The Challenge

Following the December 17, 2014, FDA binding guidance that all pharma studies starting after December 17, 2016, must conform to a set of FDA-sponsored standards, formats and technologies, pharmaceutical companies found themselves in need of a tool or process for ensuring the standards were being met and followed. One major pharmaceutical company had already put a tool in place in an effort to follow the CDISC standards, but they required assistance in fully implementing the tool. Although the tool they had installed was a good starting point, it had not yet been completely tested or qualified, so it was unclear whether the tool would work as intended – leaving open the possibility that drugs that passed through the system would be rejected by the FDA for not meeting the required standards.

The Solution

CMK Select supported the pharmaceutical company’s clinical and statistical business teams in identifying the gaps in the existing tool and processes, in terms of its capabilities and what the FDA binding guidance required. CMK helped the company implement three key components to ensure accuracy and consistency in meeting the new standards: a metadata repository for the storage and maintenance of clinical data standards; a Pinnacle 21 Enterprise software to support compliance validation checks and standards; and a change-request and workflow system to support standards governance. CMK also helped to develop and re-engineer the operational processes to support the standards implementation.

Results

With the updated tools and processes in place, the company is able to ensure that all studies meet the CDISC standards prior to submission, minimizing the possibility for rejection and the subsequent need for correction and resubmission. By guaranteeing conformity from the start, the company is able to avoid any delays in launch that would ultimately lead to major losses of time and revenue.

The Challenge

When the FDA announced its new Breakthrough Therapy Designation in 2012, it meant that the pharma industry would be able to move new life-saving drugs more efficiently through the approval process, allowing for the right drugs and therapies to reach the right patients at the right time. Any drug that is designated as a breakthrough therapy is fast-tracked through the FDA approval process.

Shortly after the new designation was instituted, a Top 5 pharmaceutical company was seeking to optimize the launch of a new breakthrough therapy oncology drug, and needed a plan in place that would allow for an adequate supply of the drug at launch – both to avoid any negative press and to open the gates for revenue gain early on.

The Solution

CMK Select first reviewed the existing timeline and assessed the risks and opportunities. We interviewed key stakeholders to better understand the brand objectives and ideal project timelines, and discovered that the existing schedule would send the drug to market two months after launch. Because this would result in a highly unfavorable response from the public, we assembled key decision makers from the manufacturing and distribution teams to critically evaluate the existing process and streamline the tasks that could be completed ahead of time to improve efficiency.

Results

We successfully reduced the pharmaceutical company’s drug availability delay by 60 percent, which placed the breakthrough drug on the market less than two weeks after the fast-tracked launch, rather than the initial estimate of two months. With such an efficient turnaround time, there was ample product available just days after launch. This ensured an additional five weeks to generate revenue and eliminated the threat of negative press. In fact, the abbreviated process worked so well that the client continues to use it today.

The Challenge

A major pharmaceutical company hired CMK Select to manage all of its therapeutic compounds in early development – from proof of concept to regulatory submission. The CMK Select team soon identified a need for a new process for transitioning projects from the pharma company’s development team to its brand team. The development team struggled with transferring critical pieces of information to the brand team during the handoff – each time a drug compound was submitted to the FDA for approval – which caused the brand team to often question the development team’s work or the decisions they made along the way. Ultimately, work was being repeated unnecessarily to fill those information gaps.

The Solution

CMK Select evaluated the company’s existing communication channels and pinpointed the areas where information was most often lacking or getting lost in translation. We then developed a centralized and fully shareable project-tracking tool that records all work done by the development team from the start of the project until the transition period. All information is organized and tracked under defined headings and marked by date. Each section serves as a means to track the work being done in all phases of the project, plus the tool acts as a comprehensive summary for the brand team to pull information from later on and even contains links to final reports.

As a critical second step in the new transition process, we advised the development and brand teams to organize a meeting of key stakeholders from both sides to review all information contained in the project tracker and to open up the proper avenues for communication going forward. When combined, the project tracker and meeting facilitate a smooth transition for hand-off from development to branding.

