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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

Life science reps love the usual stuff.

Conferences. Webinars. One-to-ones. Virtual meetings. Follow-up emails. LinkedIn messages that are trying very hard not to look like LinkedIn messages.

All fair enough, and all work well.
But one of the best tools for building a pipeline is still massively underused.

Lunch and learns.
Not glamorous. Not new. Not exactly cutting-edge commercial wizardry.

But very effective.

And if you sell into technical teams, labs, process development groups, discovery teams, or basically any life science environment where decisions involve more than one person, they should be a much bigger part of your playbook than they probably are now.

At its simplest, it is this:

You’ve got a contact inside an account. Maybe they’re a decent champion already, maybe just someone warm. You work with them to get a session in the diary. You bring in doughnuts, pizza, sandwiches, whatever works. Then you give a short on-site talk, usually 20 to 30 minutes, on something scientific, technical, or operational that is genuinely relevant to the team.

That bit matters.
Because if it is just a product pitch with pepperoni, people will clock it straight away.

The best lunch and learns are useful first and commercial second. Your product can absolutely be the hero, but it needs to earn that role by sitting inside a conversation people actually care about.

Done properly, it does not feel like a sales pitch. It feels like a useful session delivered by someone who knows their stuff.

Which, conveniently, is exactly how you want to be remembered, Oh as as the guy that brings food, everyone loves that guy!

The biggest reason lunch and learns work is that they help fix one of the most common problems in life science sales:

Most reps are way too single-threaded inside their accounts.

They’ve got one contact. Maybe two if they’re lucky. One person is replying, one person took a meeting, one person seems interested, so they tell themselves the opportunity is moving.

Maybe it is.
But maybe it is hanging by a thread.

Most buying decisions are not made by one person. There is usually a wider group involved. Budget holders, end users, technical evaluators, department leads, senior people, adjacent teams, people who care about implementation, people who care about data, people who care about risk.

The average number of people in a buying committee is 7! Do all your deals have 7 contacts?

So if you only know one person, you have not really got account coverage. You have got a name, and that is risky.

If that person leaves, goes quiet, gets busy, loses interest, changes priority, or just forgets to drag your thing through internally, you are stuck.

Lunch-and-learns are a very good way to sort that out.

This is the bit people miss.
A lunch-and-learn is not just about getting in a room and talking through a few slides while everyone attacks a stack of Domino’s.

It is about widening the relationship.

Your original contact now has a reason to invite other people. Colleagues come along. Adjacent teams come along. Sometimes senior people stick their head in. Sometimes somebody turns up who you did not even know existed but turns out to be the exact sort of person who can get things moving internally.

Now you are not relying on just one person.
You are building multiple points of contact inside the account.

And that matters because most sales opportunities have one obvious point of contact, but the actual buying group is much wider. You mentioned the average buying committee being around seven people, which sounds about right in spirit even if the number moves around a bit depending on what is being bought.

The point is simple: if you only know one person, you are undercovered.
Lunch-and-learns help you start fixing that fast.

This is where it gets even more useful in life sciences.

Let’s say you are selling into a cell line development team. Fine. But who is upstream of them? Who is downstream of them? Who is affected by the work they do? Who relies on the outputs? Who influences the inputs? Who is involved in the wider workflow?

That is where more opportunity often lives.

Lunch and learns give you a reason to meet those people, too.

So now you are not just speaking to the immediate team you started with. You are beginning to understand the wider ecosystem around them. You are seeing where your product, service, or platform has relevance across the broader workflow.

That does two useful things.

First, it gives you more commercial angles.
Second, it makes your opportunity more robust.

Because the denser your internal network is, the less fragile the opportunity becomes.

There is also a softer benefit here, but it is real.

You turn up. You bring food. You give people something useful. You are not just asking for time, you are creating something of value.

That builds social credibility, and social credibility matters far more than a lot of reps like to admit.

You are no longer just another supplier in their inbox. You are now someone they have actually met. Someone who came on-site. Someone who knows the science. Someone who gave a useful talk. Someone associated with a decent experience rather than another “just bumping this up your inbox” email.

Here is another reason I like them.

They are perfect for those weird patches of the year where external activity drops off a bit.

Summer. Thanksgiving in the US. The festive run-up. Those periods when conferences thin out, diaries get patchy, and many reps start acting like pipeline generation has been temporarily cancelled.

This is normally the point where people start moaning.

Reply rates are slower. Meetings are harder to land. Nobody wants another webinar. Everyone says they will pick it up next month, next quarter, or after whatever holiday is currently getting blamed.

Fine.

Or you can just make your own luck.

If the market is giving you fewer natural touchpoints, create some yourself.

Run a lunch and learn series.

Instead of waiting for the next big event, build your own small ones inside target accounts. Instead of hoping somebody books a demo, give them a reason to invite colleagues and get you on-site.

That is how you keep momentum up when the usual calendar starts going a bit flat.

This is not one of those ideas that sound nice in a newsletter and then disappear the second they meet the real world.

I have used this before during a new product launch, and it worked brilliantly.

In six weeks, we ran 15 lunch-and-learns across 15 companies.

That meant we spoke to hundreds of people across those accounts in a very short space of time.

Hundreds.

Try doing that through one-to-one meetings alone and see how long it takes you.

And more importantly, it was not just about volume. It was the quality of the touchpoints. We were getting in front of relevant teams, building awareness quickly, creating new internal connections, and giving ourselves more ways into each account.

That is what made it so powerful.

It was not a random activity. It was dense, useful, and commercially relevant exposure across the right companies.

Which is why I still think more reps should be doing it.

Honestly, I think lunch-and-learns are underused because they sit in a slightly awkward middle ground.

They are not flashy enough to get people excited.

They are not “innovative” enough to end up in some painfully overcooked LinkedIn post about modern selling.

And they are practical enough that people underestimate how strategic they actually are.

But they are strategic.
Because this is not really about lunch.

It is about account penetration.
It is about multi-threading.
It is about building trust.
It is about creating momentum.
It is about giving yourself more chances to win.

And in complex life science sales, that stuff matters a lot more than whether your latest follow-up email had a clever subject line.

1. Pick five accounts where you already have a warm contact
Do not overcomplicate it. Start with accounts where you already know someone, even if the relationship is only half-decent. One warm contact is enough to get the ball rolling.

2. Build one talk that is actually useful
Not a brochure in slide form. A proper short session with something scientific, practical, or commercially relevant in it. Something a contact would not be embarrassed to invite their team to.

3. Treat it like a series, not a one-off
One lunch and learn is nice. A run of them is pipeline. Book a cluster for a fixed period, especially during quieter months or around a product launch, and use it to create repeated touchpoints across target accounts.

If you can get in front of a room full of relevant people, feed them, teach them something useful, and leave with more internal connections than you walked in with, it is probably worth doing, RIGHT?

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