Your sales manager is talented, and their proposal is strong. But somewhere along the way, something breaks. Customers feel oversold, technical details get lost, and the trust you spent months building gets dented.

This is one of the most persistent problems in contract development and manufacturing (CDMO) commercial teams, and most leaders don’t realise the root cause is their CMDO sales model.

The Problem

The temptation in CDMO is to find one exceptional commercial person: someone who can open new accounts, navigate technical conversations, manage complex, long-term relationships, and close business across sales cycles spanning years. As anyone who has tried to hire or develop that profile knows, it rarely works.

The global CDMO market is worth around $246 billion and is forecast to keep growing over the next decade. In a sector where a single account can run from Phase I through to commercial launch, a flawed commercial model compounds at every stage.

I recently spoke with Michael Stanek, a Global API Commercial and Operations Executive Leader, on the Active Ingredient Podcast. With over 25 years in the CDMO sector, Michael has led turnarounds, integrated acquisitions, and spent much of his career examining why commercial and operations rarely pull in the same direction.

His view is that the disconnect reflects how the two functions are built, not how the people within them behave. “It’s almost built into the system,” he told me. “The two functions operate on completely different time horizons, with different incentives, different pressures, and even different definitions of risks.”
Commercial focuses on growth and relationships, while Operations focuses on capacity, compliance, and execution. As Michael puts it, commercials sell the future while operations protects the present.

This cap creates friction. The expectation is that one salesperson can bridge it. “We pretend that the commercial person should magically… understand everything. The chemistry, the process of risk, the analytical readiness, regulatory… But these people don’t exist on the market, and especially not in this type of business.”

The Solution: How To Fix Your CDMO Sales Model

Step 1: Stop Designing Around a Profile That Doesn’t Exist

Before Michael could redesign his commercial team, he had to challenge an assumption: that the right person, given enough support and development, can open new accounts and manage complex relationships with equal effectiveness.

“Only a very small minority of people… genuinely embody both mindsets at the same time,” he told me. “We often argue that one person can be equally strong in opening new doors and in nurturing complex long-term relationships. But in reality, those profiles are extremely rare.”

The problem compounds quietly. When a salesperson is heavily loaded with existing business, new business development slides to a secondary priority. In a sector where a customer relationship can run from Phase I through to commercial launch, that lag has serious consequences for the pipeline. “Future business will suffer if new growth is not nurtured in parallel,” Michael said.

Designing a commercial team around a role that doesn’t reflect the reality of how people work is the starting point of the problem. The structural fix has to come first.

Step 2: Divide the Role Into Two Complementary Functions

Michael’s answer is the ‘dual sales model’. Rather than asking one person to carry the entire commercial relationship, he divides responsibility between a sales manager and a business manager.

The sales manager handles the front end: identifying opportunities, managing the customer interface, and presenting the proposal. The business manager brings technical depth, site-specific knowledge, and a realistic understanding of what can be done. They represent a specific manufacturing site, build the proposal from the inside, and stay with the project once the business is won.