Results

By tracking and walking through the process with the brand team and presenting them with a complete package of information, the development team was able to bring their colleagues up to speed on the status of the project much more efficiently than had been done in the past. It also kept the brand team from having to perform any duplicative tasks and allowed them to take their work to the next level.

The Challenge

A major pharmaceutical company hired CMK Select to manage all of its therapeutic compounds in early development, from proof of concept to regulatory submission. Upon realizing that the pharma company frequently hired multiple outside agencies to help produce major deliverables – oftentimes bringing on several new agencies at various points throughout a single project – the CMK Select team identified an opportunity to streamline the onboarding process.

As part of the existing process, senior members of the medical and marketing teams would conduct an hours-long on-boarding process concurrent with each new hire, to ensure each team member had a complete understanding of the project status. The new process initiated by CMK Select worked to improve efficiency by cutting down on the amount of time spent in redundant on-boarding meetings, as well as the replicated work that was being done by senior staff members as a result.

The Solution

CMK Select conducted a review and analysis of the existing on-boarding process. We observed the senior team members as they led their on-boarding meetings to gain an understanding of the content of these meetings and how they could be more efficiently utilized.

We determined that a single on-boarding meeting for all agencies at the start of each project would drastically cut down on the time spent in these meetings by senior staff, and we put a process in place to help make that happen. We directed our client at the start of each project to map out all of the work that needed to be done from start to finish, as well as to identify all of the agencies that would be needed to attain each deliverable. From there, they could plan one single meeting to onboard all agencies at the same time.

Finally, we set up a more streamlined communications process that provides each of the on-boarding agencies with digital copies of all work that has been completed to date, and then continues tracking all subsequent work, which can then be provided as a resource for additional agencies to reference.

Results

The single, comprehensive onboarding meeting produced multiple benefits, including saving approximately 10 man-hours of work on each project for the most senior team members. Rather than scheduling out multiple hours-long meetings, the client was able to schedule one meeting and bring all agencies up to speed in a single four-hour period. This new approach also allowed for a clearer explanation of each agency’s role in relation to the next, and it gave all of the agencies the opportunity to communicate with each other about what sort of work they would each be doing and what could be done in parallel to keep the project moving as efficiently as possible. This produced a cleaner and higher-quality end product, and because there were such open lines of communication in place from the start, it was accomplished without the need for multiple follow-up meetings later on.

The Challenge

A leading pharmaceutical corporation needed a defined system for selecting the right healthcare physicians (HCPs) for each requested speaking engagement, while also ensuring that those HCPs stayed within the limits established by the brand, as well as on budget and within each program’s financial cap. The existing process took a tremendous amount of time, effort and resources by the brand managers. The overall volume of the existing process was too time-consuming and therefore required an alternative solution to simplify the operational effort for the marketing team.

The Solution

Before crafting a solution, CMK Select evaluated the overall process for the field force submissions, including the existing systems for program entry and the overall brand structure. The CMK Select team worked closely with the brand managers to understand and identify the current pain points and how they could best structure an alternate solution to simplify the process for selecting the best HCPs for each speaking engagement.

After thorough analysis and careful review, CMK Select was able to quickly design and implement a back-end operations system designed to track all of the documentation for speaking engagements from submission to finish.

This new solution included process management recommendations and communication plans, and it also provided a dashboard of reports for the brand managers.

Results

Not only did this newly designed system reduce process management for the brand team by approximately 15-20 hours per week, it also increased speaker approval rates on a month-over-month basis since its inception and enabled corporate compliance requirements to be activated more rapidly. In addition, this new solution helped ensure that the best HCPs are being thoughtfully utilized for the appropriate events, and it enabled the brand managers to easily communicate to company leadership the number of committed speaking events and which HCPs will be attending.

