Life Sciences Lead Generation & Business Development Blog

Author: Imen Jelassi, Founder, Corstrate, Life Sciences Business Development Consultant Key Takeaways Consolidation is now the default procurement posture. Sponsors are reducing vendor counts by roughly 20 to 40% and moving toward enterprise-wide partnerships with fewer, more capable suppliers (Beroe, a procurement intelligence firm). Procurement now scores outcomes, not rate cards. Beroe advises buyers to tie commercial terms to cycle times, enrollment, deviations and data q

Author: Imen Jelassi, Founder, Corstrate, Life Sciences Business Development Consultant JPM Week 2027 partnering for a CRO or CDMO starts about ten weeks before anyone lands in San Francisco. The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference is invitation-led and sells out early, so most service providers win meetings through partnering platforms, side events and warm introductions. This is a pre-show plan for jpm healthcare conference 2027 partnering, built for BD teams at CROs, CDMOs a

A small CRO or CDMO builds a business development function in 90 days by installing a system before hiring people: a written ideal customer profile, a named target list, one problem-led outbound sequence, a minimum viable CRM and three numbers reviewed every week. Corstrate helps 20 to 150 person service providers build that system and run it until it pays for a hire. Author: Imen Jelassi, Founder, Corstrate, Life Sciences Business Development Consultant Key Takeaways Referra

A life sciences business development plan 2027 is a one-page document that sets a revenue target, converts it into the pipeline and meetings required to hit it, names the accounts and demand signals you will pursue, and assigns owners and dates. CROs, CDMOs and pharma service providers that write it in Q4 reach sponsors while next year's budgets are still being shaped. Corstrate builds these plans for life sciences service companies. Author: Imen Jelassi, Founder, Corstrate,

The best conference follow up email life sciences teams send is short, specific to the conversation that took place, and sent within 48 hours of the meeting. A CRO, CDMO or pharma service provider should triage every badge scan into three tiers, send a template matched to the conversation type, and nurture contacts with no active project over 90 days. Corstrate builds this system for life sciences service companies. Author: Imen Jelassi, Founder, Corstrate, Life Sciences Busi

Author: Imen Jelassi, Founder, Corstrate, Life Sciences Business Development Consultant Key Takeaways The US is the market worth the effort. The US took about 38% of all EU pharmaceutical exports in 2024 (EUR 119.8 billion), and large pharma has announced well over $270 billion of US investment since the start of 2025 (DCAT, 2026; Sharp Services). Trade policy is not your main obstacle. The April 2026 US-UK pharma deal secured zero tariffs on UK pharmaceutical exports for at

Key Takeaways Sponsors are actively shrinking their vendor lists. Category leaders report reducing vendor counts by 20 to 40% and shifting from trial-level, project-by-project contracting to enterprise-wide partnerships (Beroe, 2026). Large pharma companies now typically route core lab work to just two or three preferred providers (Clinical Leader). The list has two gatekeepers, not one. Procurement or category management controls the paperwork, the quality agreement and the

A small CRO builds a predictable sales pipeline by installing a system, not by hiring a leader: one defined ideal client profile, a named target list, one repeatable outbound and conference motion, a single CRM stage set, and coverage math that ties monthly meetings to the revenue target. Corstrate builds that system for CROs and CDMOs that are not ready for a VP of Sales, through its fractional business development service. Key Takeaways A VP of Sales is the wrong first hire

Pharma M&A impact on CRO and CDMO contracts: which vendors get cut, retained or expanded after an acquisition

Most CDMO business development teams sell the way they wish sponsors bought: a capabilities deck, a site tour, a price. Sponsors do not buy that way. Behind every RFP there is a scorecard, formal or informal, and it ranks reliability and quality far above cost. If you know what is on that scorecard and how it is weighted, every one of your first three meetings can be built to score points on it. This article rebuilds the sponsor's CDMO selection criteria from the published su

Corstrate is a life sciences business development consultancy that helps vendors selling into pharma and biotech, including CROs, CDMOs and lab services companies, win more clients. A life sciences business development consultancy is a specialist firm that builds and runs the commercial front end for these vendors: defining the ideal client profile, building targeted account lists, running outbound campaigns, generating conference meetings, supporting RFPs, and reporting on p

A practical playbook for CDMO client acquisition: why the sales cycle is different, who can help, and how a fractional, PharmD-led BD partner builds pipeline across the US and UK.

For most CROs and CDMOs under about 50 people, fractional business development is a better first step than hiring a full-time BD manager. A US business development manager costs roughly $170,000 to $190,000 a year fully loaded and takes about six months to ramp, while a fractional partner brings senior expertise from the first month for a monthly retainer plus a commission on the business won. Hiring makes more sense once deal volume justifies a dedicated person. See how Cors

Key Takeaways More money, far fewer buyers. Private bio/pharma funding in H1 2026 reached about $20.3 billion, the highest three-year total, but across only 366 funding events, down 32% from 535 a year earlier and 46% from 684 in H1 2024. Your target list is mostly clinical-stage, not discovery-stage. Of the 68 venture-backed biotechs that raised more than $9.1 billion in H1 2026, roughly two-thirds (42 rounds) went to companies that already had a drug candidate in human test

When a director of manufacturing at a mid-size biotech needs a new fill-finish partner, they no longer open Google, scroll a page of blue links, and click through ten CDMO websites. In 2026, they open ChatGPT or Perplexity and type "best sterile fill-finish CDMOs for a Phase 2 biologic in the EU." Within seconds, the AI returns three to six named vendors, each with a short evaluation. If your company is not in that answer, you were never in the room. This is the shift that ge

For years, a large share of Western drug development quietly ran through a handful of Chinese contract organizations. That arrangement is now unwinding, and it is unwinding on a legislative clock. The BIOSECURE Act, signed into law in December 2025, has set off the single largest reshuffle of contract manufacturing relationships the industry has seen in a decade. For US and EU CDMOs, this is not an abstract policy story. It is a multi-year window to win programs that were, un

For a CRO or CDMO, an RFP is the moment your entire business development effort gets tested. Months of relationship building, conference conversations, and inbound nurturing funnel down to one document and a deadline. Win it, and you book revenue that can span years. Lose it, and the capacity you reserved, the scientists you briefed, and the pricing you sweated over walk out the door with a competitor. The uncomfortable truth is that most life sciences service companies treat

Every October, the global pharmaceutical supply chain compresses into a few halls for three days. For a CRO or CDMO business development team, those three days can produce a quarter of pipeline, or a stack of unscanned badges and an expense report nobody wants to explain. The difference is almost never the booth. It is the work done in the eight weeks before the doors open. This is the Corstrate pre-show playbook for turning a major pharma trade show into measurable business

Updated October 2026. The H2 2026 business development priorities for life sciences service companies: concentrated biotech funding, M&A-driven vendor reviews, the BIOSECURE timeline, ICH E6(R3) Annex 2, and the BIO-Europe, BioFIT and JPM meetings to book before year-end.

Cold email still works in life sciences, but the margin for error has narrowed sharply. Reply rates that hovered around 8.5% in 2019 have fallen to roughly 3.4% in 2026. This means a generic blast sent to a busy scientific buyer is now far more likely to be deleted than answered. For boutique CROs, CDMOs, and biotech service providers competing against larger players with bigger marketing budgets, the email itself has to do more work. It has to land in the right inbox, earn a