You have a sales team working hard and a pipeline with opportunities at every stage. Yet the revenue is trickling rather than flowing.

Sounds fairly simple to diagnose, right? The trouble is that a full-looking pipeline and a broken one can appear similar until you know exactly where to look.

The Problem

When conversion falls short, most life sciences organisations respond in the same predictable ways. They add salespeople, increase the marketing budget, or push the team harder to close. These responses are understandable but frequently wrong, because they treat a system problem as a people problem.

The real issue, far more often than leaders expect, is structural. Even highly skilled commercial teams will consistently underperform when the architecture connecting them is broken or incomplete.

In the contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) and pharma services space, where the commercial journey spans marketing, sales, science, operations, and post-sale delivery, a gap anywhere in that chain shows up directly in the conversion numbers.

I sat down recently with Elliott Berger on the Active Ingredients podcast, where we explored this very problem. Elliott spent 14 years at Catalent, helping transform a private equity-backed business into a multi-billion-dollar public company. He now advises investors and senior executives across the CDMO, contract research organisation (CRO), and biotech space, with commercial diagnosis at the centre of much of that work.

What he has consistently found is that the problem is rarely where organisations assume. “An average system with good people,” Elliott told me, “is better than no system with awesome people or more people… several people in the system can do a lot more damage than 100 people randomly running around.”

The Solution

Step 1: Diagnose Before You Prescribe

Elliott’s starting point, whenever he works with a CDMO or pharma services organisation struggling with conversion, is a structured diagnostic. He examines the commercial machine from top to bottom and identifies where it is leaking before recommending any changes. The instinct to reach quickly for a solution, he argues, is exactly what turns a manageable problem into a costly one.

“Most of the time I come out, and they don’t have a full system,” he told me. “That’s like an engine… you have everything, but you forgot the intake.”

The intake, in commercial terms, is awareness. If your target customers do not know your organisation exists, or cannot clearly distinguish what you offer from your competitors, the rest of the machine is already working at a disadvantage. Elliott is specific about what it takes to fix this. “You have to know who you are, who the target customers are,” he said. “You need to have a priority on that.”

His recommendation is to start the diagnostic by working backwards from your annual revenue target. How many signed contracts do you need? How many late-stage opportunities does that require, and how many qualified leads must enter the top of the funnel each month to make it possible? Most CDMO commercial teams, when they run these numbers for the first time, find the top of their funnel is significantly underfed. In an industry where a purchasing decision can take years to mature and a missed window means waiting another three to five years for the next one, that shortfall is serious. “If you’re not working that system,” Elliott said plainly, “you’re going to be disappointed.”

Step 2: Trace the Leak Stage by Stage

Once the volume picture at the top of the funnel is understood, the diagnostic moves to conversion. Elliott looks at three specific interfaces where the commercial machine most commonly breaks down:

• between marketing and sales,
• between the sales team and the technical teams,
• at the point of close.

The marketing-to-sales handoff is where deals frequently stall. Elliott described a client whose commercial team had over 1,000 names in the work-in-process (WIP) stage of their pipeline. “I’m like, you’re insane,” he told me. “Either they’re not really being worked on, or [there are duplicates] in there, or you’re not progressing.” A bloated WIP stage almost always points to unclear qualification criteria, a broken handoff between teams, or a sales function stretched too thin to work the volume it has inherited from marketing.