There is only one opportunity to successfully launch a pharmaceutical brand. Brand leaders must navigate pitfalls and obstacles by planning, coordinating, and executing a comprehensive plan that will set a trajectory toward brand success. We call this plan the Integrated Launch Plan.

WHAT IS AN INTEGRATED LAUNCH PLAN?

An integrated launch plan is a cross-functional approach to marketing that all pharmaceuticals – from big to small – ought to follow. Without an integrated approach, the launch will fail before it begins. This meticulous plan ensures an appropriately timed launch and mitigates the risk of missing phase deadlines that can ultimately lead to launch postponement and missed market opportunities.

WHO NEEDS TO BE INVOLVED?

Quite simply, everyone who partakes in the brand launch process needs to be involved in the Integrated Launch Plan. Team members will need to work together and, more importantly, communicate effectively throughout both the pre-launch and launch phases.
In the pharmaceutical space, the marketing strategy needs to be implemented across all departments including marketing, regulatory, legal, market access, sales, accounting, and manufacturing. This ensures that all aspects of a launch work together cohesively toward a successful outcome. And, of course, Senior Management needs to ensure that the launch plans, strategies and tactics are in line with corporate goals and objectives. Because of the number of key stakeholders, many pharmaceuticals are likely to face communication challenges in developing their integrated launch plans.

Smaller companies are likely to have fewer communication challenges due to small team sizes and more control over the process; however, this means that very a small group of people will need to account for everything: sales, marketing, access, supply chain, finance, legal, regulatory, medical, etc. The overwhelming responsibilities and workload required to successfully execute an integrated plan can present potential risks and oversights caused by a lack of man power.

THE CHALLENGES OF INTEGRATED LAUNCH PLANS WITH PARTNERS

Integrated launch plans are challenging enough for a single company to manage; now imagine the complexities that might arise with a cross-company or partner launch. This presents a whole new layer of intricacy that must be considered as brand and strategic imperatives are now multiplied by two.
And, if one company is a private company and the other is public, the private company will need to align with the public company’s reporting obligations to the financial and regulatory markets, something that it’s likely not used to and probably not well-versed in.

SUCCESSFULLY IMPLEMENTING AN INTEGRATED LAUNCH PLAN

Taking a step back and looking at the entire landscape of an integrated launch, it becomes clear that proper planning and management are paramount to its success. An experienced project manager is often the critical missing link to ensuring that an integrated launch plan is successfully designed, planned and implemented. The project manager will oversee the process and make certain that the proper planning, collaboration, and communication is happening across all stakeholders. Additionally, the project manager can ensure that the right people are in the right “seats” on the product launch team thus confirming that the appropriate allocation of “man power” is in place to mitigate risks and increase productivity.
CMK Select has a proven team of brand launch professionals who can help pharmaceuticals develop and implement their integrated launch plans for a successful brand launch.

It’s not news that market pressures are driving the healthcare industry’s increasing medical orientation. Recognized trends that are leading this shift include:

• Growing prevalence of chronic diseases and novel treatments for them lead to more complex questions
• New types of data that supports comparative effectiveness, Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) and real-world evidence (RWE)
• Growing credibility gap between pharmaceutical companies and regulators, legislators, media and public
• More stakeholders weighing scientific data: physicians to recommend treatments; payers to make their reimbursement decisions; corporate providers to support design of their care pathways; and of course patients.
• Increased focus in recent regulations on safety and efforts to avoid medical and pharmaceutical risk

These trends have far-reaching and often underestimated implications for pharma and device companies at large and especially for medical functions and their leaders. An increasing medical orientation represents a unique opportunity, one that requires leaders to find new ways of working and operating models that put an organization’s medical and science expertise at the center of what pharmaceutical companies are all about.

In addition, with the recent advent of biologics and complex molecules, drugs themselves have changed. These innovative medicines are too complex for many consumers to understand without expert guidance. Recognizing this, doctors have realized that they themselves increasingly need in-depth, high-level clinical education. And pharmaceutical companies have responded by moving toward a more informational and scientific approach to product introduction to the market and support.

