The Challenge:

This client described themselves as very traditional, “old-school pharma”, rating themselves 5 on a scale of 0-10 when it came to being modern marketers. They wanted to get above average but needed support from someone who knew the industry well and could help them make the shift to the “marketing future”.

Other consultants who had helped them in the past were very large, less personalized, less focused on strategy, and acted more like team extenders. They tried to fit the company into one of their archetypes when what the client really needed was a personalized approach.

While the client had a fully staffed and talented Marketing Excellence team in place, they reached out to us to be a thinking partner. They wanted to make sure they were taking the most efficient and effective path to building an industry-leading marketing organization that made an impact with patients, including those from diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds.

Our Approach/Our Offering:

The company’s Marketing Excellence team was already doing a lot of things right to modernize their marketing organization. We started working with the core members through the CMO Transformation Advisor program and our Soil Test methodology to strengthen and accelerate their strategy and planning to build a marketing future in a more prioritized and sequenced way. We also helped them prevent missteps that accompany long-term change programs in large companies.

From there, we developed their Marketing Way, a first-ever standard approach to marketing at their company. The company did not have a legacy of following process, as people preferred to go it on their own, so we needed to ensure the guidance was practical, beneficial and accompanied by leader and skill building support. The resulting Marketing Way was a comprehensive handbook and toolkit that reflected contemporary ideal marketing practice, was useful for life sciences and their business, and made it easier for different marketing teams and supporting functions to collaborate when doing marketing work.

The Marketing Way also became the unifying foundation for developing training content and other marketing resources. Mastery in Action Workshops were developed to help improve the relevance, integration, and impact of campaigns. Lime also helped overhaul the company’s Marketing Competencies to align with the Marketing Way and to help define what world-class modern marketing looks like when making talent and professional development decisions.

The Results:

• The client is bringing about change in their organization in a way that fits their company mission, values and also their philosophy and culture. While a lot of the work is long-term in scope, the client is thrilled that they are able to accomplish it more quickly.
• The Marketing Way has become the cornerstone to bringing together the cross-functional effort to modernize its marketers. It has made other sub-team work easier and created momentum for change.
• The client sees they are now able to deliver more personalized, relevant marketing for their own customers, representing hundreds of millions in revenue. Getting to the end of these Marketing Excellence projects faster meant more dollars to the client sooner, while maintaining the company’s sincere commitment to patients.
• The client also saw the positive impact of the engagement on reducing team attrition.

“We needed to land the plane, put pen to paper, and stop chasing our own tails. Lime put a lot of effort into understanding us and our particular needs. They’re a fantastic capability-building partner and a good, honest sounding board. They not only challenged us on direction but they were proactive in recommending different ways to approach a situation.” – Marketing Excellence Leader