Building Internal BD Muscle
Building Internal BD Muscle at Fig Therapeutics
Biopharmaceutical business development teams often need to ramp-up quickly and learn new skills at the firehose. Meanwhile, strategic transactions are time sensitive and have a serious cost on opportunity when mishandled.

As transactions are sensitive strategic processes, names of companies and executives in all MotionHall case studies are anonymized.

Tim, Vanessa, and Yao represent the Business Development (BD) team at Fig Therapeutics, a biotech with a robust clinical pipeline. The CEO and board have decided that it's time to develop their BD ‘muscle’ by building a specialized in-house team.

Tim’s background experience includes being a CCO or a CEO at other biotechs. This is his first time leading in a CBO role and his first strategic task is to outlicense Fig’s lead asset. Though new to the process, he’s optimistic he can learn to master this process for the company.

Vanessa has been working with Tim for several years in various analyst support roles. She is also interested in developing BD skills and growing with Fig’s new BD team. She supports Tim by helping him understand the market for their licensing deal, managing market outreach, and briefing him before meetings.

Yao has just joined Fig Therapeutics. He has a biology background and recently finished business school. He is assigned to report to Vanessa and help her analyze market data.

The team is competent, ambitious and is interested in accessing MotionHall’s Model, Platform and Method to elevate what they can achieve together.

The Platform is Best Leveraged by a Sophisticated BD Team

Tim and Vanessa begin with the MotionHall Strategy Consulting team to get started not just with the Platform, but also to ‘build BD muscle’ - meaning developing the internal processes and professional competencies required for them to make best use of the Platform tools and manage their upcoming deal cycle in the most efficient way.

Accelerated Professional Growth and Team Performance

The pair work with MotionHall Strategy Consulting to set a series of custom workshops alongside Platform access. In Tim’s strategy conversations with MotionHall, he learns how best to approach the market and how to create competitive forcing functions that will drive interest in the deal. Vanessa learns the best practices that help her prepare Tim to be most effective in meetings. Yao dives into the scientific details, and learns how to better provide timely scientific tailoring and competitive details to support Vanessa and Tim.

Efficiently achieving your professional development goals

Fig’s BD team goals challenged each member of the team to develop new skills building on top of their existing strengths:

  • • Tim challenged himself to grow as a dealmaker and achieve success in his first licensing deal cycle.
  • • Vanessa learned how to better support Tim in the transaction cycle, while leading the foundations of a team.
  • • Yao had strong scientific acumen and attention to detail but needed to learn how to operate as part of a BD team supporting a dealmaker in a sensitive strategic business process.

Soon, Tim, Vanessa and Yao are working on their own with the Platform, Model and Method to drive their next set of BD goals forward while continuing to build the team. Their next challenge is to consider Platform Strategy for the company.

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