THE LINES BETWEEN THE DOTS

Earlier in my career, I was involved in preparing for a pharmaceutical launch into a market where our company would face an unusually strong incumbent competitor.

Their position was formidable.

By our estimates at the time, they controlled the overwhelming majority of the market we were preparing to enter.

There are plenty of reasons why a company can build that kind of position. Product experience, execution, customer familiarity and years in a market can all contribute.

But as we prepared to compete, something else kept getting my attention.

Some members of our field organization had broad connections with people who had worked around this competitor. They knew the geography. They knew many of the institutions. Some had worked across multiple therapeutic areas in those same markets.

And they kept describing something that was difficult to see in the numbers.

The competitor seemed to know everybody.

As part of our launch preparation, we participated in an internal targeting exercise designed to identify and verify customers who could be important to the launch.

The initial lists were thoughtful.

There were an average of 15 customers per territory, and there were legitimate reasons for those customers to be there.

But something about the lists didn't feel fully baked to me.

Part of that instinct came from an earlier experience in my career.

I had already learned that identifying the right customer didn't necessarily mean you understood all of the influence surrounding that customer.

So when I looked at these new lists, my question wasn't whether the people on them belonged there.

They did.

My question was:

Who isn't here—and why might they matter?

Some of our most experienced representatives began raising similar questions.

These weren't people simply asking for longer target lists.

Many had worked in those same geographies across different therapeutic areas. They carried years of institutional knowledge with them.

They knew physicians.

They knew hospitals.

They knew pharmacists and other healthcare professionals.

But perhaps more importantly, they understood relationships.

Early field rides began reinforcing what we were hearing.

Every so often, customers would describe people associated with the competition in ways that caught my attention.

They would say things like:

They know all the right people.

Or:

They've worked with those physicians for years.

Those comments stayed with me.

I couldn't know how much those relationships contributed to the competitor's dominant market position.

But I couldn't ignore the pattern, either.

Their advantage appeared to include something our targeting lists couldn't fully capture:

Accumulated knowledge of how influence traveled through the market.

That changed the question for me.

Were we preparing to compete only against another pharmaceutical product?

Or were we also preparing to compete in an influence ecosystem that another organization had spent years learning?

Traditional targeting could help us identify important individual customers.

But the market itself wasn't made up of isolated individuals.

Physicians worked with other physicians.

Specialists influenced colleagues.

Healthcare professionals moved between institutions and professional organizations.

Some people held influence that wasn't easily represented by a conventional numerical measure of market potential.

The dots were visible.

The lines between them were harder to see.

We brought the field feedback to leadership.

Their response was important.

They didn't discard the existing targeting work simply because the field had raised questions.

Nor should they have.

The original lists contained customers with legitimate influence and market relevance.

Instead, leadership asked us to explore further while continuing to respect the work that had already been done.

That created a much better question:

Could we expand our view of the market without abandoning the discipline that created the original list?

Eventually, we gained agreement to broaden the exercise.

But there were guardrails.

This wasn't an invitation to add anyone a representative happened to know.

Someone needed to have a defensible level of known influence within the market—even when that influence couldn't necessarily be assigned a traditional numerical market-potential value.

No one made the list simply because someone thought they might be important.

There had to be a reason.

A territory that might initially have contained approximately 15 priority customers could now contain an average of roughly 35 people whose relevance we believed we could reasonably explain.

We hadn't eliminated targeting discipline.

We had expanded what we were willing to recognize as meaningful market intelligence.

There was another effect I hadn't completely anticipated.

The field noticed.

Representatives had shared what years of experience in those markets had taught them, and they could see that leadership had listened.

Not simply listened politely.

Their knowledge had affected the process.

That seemed to create a cultural lift.

People began asking better questions—not only of customers, but of one another.

Representatives sharing customers or geographies collaborated more closely.

Managers and directors had richer conversations about why certain territories might be developing differently from others.

The targeting exercise had stopped being merely a list.

It had become a way of thinking about the market.

As the launch progressed, we began seeing signals that interested us.

There appeared to be more invitations into appropriate customer discussions, including customer-requested clinical-update lunches and requests for FDA-approved scientific presentations that could help customers better understand the product, its data and the appropriate patient types.

The quality of questions from the field seemed to improve.

Collaboration around shared customers improved.

And by the company's appropriate measures, the rate at which we were penetrating portions of the market appeared stronger than average in some of the areas we were watching.

That naturally led to conversations among managers and directors.

Why were certain territories developing faster than others?

Was there something about the expanded targeting work that had helped?

There seemed to be a plausible connection.

But there is an important distinction between a plausible explanation and a proven one.

We could not analytically demonstrate that expanding those target lists caused stronger performance.

Too many variables affect the performance of a pharmaceutical launch.

I wouldn't make that claim then, and I wouldn't make it now.

But there was broad agreement that we understood the market better after the exercise than we had before it.

And that distinction matters.

Because perhaps the most valuable outcome wasn't simply that we added more names.

We had developed a better way of seeing the market.

The expanded exercise changed the questions people asked.

It changed the intelligence people shared.

It changed some of the conversations between representatives and managers.

And it gave us another way to think about why apparently similar territories could behave differently.

Targeting is essential.

Data matters.

Market potential matters.

But experience taught me that sometimes the individual customer is only part of what you're trying to understand.

You may also need to understand the network surrounding that customer.

Who do they trust?

Whose experience do they respect?

Who has worked with whom?

Whose opinion travels beyond their own institution?

And who possesses influence that conventional measures may not completely capture?

A list can identify important people.

A network begins to show you how those people are connected.

Data can help identify the customer.

Experience can help reveal the network surrounding them.

And sometimes the advantage isn't hidden in another data point.

It's hidden in the relationship between two data points you were already looking at.

Traditional targeting sees the dots. Experience learns to see the lines.

Training can teach you how to identify a market.

Experience teaches you to ask how influence moves through it.

That's the craft.