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June 19, 2025 14 mins

In this SCORRCAST video, recorded on the final day of BIO 2025 in Boston, hear real-time reflections on the overwhelming brand "sameness" seen across the show floor. Get insights on what stood out, what didn’t, and how life sciences companies can break away from generic messaging and make a lasting impact.

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Episode Transcript

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(00:00):
Good morning, good afternoon,good evening. To anyone that is
listening to this. I amrecording this on Thursday
morning in my hotel room on whatis the fourth and final day of
BIO 2025 I hope that you'relistening to this Thursday,
Friday while you're traveling,or if you're listening to this
the following week. Thank youfor tuning in. This is a special

(00:23):
edition of the SCORR cast, wherewe are kind of give some real
time and live, if you will,feedback from the show floor
over the last handful of days.
And I have to say, it was areally impressive show. Once
again, I think bio did a greatjob in San Diego in 2024 had a
lot of feedback about how thesetup of the structure of the

(00:43):
floor plan, and a little bittighter knit in 2025 what was
was really beneficial to a lotof teams. So I'm excited to talk
a little bit about that. Talk alittle bit about some of the
problems that we were hearing onthe show floor. SCORR was
represented by myself and thentwo of our account team members,
Alyssa Greiner and Steviegelden, and we were on the show

(01:07):
floor, having conversations,reviewing some of the more
entertaining booths, reviewingsome of some of the issues that
we have in the industry when itcomes to trade show booths, and
then also having conversationswith our prospects, our clients,
and hearing from them, not onlyabout the trade show but also
about what their biggestchallenges are right now in

(01:30):
marketing in 2025 and there'sreally two that stood out. The
first one is, we're going tocontinue to talk about this, the
messaging, the sea of sameness.
This is a complicated market.
This is not just a fluff thingthat I am saying. I'm not
talking about brand messaging.
I'm not talking about brandstory, because I think that you

(01:51):
have to have this, you know,beautiful and sexy rebrand. I'm
talking about brand messagingand brand story. Because if you
are not able to cut through theclutter, if you are not able to
succinctly say, here's what wedo, here's the capacity that we
have, here's the expertise thatwe have, the specialty that
we're in, and here's why itshould freaking matter to you.

(02:14):
You're not going to be in thattop three. You're not going to
be in that top five. Andultimately, that's what we want.
That's what we absolutely haveto have, and that's what
marketing should be. And so whatwe did as a little thought
exercise, I'm going to pull upmy phone here. We, all of us,
walked the show for and and kindof calculated out the number of

(02:37):
times we saw certain phrases.
And at the end of the day, wehad a total of about 45 of these
bunches. And so we hadexperienced experts, just having
that as the main thing, expert,cdmo, your expert partner,
things like that, had 12 totalinteractions, or 12 total boosts
that had that as the mainmessage, just the flat out

(02:58):
partner being the main message,had 13. We had 12 of the One
Stop Shop full service, end toend. We had 11 of the concept to
commercialization, or concept tox, and then we had an extra
nine. So it actually is closerto 50 total that had the trusted
reliable as that main coremessage. And I've gotta, I've
gotta, at least say, you know, Iunderstand some of the trusted

(03:21):
reliable angle. It's just notfor me. I think trusted is, is a
table stakes. But I do want toread off a couple a couple of
these, your end to end biologiccdmo, your your premier cdmo,
your cdmo Partner, all under oneroof, pre clinical to
commercial, your cdmo Partner,cdmo expertise, trusted support
your biolog. Your trust isbiological cdmo partner. I like

(03:45):
your friendly cdmo There. Thereare some benefits to what we are
talking about. And i i to beingthat specific and I or to not
being that specific, Iunderstand that you are playing
it safe a little bit with ourmessaging. And hey, if we say
we're an end to end cdmo, if wesay we're a one stop shop, or we
just say we're, you know, abiologic cdmo, there's not a lot

(04:08):
that comes after that. There'snot a lot of questions. I'm
certainly not going to beinstantly stopped on the show
floor to have a conversationwith you. If I'm not familiar
with you already, I'm going tobe relying on my brand equity.
I'm relying on, you know, mybusiness development team
members, my sales team members,to really be able to build that