Going beyond the traditional pharma model

The fact is that the level of expertise required to provide this educational, informational support goes well beyond what has traditionally been supplied by pharma marketing and sales teams. These teams are strictly limited to providing the information contained in the approved product label. Also, this type of support isn’t in the scope of most clinical development departments.

Seeking to fill the gap between what physicians need and what pharma had offered in the past, some companies began turning to their medical affairs functions. They realized that medical affairs already had the ability to identify and quantify medical value across the product lifecycle. In these companies, medical affairs also began finding new ways to develop and communicate relevant medical data to regulators, physicians, payers and patients. These departments are able to effectively discuss cost, risk and efficacy in detail, while also providing other important information.

However, these tasks can only be accomplished through a strong medical affairs organization that works in close collaboration with research and development (R&D) and commercial teams.

In fact, in many companies, medical affairs has been serving a limited support function, serving on medical/legal/regulatory committees and facilitating peer-to-peer interactions. In response to the changing environment, these companies now need to ensure that the right talent, capabilities and organization structure/size is in place to take on the strategic medical leadership role for data development and communication to internal and external stakeholders.

The expansion of the role and the scope of medical affairs is driven in part by the demand from the medical community for useful medical/scientific dialogue with the industry, and also by significant changes in the regulatory environment. For example, several large companies are under corporate integrity agreements that require a clear delineation between commercial and medical organizations. Those agreements strictly limit what commercial (both marketing and sales) team members can say. Only approved products can be detailed and only information on the approved product label can be discussed or presented.

On the other hand, medical affairs team members an address unsolicited questions from health professionals, including products in development, recent publications, presentations at medical congresses, etc.

In most organizations, medical affairs representatives are now not only actively engaged in communicating medical information directly to opinion leaders, but also connecting with practicing physicians, payer medical directors and other decision makers. They are asked to provide medical/clinical insights in a way business can use it, in partnership with marketing and clinical development. Pharma companies are making more and more use of medical affairs’ in-depth product knowledge as well as their growing alignment with and understanding of marketing strategy. The more medical affairs have been asked to provide, the more has the value of these departments’ services been on the rise.

Evidence of the shift

How do we know that medical affairs are on the rise and becoming stronger equal partner to marketing and clinical development teams across the industry? Look around and you’ll see an unprecedented number of conferences, webinars and other types of presentations focused on the growing scope and essential value these departments supply. Recent conferences and webinars have had titles such as, “Bringing medical affairs earlier into development,” “The evolution of medical as the mission-critical function,” and “Medical Affairs Strategic Summit.”

It’s important to mention that those conferences have gathered large numbers of professionals; not only medical team members, but also their partners from commercial side, medical science liaisons (MSLs) teams and R&D.

Getting involved, creating value

Most medical affairs teams are embracing the challenge and establishing their leadership in:

• Providing medical expertise to a range of clinical/scientific questions
• Driving development of medical strategy and delivering scientific communications
• Actively engaging with key opinion leaders (KOLs) and championing KOL mapping and engagement planning within organizations
• Offering various medical education functions
• Developing data through Phase IV and RWE
• Publication planning and execution
• Representing the company at professional conferences and congresses
• Extending medical directors’ reach to the field through medical science liaisons
• Performing HEOR studies

In addition, medical affairs is becoming stronger partners and contributors to:

• Strategic launch planning and execution
• Strategic and tactical planning for marketed products
• Education for payers through partnership with managed markets teams
• Many other important initiatives

Beyond this broad scope of responsibilities, more advanced organizations have started involving medical affairs much earlier in the product development process — having them take part in the design of Phase II or even Phase I clinical trials. Those organizations view medical affairs team as an equal business partner with R&D and marketing teams.

Medical affairs brings a lot to the table: medical knowledge, scientific insights, and feedback from the field that helps companies understand clinicians’ ongoing struggles and unmet medical needs. All of this helps effective organizations 1) better define and manage product strategy and 2) design product value propositions that motivate choices by physicians, payers and patients.

