Follow the Money: How Life Science Companies Misread Their Commercial Landscape Before Launch

There is a conversation that happens in almost every early-stage medtech and biotech platform company, usually sometime between a successful clinical milestone and the first commercial hire. Someone in the room says: ‘Let’s sort out pricing once we are closer to launch.’

It sounds reasonable. It feels pragmatic. And it is one of the most expensive mistakes a life science company can make.

Pricing is not a late-stage decision. Willingness to pay is a signal that exists in the market long before your product does. The commercial teams that find it early build fundamentally better go-to-market strategies than those that guess at it later.

Medical devices and biotech platform technologies share a particular commercial challenge. They are often genuinely exciting to the people they are shown to. Scientists, clinicians, and lab directors engage enthusiastically in early conversations. They attend conferences, request demonstrations, and ask detailed technical questions.

This enthusiasm is frequently mistaken for commercial intent. It is not. Scientific curiosity and budget commitment are separated by a wide gap. Crossing that gap requires understanding not just who finds your technology interesting, but who controls the resources to act on that interest.

In most institutional settings, those are different people entirely.

In medtech and biotech tools, the decision-making unit is almost never a single person. A typical hospital or reference lab purchasing decision might involve:

• A clinical champion who wants the technology and will advocate internally
• A lab director or department head who controls operational budget
• A procurement team that manages tender processes and supplier relationships
• A finance or C-suite layer that approves capital expenditure above a certain threshold
• In some markets, an external body that influences or sets reimbursement frameworks

Each of these stakeholders has a different relationship to the buying decision, and a different definition of value. Your clinical champion cares about outcomes. Your procurement lead cares about total cost of ownership and contract terms. Your CFO cares about capital allocation and payback period.

A commercial strategy that only speaks to one of these audiences will stall at exactly the moment it needs to accelerate.

Willingness to pay (WTP) is typically treated as a pricing exercise: something you hand to a health economist or a market research firm with a defined brief. That approach produces data. It does not produce commercial intelligence.

Real WTP insight comes from structured commercial conversations conducted early, before a price exists and before a formal launch process begins. The goal is not to ask customers what they would pay. It is to understand the economic landscape they operate in:

• What are they currently spending to address the problem your technology solves?
• Where does that budget sit: capital expenditure, operational budget, departmental discretionary spend?
• What does their procurement cycle look like: annual tender, rolling contract, spot purchase?
• What outcome would need to be demonstrated for a budget holder to prioritise this over competing priorities?
• Are there analogous technologies or systems that have been adopted, and what did that adoption process look like?

These conversations, done well, reveal far more than a number. They reveal the shape of the commercial pathway: who needs to be convinced, in what order, with what evidence, and through what process.

One of the most important distinctions in medtech and biotech platform commercial strategy is the difference between capital and consumable buying dynamics.

A capital equipment purchase — an instrument, an imaging system, a sequencing platform — involves a fundamentally different decision process than a consumable or reagent purchase. Capital requires a different budget source, a longer decision cycle, a stronger business case, and often a different approver.

Many platform companies underestimate this distinction when planning their commercial model. They design their sales motion around the instrument and then discover that adoption stalls because the consumable pull-through economics were never clearly articulated to the budget holder.

The commercial teams that avoid this build their WTP analysis around both dimensions from the start: what is the case for the capital investment, and what does the ongoing economic relationship look like once the instrument is placed?

The companies that launch well are not those with the most sophisticated pricing models. They are the ones that spent time in the market before they had a product to sell.

Practically, this means:

• Conducting structured customer discovery conversations focused on economics, not just clinical utility or instrument functionality and added value for research
• Mapping the decision-making unit at two or three priority accounts before building a commercial model
• Identifying analogue products — technologies that solved adjacent problems — and studying how they were adopted and priced
• Understanding procurement cycles and tender timelines so commercial launch timing aligns with buying windows
• Building a hypothesis about WTP that is grounded in what customers are currently spending, not what you believe your technology is worth

None of this requires a large team or a significant budget. It requires discipline, structured thinking, and a willingness to have commercial conversations early, before the pressure of launch forces you into reactive decision-making.

Before your next strategy session on pricing, positioning, or market entry, ask a simpler question: do we actually know who controls the budget for this category, and have we spoken to them?

If the honest answer is no — or not really — that is where commercial strategy should begin. Not with pricing models or revenue projections, but with the discipline of following the money to its source.

The companies that do this well do not just launch better products. They build commercial organisations that understand their markets in a way that is genuinely hard to replicate.