(04:30):
out. And it can work. It canespecially work if you are a
larger player in the space whois automatically top of mind,
I'd still make an argument thatyou need to have better
messaging, but we have to startto nail in and dial in on what
is going to actually separate usin the market. And again, I
think this is super important,that. We are not talking here in

(04:54):
in terms of it has to besomething that is so flashy, or
something completely out of theballpark. I completely
understand that sometimes, whenI am talking about the rebrand
process or the messaging processthat we we get that kind of look
of, look of, well, we don't wantto do that. We don't want to go
through a full rebrand. We don'twant to go through the, you

(05:17):
know, the entire updating of ourmessaging and of our visuals.
And I'm not just specificallytalking about that, and I'm also
not talking about it in termsof, oh, it's a nice to have. I'm
talking about that this as abrand message is a is something
that needs to be on the top ofyour list before the end of 2025
if you do not feel confident inthat message, buyers are asking

(05:41):
completely different questionsthan ever before, and you have
to be able to communicate to theneeds that they're looking for.
You have to be able tocommunicate that you can solve
their problem, that you have thecapacity to bring to solve their
problem, that you havestability, that you have the
people inside your organizationthat give you that power to say,

(06:04):
hey, not only are we here rightnow? Not only to have capacity
today, but our leadership is inplace, and we're going to have
we're going to have capacity,and we're going to continue to
grow with you over the nextcouple of years. And then you
have to be more specialized. Youhave to have that unique value
proposition. I was on the showfloor, and I was able to catch

(06:28):
up with Heather Sugrue over atChrysalis Bio. We're actually
going to be recording a podcaston Monday, following the show.
So this is even going to be morecommentary around the concept of
marketing and businessdevelopment. But then certainly,
what does the message play? Youknow? How does that message play
a role? And we talked about itright then and there. We talk

(06:51):
about all the time in terms of,you have to have that golden
ticket. You have to have thatnugget. What is that unique
selling proposition? What isthat unique value proposition,
and why does that matter to yourtarget audience? And so I think
that again, this ended up, thisis now a an absolute rant that I
am going on. I think the onlyother thing that I would say is

(07:15):
when we went through and wefound 40-50, of these companies
that had very similar messagingor very similar approaches. You
then go the step deeper. You gothrough the second and third
pages on their website, or youtalk to an individual there, and
they don't have the same valueproposition. They either are in
one part of the industry, theyhave a specific specialization,

(07:39):
whether they're working withinGLP ones or they're within
they're they're on, they're onthe peptide side of things.
They're in cell therapy. They'rein cell and gene therapy.
They're in gene therapy, likethere are these companies are
not the same, and you are doingyourself a disservice if you try
to blend in. And blending in isnot, not the way to go. And you

(08:02):
know, we talked about it on thethe website, we talked about it
on the LinkedIn, we talked abouton the show for it's really,
really crowded. You've got 13 to15 seconds, you've got to you've
got what we call a big idea,you've got a core headline with
some secondary messaging beforepeople move on. And so how can

(08:22):
we be really specific with that?
How can we go out and make adifference and make an impact in
that way? And I think that needsto be the focus for a lot of
organizations moving forward. SoI took a took a little eight
minute detour there that wasnumber one, that topic. I had a
couple conversations on the showfloor about it, just in terms of

(08:44):
that topic specifically, and howrampant that conversation is. In
2025I make the joke that in 2024
when I brought up, you know,some of the sea of sameness
stuff, and how every singlebooth says the same thing, I
kind of got a, kind of got acold shoulder and said, No, no,
that's not of interest to us.
Now, it's all anybody wants totalk about. And I think that

(09:06):
we're seeing more and more ofthis, where when you walk the
show floor, you're seeing a lotof companies similar to you.
When you walk the show floor,you're seeing a lot of companies
that say that they can do thesame thing as you. And so now
we're asking those questions,what are we doing to be
different? What are we doing tostand out? And if you aren't

(09:26):
standing out, if you don't havea brand position, if you don't
have a brand story that helpsyou, and it really, really
articulates the company that notonly you are with, the company
that your customers and yourclients need, you're missing
out, and you leave money on thetable. So that's number one.
That's number one. Number two.
Number two here is, well, numbertwo is, is the marketing and