While medical affairs is clearly growing in importance and influence, at some pharma companies its effectiveness remains limited by internal cultural barriers and political/territorial considerations. Reports of a lack of resources in terms of both dollars and staffing are not uncommon. Across the industry, medical affairs departments continue moving from providing limited support functions into a broader, more strategic, and more valuable organizational role. The successful ones may be those that are able to agreeably share their new-found influence with other key departments, while clearly demonstrating their value both internally and externally.

In summary, the evolution of medical affairs is driven by a changing healthcare landscape, marked by specialized medicines and new stakeholders who demand more complex scientific information across all channels. With their deep clinical expertise, medical affairs departments are uniquely positioned to meet these needs and create competitive advantage for their companies.

KPIs, or key performance indicators, are critical to the success of a pharmaceutical product launch. By their very definition, KPIs are measurable values that demonstrate how effectively a company is achieving their business goals – in this case, a successful product launch. Of course, there are many KPIs that can be tracked over the course of a launch, but only a handful are truly vital for measuring the overall success of your product’s introduction into the marketplace.

Ideally, eight to 10 KPIs should be identified for each of the three product phases: pre-launch, at launch and post-launch. These KPIs will provide true success measures of the overall launch and – eventually – of brand performance.

1. 1. PRE-LAUNCH: The pre-launch phase starts about a year prior to the scheduled product launch and ends when your product finally hits the market. During this phase, project leaders will reach out to stakeholders and educate them on the plans of the launch so there are no surprises along the way
   2. AT LAUNCH: Lasting only about six months, the at-launch phase is the shortest but most important. This is the point at which stakeholders really dig in to ensure the product is market ready and properly positioned to succeed in a competitive environment. It is during this phase, that the critical launch curve – the ultimate measure of success for a new product – is defined.
   3. POST-LAUNCH: Starting approximately six months after your product is introduced to the marketplace, and lasting for nine to 12 months thereafter, the post-launch phase is a period of analysis and scrutiny. During this time, the product is continually monitored so that modifications can be made as necessary, with one end goal in mind: brand success.

WHAT TO MEASURE DURING EACH PHASE:

Once the individual pre-launch, at launch, and post-launch KPIs are established, they are then tracked, monitored, measured, and assessed. At the end of each phase, the resulting data is evaluated, which allows the launch team to clearly quantify a product’s success.

We recommend measuring the following KPIs across each of the pharmaceutical launch phases:

WHY MEASURE KPIs?

When examining recent pharmaceutical launches – ones that have hit the marketplace over the past few years – there are several clear examples of unsuccessful product launches, and many of them have the same thing in common: critical KPIs were not set, measured, or tracked.

Example 1: Supply Readiness: GAZYVA (Genentech)

Gazyva received approval from the FDA in November 2013 for a breakthrough therapy designation. Because of the strong safety and efficacy review during clinical trials, the FDA requested that Genentech accelerate the launch of Gazyva by six weeks. This was a struggle for their team because they did not have a supply readiness KPI in place to ensure that supply was available when required. Ultimately, the product launch team worked closely with its internal teams and the FDA to obtain the necessary supply, and they launched earlier than planned, but it was more of a challenge than it needed to be, due to the lack of a supply readiness KPI.

Example 2: Messaging and Targeting: Toujeo (Sanofi)

Toujeo, insulin glargine U300, was approved by the FDA in February 2015 and launched in April 2015 to the same patient segment that currently was prescribed a drug called Lantus. PCPs prescribed Lantus to patients for whom they were not comfortable giving a higher concentration of insulin.

At the time of the product launch, Sanofi decided to stop promoting Lantus in favor of the newer drug. Meanwhile, despite price parity between the two medications, physicians were skeptical of Toujeo’s mechanism of action. As a result, Sanofi lost market share to competition, and a year later, the pharma company ultimately had to re-introduce Lantus due to the unsuccessful launch of Toujeo. Had a launch readiness KPI been in place for this product portfolio, Sanofi could have avoided the negative impact on its business.

