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Succession Bio works with life science/biotech companies to help drive sales, licensing, and partnership opportunities.

We do this through market research to identify the right companies and people, craft scientifically credible messages, and then perform the outbound sales and marketing tactics on your behalf to facilitate meetings with the right people at the right companies.

Succession

Cold outreach in life sciences isn’t failing because teams lack effort, intent or knowledge.

It fails because most cold outbound approaches aren’t designed for how scientific buyers behave or how modern outbound really works.

Over the past few years, Harrison, Nick, Jess and I (Divya) have seen the same structural issues and friction points show up across the life sciences industry.

Below, we unpack the 5 main challenges that consistently limit pipeline generation in life sciences, and how strong teams are addressing them.

P.S. I’ve attached a downloadable PDF framework doc for you guys at the bottom of this newsletter (no skipping though 😉)

1. Deliverability is Broken

Earlier in my career before joining the Succession team, I was pretty clueless about how broken the systems I was using actually were. No matter how much effort I put into messaging, a lot of it simply wasn’t landing. That’s why I really want to stress this first point: if you don’t fix this, everything else is wasted effort.

Do you and the rest of your sales team assume your outbound messages are being seen? Hard truth, a huge portion never actually makes it to the prospect’s inbox (RIP).

Many cold outreach strategies fail at the infrastructure layer due to shared domains, poor reputation control, and overly aggressive sending from day one which  quietly undermines campaigns before messaging is even tested. Teams often don’t realise this is happening because surface-level engagement metrics still appear healthy.

If inboxes aren’t stable from the get go, it becomes impossible to accurately assess what is or isn’t working downstream. And so you’re not testing messaging or targeting, you’re actually testing spam filters.

Succession builds infrastructure and focuses on testing first before implementation. Campaigns are built on dedicated domains, controlled volume strategies, active inbox warming and constant monitoring. That way, performance data actually reflects real buyer behaviour rather than deliverability noise.

2. Scientists Aren’t Generic Buyers

I can testify this myself: scientists don’t evaluate outreach like general B2B prospects. They are trained to assess evidence, nuance, and technical accuracy and they instantly are checked out if something feels superficial.

Cold outreach to scientists often fails when it tries to “simplify” science (which is the good stuff) too aggressively or replace substance with marketing + sales jargon. Even when the intent is good, it can come across as not really understanding how scientists work day to day.

Once credibility is lost, no amount of follow-up recovers attention.

Between the 4 of us, we’ve spent over 40 years in the life sciences, and that experience feeds directly into how we approach cold outreach. Our messaging is built around real scientific context. We prioritise accuracy, relevance, and restraint meaning enough detail to demonstrate understanding, without overwhelming or over-engineering details. The aim is not to impress, but to signal “we get your world” because we know the language well.

3. The Wrong Metrics Drive Behaviour

Many lead generation activities are optimised around what’s easy to measure rather than what drives revenue.

Opens, clicks, and tracked engagement can look reassuring on a dashboard while conversations stall. When sales reps chase these signals, behaviour shifts toward volume and surface interaction (wrong metrics) instead of meaningful engagement.

Insider tip: at Succession, we don’t measure opens, clicks, or tracked engagement. That’s because bots trigger a lot of that activity, which creates false signals and increases the risk of emails landing in spam. We measure the outcomes that matter, replies, conversation quality, meetings that progress and active opportunities in your pipeline. These are the true metrics that drive revenue and make it obvious when something needs isn’t working and needs fixing.

4. Broad Targeting Kills Relevance

Job titles and company size are weak signals in life sciences and here’s why. Two people with the same title may operate in completely different scientific, technical, and organisational contexts.

Take a senior scientist at a small biotech with less than 50 employees. They’re often doing a bit of everything like running experiments, assessing tools, influencing purchasing decisions, and championing ideas internally. Now compare that to a senior scientist in big pharma, where roles are more narrowly defined and decision-making is distributed across multiple layers. Same title, very different level of influence.

Without having access and understanding research focus, modality, disease area, or technical environment, outreach risks being directionally correct but practically irrelevant.

Succession’s targeting is built around scientific and organisational context: what teams are currently working on, how they run experiments, what tools they use and where decisions actually sit. This allows outreach to align with real buying triggers rather than vague personas.

5. Lead Gen Isn’t Treated as a System

Many sales teams approach outbound as something to switch on, pause, and restart.

Campaigns are launched, tweaked, abandoned, and rebuilt without true understanding of the consequence of each action. Each reset means less timed touchpoint for your prospect, wiping momentum which prevents insights from compounding. The result is an unpredictable pipeline, bursts of activity rather than steady deal flow. Sustainable growth requires continuity, not constant reinvention.

We operate lead generation as an evolving system. Performance is constantly reviewed and scrutinised, we investigate our campaigns using our statical evidence, learnings are carried forward and improvements stack over time contributing to our ongoing system refinement. This turns outbound from a reactive motion into a predictable pipeline engine.

Most outbound doesn’t fail for one obvious reason. It fails quietly over time because small issues compound and nobody spots them early enough. Messages don’t land right, signals get misread, relevance slips, and teams end up fixing the wrong things.

This perspective has been shaped by patterns we’ve seen repeatedly. Over time, those patterns become hard to ignore. Paying attention to them is often the difference between lead generation that feels unpredictable and one that holds up month after month.

Now as promised, here is your downloadable pdf so you can keep those challenges top of mind and most importantly, know how to overcome them:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11ob_w0jWfpxSTjuDSuUuf5JBLfsA0Ebm/view?usp=sharing

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