How CIENCE Built a Successful Lead Generation Strategy for a Niche Biotech Company

Sales Development

Emulate Case Study

About Emulate

Emulate was founded in 2013 by a team of Harvard University scientists who had developed a brand-new technology: Organ-Chips. These are clear polymer chips, about the size of a USB stick, which contain living human organ cells. These chips, made up of brain, intestine, kidney, liver, or lung tissue, better enable researchers to understand how different diseases, medicines, chemicals, and foods affect human health. 

Organ-Chips can be used across a whole range of applications, such as agriculture, cosmetics, food, and chemical-based consumer products. They are also being used to push forward the frontiers of disease research, with unique data that can help support grant funding. Emulate offers a suite of software that enables users to design Organ-Chip studies, as well as analyze and interpret data. 

Since its founding, Emulate has enjoyed successful growth, with eighteen of the world’s top twenty pharmaceutical companies among its customers. Along the way, Emulate has won numerous awards and accolades, such as Product Design of the Year 2015 by London’s Design Museum. Impressively, the Museum of Modern Art in New York even acquired Emulate’s Organ-Chips to display in its permanent collection.

profile-jessica
Jessica Petrucci
Digital Marketing Manager
Industry
Biotechnology
Website
emulatebio.com

The Story of Emulate

Emulate’s Organ-Chips provide an enormous benefit to the pharmaceutical industry by increasing the likelihood of clinical trials succeeding. Clinical trials, where products are tested on humans, are extremely expensive, sometimes taking years to complete and costing millions of dollars. 

When clinical trials fail, an estimated 86% of the time, companies have to absorb all of these costs. What’s more, they are left without a marketable product in which to recoup these losses. 

Because of their unprecedented level of biological function, Emulate’s Organ-Chips offer a much better predictive platform than existing technologies. They can be used to identify inferior products before they proceed to clinical trials. This means a better risk assessment during the product development cycle that reduces the likelihood of costly failures for businesses. 

Emulate knew that its Organ-Chips offered enormous potential savings to companies conducting clinical trial research. Its target markets included research and medical institutions, research hospitals, biotech/pharma, nutritional health, and agri-bio. 

Emulate realized that successful marketing in these industries could safeguard its growth well into the future. Determined to increase its market share and win new competitors, Emulate looked for an outbound lead generation company that was well-equipped to handle outreach of this caliber to help it achieve business goals.

Although Emulate did not have any prior experience with an outbound company, what ultimately convinced them was CIENCE’s impressive track record of successful lead generation services in similar industries. 

Challenges & Scope

The main challenge for Emulate was finding an experienced outbound lead generation team that could implement detailed, complex outreach, overcome the potential obstacles in this industry, and work closely with Emulate to develop a solid outbound plan to reach its target audience.

Challenges

Emulate’s sales team had found it challenging in the past to book qualified appointments in-house while also devoting sufficient attention to closing deals. To better focus its energies on winning sales and reaching out to the greatest number of qualified prospects, it was imperative to find a lead gen company that could take on these tasks and provide leadership in this area.  

Need

To bring in new leads and reach its full potential, Emulate needed to strengthen its sales team. Naturally, Emulate wanted to work with an experienced sales development representative (SDR) team that had a track record of success in implementing outreach campaigns, specifically in niche markets for these one-of-a-kind products. 

Opportunity

Emulate could achieve its business goals and secure appointments through highly specialized targeted outreach: CIENCE was able to offer outbound services over email, phone, social, web, and advertising channels. The effort started with CIENCE’s AI-enabled research, which gave the team the ability to create a robust orchestrated outbound campaign to exactly the right fit audience in order to fill up its sales pipeline.

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Why CIENCE?

CIENCE’s sales experts worked with Emulate to customize a unique outbound strategy. One of the most creative parts of this strategy was CIENCE’s plan to target prospects who had suffered clinical study failures within the last six months. 

CIENCE’s experts reasoned that, given the enormous amounts of time, effort, and money that went into a typical clinical trial, companies who had recently suffered an expensive failure would be far more receptive to the many benefits that Emulate’s Organ-Chips could provide.  

Given their prodigious training and experience, CIENCE was able to execute a well-thought-out strategy using vast amounts of research power. 

This included analyzing a massive amount of data to find companies that exactly matched Emulate’s ideal customer profile (ICP).

“They are an energetic partner,” says Jessica Petrucci, digital marketing manager at Emulate. “CIENCE values flexibility and does whatever necessary to fulfill their client's needs.”

From there, the CIENCE campaign strategists used a variety of methodologies, including successful messaging tactics like SP3O and re-engagement across the various playbooks developed.

 

Results

CIENCE and Emulate’s partnership has been extraordinarily successful. What started as a collaboration in November 2019 is still going strong. Over that time, CIENCE has secured more than 200 qualified appointments for Emulate’s internal sales team, averaging around 10 appointments per month. CIENCE achieved a positive to negative responses ratio of 1:1, and an impressive response rate of 15%.

Jay Evans, sales executive at CIENCE, has been particularly proud of what the team has accomplished for Emulate: “The results impressed me. We did even better with these guys than any of us anticipated!” 

Helping Emulate boost its internal productivity, Jessica Petrucci agrees: “CIENCE Technologies created approximately 1,000 lead interactions per month, compared to the forty touches per month that we can produce internally.” 

Because Emulate’s sales team no longer needed to focus on securing appointments, they were able to concentrate on preparing sales pitches to close more deals.

“Having CIENCE take the scheduling portion of the work off our shoulders adds a lot of value, and helps us reach our goals,” says Jessica Petrucci.

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Partnership Success

CIENCE and Emulate’s teams look forward to conducting even more campaigns in the future. CIENCE’s Account Manager Michael Shure says: “Emulate was extremely cooperative, always ready to share information back and forth, willing to work with us as a team and try different approaches.”

With each new campaign, CIENCE continues to refine its understanding of Emulate’s ICP to better develop and conduct its targeted outreach strategy. The partnership has helped Emulate land major contracts, including leading pharmaceutical companies. 

“CIENCE has not hesitated to accommodate our needs,” says Jessica Petrucci, satisfied with CIENCE’s performance and the energetic way its SDRs went above and beyond to fulfill Emulate’s requirements.

“Emulate trusts us to do the job and deliver,” says Michael Shure. “This trust stems from CIENCE’s commitment to proactively looking for ways to improve its services.” 

The success of CIENCE and Emulate’s collaboration validates the use of outbound to achieve business goals: By allowing CIENCE to focus on lead generation, Emulate was able to devote itself wholeheartedly to closing sales and achieving better results. 

“What a great use of CIENCE’s human-curated market research to combine with the data to hyper-focus on the right people,” says Jay Evans. “The partnership with Emulate is a fine example of a niche, high-tech product able to successfully reach the world’s leading companies with the help of CIENCE.”