“ limit your business ambition for the moment & focus only on the market that is available to you”
When you launch new brand in Big pharma
Because your strategy’s survival demands that you manage the sales performance expectations of your company’s leaders, when you assess the size of each opportunity, you must measure the size of this opportunity’s readily available market, the low-lying fruit, and not measure it against your estimate of the size of the total market.
The readily available market consists of only those customers and patients you can easily access. The total market is the combined market of both the accessible market, and all latent opportunities that may later develop into future customers through disease awareness campaigns that encourage undiagnosed patients to seek help, and which also educate stakeholders, leading them to increase their diagnosis and treatment levels.
First Approach for Assessing the Opportunity’s Attractiveness: Numeric Value
When assessing your market, the wiser choice is to limit your business ambition for the moment and focus only on the market that is available to you. It’s not a good idea to forecast your revenue based on the total market size because there are dozens of uncontrollable factors that can shift the market potential away from your brand, preventing your product from ever achieving its potential.
Forecasting unrealistic sales expectations that are impossible to meet in the short-term will affect your team’s morale and raise unwelcome questions among your company’s executives about your abilities.
Imagine an example where there are 100 patients suffering from a particular disease. Of these 100, only 90% know they have the disease because they are aware of having the symptoms and seek help by consulting physicians. Of these 90 patients, 70% or 63 of them were correctly diagnosed by their physician. Of these 63 patients, 56 were treated with the current generic pharmaceutical treatments and seven were treated with the innovative medication.
If you are launching an innovative treatment, this means your available market is seven. Had you forecasted your market as 100 patients, your expectations would be greatly disappointed, you and your team would feel deeply frustrated, and the executives in your company will be loudly demanding to know what went wrong.
Clearly, forecasting is a numbers game that depends on knowing your MOM (Market Opportunity Map ), and the patient’s journey.