(09:49):
business developmentrelationship, again, big
commentary here around thepipeline and marketing and
business development teams notonly working together that
that's a. Part of this, but itwas also, how do we hand off?
How do we set up a structurewhere we have marketing we have
marketing leads, or we havemarketing influence, potential
leads, and then we're able topass them off? And you know, we

(10:11):
might have that a goodstructure, and the actual leads
aren't coming in. And so how dowe build the right methods so
that when marketing isdelivering, we are able to pass
those leads off to sales, andthen we are able to stay in
touch and understand was that agood lead, is that lead now in
an active opportunity, is therean RFP? Is there $1 amount
associated? Are we talking tothe right person at the right

(10:34):
company, or is it the rightcompany, wrong person, right
company, right person, wrongtime. These are the types of
conversations that more and moreteams are starting to have at
the commercial level to reallyintegrate marketing and sales at
the same on the same team and atthe same infrastructure. And I
say all the time. You know,revenue is a team game. It takes

(10:55):
the first touch point, it takesthe 50th touch point, the 250th
touch point, the 1000 touchpoint from everybody on the
team, operations, client,success, finance, whoever it
might be, procurement, they allare involved in this brand and
this relationship revenue is ateam game. But specifically, we
need marketing and businessdevelopment to be working on the

(11:15):
same page. And if they're notworking on the same page. You're
going to see that. You're goingto see those cracks. You're
going to see you're going to seethat you run an event and
there's no follow through to theevent. You're going to see that,
you know, we're making lastminute claims for the trade show
or last minute adjustments forthe trade show. You're going to

(11:36):
see that there is a lack ofnurture following a trade show,
or from an event where we don'tinstantly know, Hey, these are
the types of people that werecoming to the event. This is the
type of of nurture that we wantto create. Here's the content
that we have. And so it wasreally interesting conversation,
because it was both at a highlevel in terms of setting up the

(11:57):
structure, but also at thegranular level in terms of, how
do we set up that if we'rerunning content and we're
targeting, you know, the theNorth American audience, or even
the East Coast audience versusthe West Coast versus, you know,
somebody that's more in Europe,or specific based by, you know,
early phase or, or, you know,phase one, phase two, or again,

(12:18):
you Talk about the differentmodalities within being a CDMO,
if they're if they're consumingthis type of content, how do we
ensure that they stay withinthis pipeline? How do we ensure
that they stay within thisfunnel with quality content? And
then our sales team knows, whatare those triggers for them to
go from a marketing contact to amarketing lead, to a marketing

(12:39):
prospect to a sales prospect toa qualified like, what do you
have right? And I say all thetime that there's no standard,
there's no right way. The rightway is what works for you. I'm a
very simple like, Hey, this is apotential. It becomes a
marketing qualified lead, boom.
It now becomes a sales qualifiedlead, and now we're a sales
qualified opportunity, marketinglead, sales qualified lead

(13:01):
sales, qualified opportunity.
That to me, is as simple as itneeds to be. You can freaking
get as fancy as you want withinyour CRM, within your databases.
But the problem is, is that ifyou get really fancy, you have
to also follow it up. So I thinkthat is a really, really
important piece. And again, itdoesn't matter if you have a
great brand and have a greatbrand and have a great message,

(13:23):
but off that follow through, ifwe don't have that sales and
marketing relationship thatultimately we are, we are going
to continue to be unsuccessfulas well. So I've got more, more
feedback coming, more contentcoming. I've got my wonderful
INCOG hat here, actually areally solid, really solid
truckers hat that I'm going touse for runs. There were a

(13:43):
couple of really fun, fun, funitems on the trade show. Bio
always does a really great job.
But I do have to give a shoutout to the team over at the the
Ohio pavilion that had thevending machine where you click
the button, you scan the QRcode, you picked your soda, you
liked them on Facebook or onLinkedIn. You followed their
page on on LinkedIn, and thenyou got the the soda. There it

(14:05):
was. It was a really cleverapproach. And more and more
teams need to look at thoseinteractive ways to build
strategy, interactive ways to toreally be able to create an
impact on the show floor. Thankyou so much. Guys. Hope that
this was the very least a littlebit of initial initial recap and
interest of everybody. If youhave more questions about how

(14:25):
the show went, just reach out.
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