Life Science Leader Magazine Supplements

CMO 2016

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REPORT INDUSTRY STANDARD RESEARCH 38 By K. Hammeke THE VALUE OF EXPERIENTIAL DATA IN MAKING INFORMED CMO SELECTION DECISIONS LIFESCIENCELEADER.COM THE CMO LEADERSHIP AWARDS 2016 T K A T E H A M M E K E Market Research Director Industry Standard Research The Value Of Experiential Data In Making Informed CMO Selection Decisions As part of Life Science Leader's commitment to bringing the most valuable decision-making tools to its readership, the methodology and research supplier for the Leadership Awards has changed. Industry Standard Research, a full-service market research provider to the pharma and pharma services industries, collected experiential data on Sponsor-CMO service encounters that have transpired in the past 18 months to serve as the foundation for the 2016 CMO Leadership Awards. for customers is valuable information when it comes to making informed CMO selection decisions, particularly because industry perceptions don't always match reality. This can be especially true when it comes to identifying industry leaders. ISR's CMO benchmarking surveys ask respondents to list up to three CMOs they think of as leaders in either small molecule, biologic, or drug product manufacturing services. This is an unprompted question where respon- dents are not provided with a list of CMOs from which to choose. As a result, sometimes a CMO was listed as a perceived leader for services the business does not offer — this can mean that the company is benefitting from the halo effect, a cognitive bias where an observer's overall impression of a company influences the observer's thoughts about the company's proper- ties. But the halo effect is not always beneficial. When it backfires (so to speak), it can influence an individual to hold a company to higher expectations than warranted or expect a range of services and support in which the supplier has no expertise. The data shows the 185 different sup- pliers were proffered by respondents when asked to name leaders in contract his approach, which pro- vided feedback from recent customers across 26 perfor- mance metrics on more than 80 CMOs, more closely corresponds with the level of qualification important to the CMOs receiving the awards and the Sponsors that engage contract manufac- turing services. There are five core CMO Leadership Award categories: Quality, Reliability, Capabilities, Expertise, and Compat- ibility. Several performance metrics factor into each award category in order to help both Sponsors and CMOs to understand a quantified evaluation and accurately assess a supplier's skills within a category that can span a range of definitions. Have you ever asked your customers or vendors how they define quality? ISR has. And it's tricky to find coherent through lines (i.e., ongoing themes). The change from perception-based data to experiential data is important because it shifts the focus of the awards from a CMO's reputation — a product of marketing, public relations spin, and any "industry buzz" about a company known by professionals in the industry — to how a CMO has performed for its current and recent customers relative to their expectations. How well a CMO executed its contracted responsibilities manufacturing. The three businesses receiving the highest number of men- tions also are three of the largest CMOs and the CMOs that topped the list for proposal volume. In fact, CMO size (and the well-funded marketing budget that often accompanies size) appears to have a greater influence on perceived leadership than anything else, including how a CMO performed according to its customers. Alas, it's no surprise that customer experience can be drowned out by the marketing and PR machines; that is the purpose, after all. But are the marketing communica- tions designed to influence perception potentially harming the business by fueling high expectations? The in-depth results from ISR's research point toward a challenge of scale faced by service providers and vendors from all types of industries — service excellence can be diluted by large customer bases. Or, it's impossible to please everyone all the time. This impossibility is further supported by the absence of a consensus on the "most important attribute" for a CMO to possess — even for a particular type of project. In addition to asking research par- ticipants to evaluate each CMO that they have recently done business with, the survey asks respondents to prioritize

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