pinterest, you’ll be getting in your buyers’ heads and heading to the bank.

The Return of the Company Website
Hamid Ghanadan, President, The Linus Group, and author of Persuading Scientists

In the Life Sciences, “content marketing” is becoming synonymous with marketing itself. Most life science companies have already implemented marketing automation technologies and are in the midst of developing processes to optimize their results. While marketing automation technology is a powerful tool, the quantity of interactions it generates with prospects pales in comparison with the company’s own website. In the same time that a marketer spends developing and deploying a marketing automation campaign to generate a few hundred interactions, the company’s website most likely generates a few thousand interactions organically.

Yet, the company website remains the most neglected and unoptimized part of the company’s marketing mix. It’s time that marketing takes ownership of the company’s website. And with today’s best practices and democratized tools, marketers can develop a sophisticated Web platform to become the central machinery for all of the company’s marketing activities. I’ll discuss why it’s time to focus content marketing on the company’s website, so that the great content that marketers develop builds equity for the company on the search domain.