Pharma companies preparing to launch a new drug or expand commercial operations face a unique problem when selecting vendors for distribution, pricing, and customer relationship management. Buyers of mainstream business software can consult reviews on the software comparison sites G2 and Gartner Peer Insights, along with analyst evaluations such as the Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester’s Wave reports. In pharma commercial services, by contrast, vendor decisions still rely heavily on word of mouth, according to Hoyt Gong, an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School. To help bridge this gap, Gong has created Rx Almanac, an editorial site and directory designed to help pharma teams understand and compare commercial service providers on neutral terms.
No “Yellow Pages” for Pharma
“There was no Yellow Pages for this industry today,” Gong said. “I’ve gotten backing from Harvard and Google to start [Rx Almanac] and bring it to light.” The idea came from vendor selection Gong did in a prior role as a senior product manager at an insulin pump maker as the business scaled. That included “picking our CRM vendor, thinking through our distribution strategy, choosing our pharmaceutical distribution vendors, our pricing vendors, our PBM strategy,” he said. The experience highlighted the difficulty of finding reliable data on specialized firms that manage specific logistical and commercial hurdles.
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The core focus of Rx Almanac is post-R&D and post-clinical-trial. In other words, the commercial stage. Gong describes Rx Almanac as covering “all things pharma services.” “After a pharma company has done the R&D and clinical development, that last commercial stage is an area I saw as having very little content, so I’ve been building out publications and niches there,” he said.
Comparing the Tools
For instance, Rx Almanac has a buyer matrix comparing Veeva Vault CRM and Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud, the two main commercial CRM platforms used in pharma. It scores them on migration, validation, data, commercial workflows, implementation partners, risk and total cost. The overarching goal is to assess what the vendors are “actually capable of versus what they say they can do,” Gong said. “That’s what I’m trying to get at with Rx Almanac.” AI agents have become a growing part of that marketing message. “One of my pet peeves is when someone talks about AI but isn’t crisp about what the agents are actually doing and how they add value,” Gong said.
Market Consolidation
Gong said the most consequential pattern to emerge from the comparisons so far is consolidation. “A lot of these companies [in the pharma commercial services market] are buying each other out, and that gobbling up is how they’re growing,” he said. “That leads to concerns from pharma: Are these services really the most capable? Are they just piecemealed together?” Much of that dealmaking, he added, traces back to private equity firms such as Carlyle, KKR and Summit Partners.
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For launch teams, those acquisitions raise a practical question: How well do the combined services work together to get a drug to patients? “After you’ve done all the hard work of R&D and clinical development, how do you make it a great patient experience? How do you get it into patients’ hands? How do you make sure it’s covered appropriately and affordable?” he said. “That’s really what I’m trying to cover.”
Throughout his 18-year tenure, Brian has covered an array of life science topics, including clinical trials, medical devices, and drug discovery and development. Prior to WTWH, he held the title of content director at Informa, where he focused on topics such as connected devices, cybersecurity, AI and Industry 4.0. A dedicated decade at UBM saw Brian providing in-depth coverage of the medical device sector. Engage with Brian on LinkedIn or drop him an email at [email protected].