If you need any help defining KPIs or understanding what KPIs would be beneficial for your business, CMK Select can help you.

Value pricing is taking the life sciences industry by storm, providing an opportunity to create goodwill with customers and positive brand recognition. More and more companies are coming up with creative ways of implementing value pricing strategies and the reality is, sooner or later, strategic and commercialization teams industry-wide will need to understand the full scope of value pricing and what it takes to effectively implement a successful value pricing tactic. In this post, we will define and examine value pricing from the following perspectives:

• What is value pricing?
• What does value pricing mean in the pharmaceutical industry?
• How will value pricing work in the pharmaceutical marketplace?
• How will it be implemented?
• The bottom line.

What is value pricing?

Value-based pricing (also known as value optimized pricing) is a pricing strategy that sets prices based primarily on the perceived value of a product or service to the consumer, rather than according to the cost of that product or service, according to Wikipedia. When a value-pricing tactic is successfully implemented, it improves profitability by generating higher prices without really impacting sales volumes.

In other words, a manufacturer of a good or service allows the market to tell it what a fair price is for that good or service. This type of model is most often seen in markets in which the majority of sales are made based on emotion, such as in the fashion, artwork and entertainment industries – and, at the top of that list, pharmaceuticals.

Pharmaceutical sales are based disproportionately on need. There is no stronger emotional buying driver than pain. In the pharma business, you’re quite literally dealing with a product that dictates the difference between life and death.

What does value pricing mean in pharmaceuticals?

With value pricing comes certain guarantees offered to the consumer, which can present a significant risk to a company. Ultimately, by turning to a value-pricing model, the manufacturer is essentially guaranteeing a successful clinical outcome, “or your money back.” And to the consumer, this might sound great!

What could go wrong, right?

Well, there are a few things to consider:

First, would this mean the consumer (hospital, insurance company or the patient) is not obligated to cover any of the drug costs on a failed clinical outcome? Would they get all of their money back, or just some? Would the physician still receive his fee given that he had to provide his professional insight, expertise and time, or would he not be entitled to any compensation since the “value” of the procedure wasn’t realized due to a failed outcome? What about the pharmacy and suppliers? It stands to reason that the pharmacies won’t want to give up their fees and that the suppliers won’t either. In the end, what could be exposed in this value pricing model is not only the actual cost of the pharmaceutical product to the patient, but also the other fees and costs associated with treatment.

Second, doctors and suppliers may not want patients and/or payers to know the true cost of a product. Perhaps this is one of the more subtle (or not so subtle) aims of the manufacturers. While only $.06 of every healthcare dollar spent is driven by drug costs, the price the consumer ultimately pays for the drug is driven up substantially as it moves through the supply chain. After adding in the average wholesaler markup, pharmacy pricing, managed market rebates, and doctor and hospital fees, the pricing for treatment becomes extensive.

And finally, like any fiscally responsible for-profit business, manufacturers must consider their profit margins, as they have a duty to their shareholders, who have entrusted them with their hard earned money.  To ensure a profitable outcome in a value-pricing model, a company needs to be incredibly confident that their treatment is going to work. This means that they must have complete faith that their clinical trials have been built correctly. As it is, clinical trials are conducted with very tight controls – the exclusion criteria for patients in a given trial is not always matched well with the real world. For example, many trials exclude smokers. In the real world, a lot of people smoke and don’t always disclose this fact to their doctors. That poses a real vulnerability when billions of dollars are spent over the development cycle of a drug. So, how much money is a company willing to put at risk for a commercial product to gain initial traction, to preserve the life of a product, or to gain goodwill in a market before they cross over the line to “too much”? Every company will have to define what its walk away value is going to be.

How will value pricing work in the pharmaceutical marketplace?

The question that companies need to answer is whether they have enough faith in their study data to guarantee a positive outcome for the patients being treated in the real world.

