The client
The client is a fast-growing mid-size CRO. It stands out for agile teams, flexible project approaches, and expert staff who work closely with sponsor teams. Its rare disease and oncology practices are especially active growth areas.
The challenge
As a mid-size CRO, it often competes head-to-head with larger CROs that may have deeper experience in specific diseases and more internal resources for complex pursuits.
It needed to show that it could offer a more agile, hands-on, and collaborative approach, and to address perceived gaps in therapeutic experience. The team wanted stronger, patient-centered strategies for bid defense meetings (BDMs), so sponsors could feel confident in its ability to design and run patient-centric studies.
“We were losing business due to a lack of specific therapeutic experience. It just made the buying decision too difficult for our sponsors, especially when we competed against the largest CROs. We needed to do something to improve our chances at those critical BDMs to support our expansion in our strategic therapeutic areas.”
Where it started
Before working with us:
- Lack of therapeutic experience was the main reason for about 18% of lost bids
- Those losses represented $337M in opportunity value from 2021 to 2024
- Data and analysis were often needed 10 to 14 business days before a bid defense meeting
What we did
We worked with the CRO’s BDM leads to set the research focus for each opportunity, then quickly built custom reports and strategic assets for the sponsor-facing presentation.
The process included:
- Defining the opportunity and research priorities with the BDM team
- Collecting and analyzing social listening, digital activity, competitor data, and patient-facing materials
- Building a first report for the client to review
- Folding their feedback into a final 20 to 40 page analysis
- Preparing the final report for print and shipping it straight to the BDM team when needed
What the reports covered
Because we continuously monitor patient sentiment, digital activity, competitor positioning, and advocacy landscapes, we could produce high-quality reports on rare and complex indications with little lead time.
Reports often included:
- Patient sentiment analysis
- Competitive landscape mapping
- Patient journey maps
- Website and content heuristic scoring
- Digital share-of-voice analysis
- Clinical trial landscape review
- Patient recruitment and retention strategy
- Concept brands and creative prototypes
What we made
Our in-house creative team could bring strategic ideas to life quickly, as branded concepts, patient-facing mockups, websites, and other presentation-ready assets.
Examples included:
- Patient life binders
- Concept study brands
- Patient-facing and investigator-facing website concepts
- Recruitment and retention strategy frameworks
Working together
The CRO’s teams set the range and focus of the research. We prepared a first report, reviewed it with them, and used their guidance to finish the report and the sponsor-facing materials.
The results
Our support helped the CRO perform better across major bid defense opportunities.
- More than 2x improvement in BDM win rate
- Win rate up from 30% to 62%
- $155.4M in project service fees won
- $979 won for every $1 spent
- No missed deadlines
- Reports ready in 4 to 20 business days, depending on scope
In the client’s words
“You’ve been our secret weapon.”
“We should be using this across every opportunity.”
“I hate to ask... but can you handle another report?”
The impact
The CRO’s rare disease team became a major driver of its revenue growth. The CRO expanded into more than five new indications and strengthened its position in its strategic therapeutic areas.
What came next
After the early wins, the CRO kept expanding the partnership. In the first three months of 2024 alone, we supported five major opportunities, and the CRO won them all. It has also explored using PatientlyIQ data in more of its internal teams.