Winning in 2025: Life Sciences Strategies to Reclaim Market Share

Life Sciences FY25 GTM Planning

The life sciences tools and services industry continues to face a tough year. The flash of optimism at the beginning of the year was suppressed by light pharma and biotech spend, a recession in China and a lack of timely interest rate cuts. Most life sciences companies will see low negative or positive single digit growth year-over-year.

Marketing and sales leaders in the industry are looking for ways to regain momentum and re-establish sustainable growth. Go-to-market (GTM) leaders play a pivotal role in shaping strategies that can drive revenue, restore confidence and position their organizations to achieve annual targets. Here are five critical GTM trends that can help vendors return to growth and accelerate revenue in 2025.

 1. Targeting High Propensity to Buy Accounts

Most life sciences companies have a defined customer segmentation model. The attributes like global, key, field or inside accounts are defined by using historical or forward-looking criteria. These accounts are then pushed to the sales teams to inform coverage and deployment. Companies tend to fail by turning these outputs into account prioritization—pointing sellers at the right accounts and buyers with the right products. To re-establish growth and secure a stable revenue base, teams should adopt specific, actionable account tactics that focus sellers on high-value targets, whether they’re existing relationships, targeted competitive takeaways or value-driven engagements. These should all be supported with effective tools and a regular coaching cadence. Tactics may include:

• Opportunity & share of wallet modeling 
• Sales plays (e.g., strategic win-back campaigns) 
• Dashboards & metrics 
• Coaching reviews & ride-along

2. Executing Actionable Account Planning

As mentioned in the prior theme, most life sciences companies have a defined global, strategic or key account team that manages their largest customers. These accounts are often covered by the strongest sales talent, given additional discounting approval and have some level of sponsorship from leaders. Although these teams often have the strongest sales talent, they tend to overlook the basic tenets of key accounts programs. There is a priority to digitize account planning methods like gold-sheets, identify ways to differentiate from the competition and ensure regular commitment to customers. These tenets may include:

• Account & stakeholder mapping 
• ROI-driven solutioning 
• Executive sponsorship 
• Loyalty & customer success programs 

3. Improving Sales Effectiveness

As mentioned in a previous article, Q1 Softness Unveils Sales Atrophy, sales leadership is still unsure if sellers are performing well in front of customers. There are questions around generalists having the right products in their bags (i.e., narrow vs. broad portfolio), the appropriate number of sales calls each week and where sellers are spending their time in a given week. This quickly delves into additional questions around territory and workload balancing, competency capabilities and training programs. Overall, there is no magic bullet on fixing organizational sales effectiveness. All these GTM programs work in tandem. These include:

• Sales time surveys
• Territory design & account assignments
• Competency & skills model
• Tailored training programs

4. Streamlining Customer Service

Any client within Alexander Group’s Life Sciences practice in the past four years will mention that sales time spent on customer service is an issue. Often, teams are plagued with customer service teams being unable to quickly turn around inquiries from customers. This is caused by a variety of factors including siloed teams (e.g., order management, procurement, supply chain), unavailable information requiring the team to track it down and too many requests hindering the system. When customers do not get a timely response or do not hear the answer they want to hear, they often immediately call their account owner. Companies looking to solve these issues are using:

• Customer service level agreements
• Dedicated customer service upmarket
• Service teams’ organization alignment
• Self-service capabilities

5. Winning the Race for Top Talent

The broader race for talent from 2021-2022 is over. However, there is a lingering fight for top talent, including high performers, product or market specialists and application scientists. In a recent Alexander Group Sales Comp Hot Topics survey, the overall cost of sales compensation programs was increasing by 10%. This was mostly driven by increasing pay levels and pay curve changes. Life sciences companies are looking to make sure they protect their top talent and attract new talent by increasing total target compensation, often reviewing the mix between base and incentive. There is also a strategic priority to drive greater pay for performance between top and bottom performers, creating more upside and pay for sellers who overachieve. To summarize, these tactics include:

• Pay level & mix target setting
• Plan mechanic & upside design
• Employee value propositions
• Job architecture & career pathing

 Final Thoughts on Reclaiming Market Share in 2025

The life sciences tools and services industry must navigate a challenging landscape by focusing on key strategies to regain momentum in FY25. To re-establish baseline growth, companies must focus on account prioritization, key accounts, sales effectiveness, customer service and retaining top talent. Fixing some or all of these GTM priorities will help vendors differentiate themselves from the competition and retake market share.