That, in turn, begs the question:  What actually qualifies as a successful clinical outcome? How long does the outcome have to last? Who defines this outcome? Do clinicians drive the decision on what worked and what didn’t, or does the manufacturer? Both sides have several conflicting interests in this equation. A doctor might believe an outcome is unsuccessful if a patient doesn’t experience the same result seen in the clinical trial. Conversely, the company may say that the patient was not appropriately qualified to utilize their product (a closet smoker, for example) and thus the standard outcome was not to be expected. What happens then? Is there an independent arbitrator who can make the final decision in these types of situations, and if so, who will that arbitrator be?

One must then define the appropriate patient for a particular treatment. Do only “on-label” patients qualify? What happens when there is a contraindication in a patient that was unknown at the time of prescription, or if the clinician felt that the potential benefit was greater than the risk of a poor outcome? Is there a shared risk between the company, the clinician, and payer or patient?

How will value pricing be implemented?

The only fair and appropriate way to base pricing on value is to utilize the clinical trial protocols. Companies will need to take a full-scale approach to designing and implementing these protocols. This means that medical, legal, regulatory, marketing and sales teams will need to work closely together. Currently, there are often firewalls between the medical and marketing teams at many pharmaceutical companies. These firewalls will need to be breached or else the program goals will be misaligned, and predictable patient outcomes will not be certain. At the same time, clinicians and payers will have to agree to specific measurements that qualify for the patient value pricing guarantee.

Many companies are starting to launch products with the value pricing approach to drive a fast uptake at product launch and to build goodwill in the market for expensive products. Time will tell if value pricing accomplishes both of these objectives. In the meantime, pharma companies will have to ensure that their overall profits are not only stable, but growing in spite of the value pricing discounts needed, to keep shareholders happy and to avoid shareholder lawsuits.

The bottom line.

The bottom line is, there’s a whole lot of thought and analysis that needs to go into the structuring of a value-pricing scheme. First and foremost, the one question that must be answered: Is there enough emotion in the healthcare business to drive the desired outcomes of the pharma companies in this value pricing game? The recent trends in the industry seem to suggest so, but it is up to your individual strategic and commercialization teams to determine the worth – and assess the risks – of developing a value pricing strategy for your company.

CMK Select is honored to be recognized for our dynamic growth this year by NJBIZ, New Jersey’s leading business journal publication, as an NJBIZ Fast 50 Company.  This award is given to companies who progressively contribute to the success of the state’s economic growth and stability.

CMK Select and the remainder of the NJBIZ Fast 50 Award Winners will be presented with this honor at an event on November 14, 2017 at The Palace at Somerset Park. At the event, the Fast 50 Award Winners that have been recognized for their growth will be celebrated for their hard work and success this year.

We are truly honored to receive this award.  In the last three years, we have worked to achieve exceptional growth in our service offerings. The key to our success is grounded in our people.  We have made a commitment to attracting, retaining and rewarding our employees by offering them unique career paths and mentoring programs.  The talent and resourcefulness of all our employees has given us the opportunity to expand our services and to benefit the pharmaceutical and life sciences community.

During this growth period, we have faced challenges that are common in such a competitive industry.  It can be difficult to navigate this marketplace with changes in regulation and an increase in more specialty products.  We have stayed nimble and innovative in providing services and methods that continue to help us grow and overcome these challenges.
With our formalized Commercial Practice, we can provide services addressing every phase of the pharmaceutical product lifestyle.  Our services now include New Product Strategy and Planning, Product Launch Excellence, Brand Maximization and Loss of Exclusivity Planning.
Going forward, we will continue to focus on growing our services offerings, regional service delivery, client relationships and employee base.  To accommodate this growth, we are making key investments in talent and infrastructure to help us best respond to clients’ needs and to achieve our goals.
We would like to thank all our employees for their hard work this year and NJBIZ for recognizing us with this award! We look forward to the event on November 14^th!