The CRM You Do Not Have Yet Is Already Costing You

There is a version of this conversation that happens in almost every early stage medtech and biotech platform company, usually somewhere between a first successful clinical milestone and the beginning of serious launch preparation. Someone raises the question of a CRM system. The response, more often than not, is that it is a good idea but not yet necessary. The product is not on the market. The sales team does not exist. The commercial infrastructure can be built when it is actually needed.

It is a reasonable position on the surface. It is also one that quietly undermines commercial readiness in ways that only become visible later, when a company is trying to launch and discovers that the foundation it needed was never laid.

The years between early clinical development and product launch are not commercially empty. They are, in many respects, commercially critical — because they are the years when a company first makes contact with the people who will eventually decide whether to adopt its technology.

Conference presentations attract scientists, clinicians, and lab directors who express genuine interest. KOL engagement produces conversations with people who shape clinical opinion in their institutions. Advisory board meetings, grant collaborations, early feasibility studies — all of these create interactions with individuals who have relevance to the eventual commercial story. The names, the organisations, the specific interests expressed, the questions asked: this is pre-commercial intelligence of real value.

In most early stage companies, none of it is captured systematically. It lives in the inbox of whoever attended the conference. It sits in a LinkedIn connection that carries no context about when or why the conversation happened. At best it makes it into a spreadsheet that one person maintains and that quickly becomes outdated. When that person leaves, the institutional memory goes with them.

A CRM system in a pre-commercial life science company is not a sales tool. It is an intelligence repository. Its value at this stage is not in managing deals or tracking revenue. It is in creating a structured, searchable record of every meaningful commercial interaction the organisation has — who was spoken to, in what context, what they expressed interest in, and what the next step was, if any.

That record serves several functions that become increasingly important as a company approaches launch. It tells you who already knows your technology and how well. It identifies the clusters of institutional interest that suggest where early commercial traction is most likely. It gives a new commercial hire a starting point that reflects years of pre-commercial relationship building, rather than a blank sheet. And it allows the organisation to maintain continuity of contact with people who have shown interest, through newsletters, publications, and event invitations, long before a commercial conversation is appropriate.

None of this requires an enterprise-grade system or a dedicated CRM manager. It requires discipline about capturing interactions and a shared standard for what gets recorded. The tool itself can be simple. The habit is what matters.

When a company defers CRM investment until launch, it typically does so on the assumption that the commercial phase is when the relevant contacts will be made. That assumption underestimates how much ground has already been covered in the years before.

A company that has been presenting at conferences for four years, engaging with clinical networks, and building relationships with key researchers has already had hundreds of commercially relevant interactions. If those interactions have not been captured, they cannot be leveraged. The commercial team that joins at launch has to start from scratch, rebuilding relationships that already existed, re-identifying contacts whose details are buried in old email threads, and making first impressions on people who have, in some cases, been following the technology for years.

This is not a theoretical inefficiency. It translates directly into a slower ramp, a longer sales cycle, and a launch that underperforms relative to what the pre-commercial groundwork should have made possible.

The practical recommendation is straightforward, even if the discipline required to follow it is not. Start capturing commercial interactions systematically from the moment your technology begins to attract external attention. That does not have to mean an expensive platform or a dedicated resource. It means agreeing on what a contact record looks like, who is responsible for maintaining it, and what the minimum standard of information is for any interaction worth recording.

As the organisation grows and approaches launch, that foundation can be migrated into a more capable system. The contacts will already be there. The interaction history will already be there. The commercial team will be starting from a position of genuine intelligence rather than a standing start.

The companies that launch well are not always the ones that built the best product. They are often the ones that spent the pre-commercial years paying attention to the market in a structured way, and who arrived at launch with a contact base, a relationship history, and a picture of where the early demand actually sits.

A CRM is a significant part of how that discipline gets institutionalised. The right time to start building it is not when the product is ready. It is now.

[Note to the reader who made it to the end of this page: Hubspot is my go-to CRM at the moment and I might be able to fix you a discount so reach out to discuss]