TL;DR A life science company moves through nine stages, from discovery to exit. Most only bring in marketing at commercialization — stage 7 — long after the decisions that shape adoption, funding, and positioning have been made. Treated as a commercial function from the start, marketing reduces risk at every stage by replacing internal assumptions with real customer evidence.
"We're not ready for marketing yet."
I've heard some version of that from more life science founders than I can count.
Usually, what they mean is, "we're not ready to advertise yet." That's fair. Advertising belongs near commercialization.
But marketing and advertising are two different jobs. Real marketing helps a company make better commercial decisions years before a product reaches the market. And in life sciences, those years carry more weight than in almost any other industry.
Whether you're building a medical device, a diagnostic platform, a digital health app, a lab technology, or a therapeutic, your company will spend years making decisions that shape whether it succeeds commercially. Most of those decisions happen before you hire a single sales rep — choices about your market, your positioning, your value proposition, your customers, your brand, your evidence strategy, and your partnerships.
Those are business decisions.
So here's how I think about marketing in life sciences. It's one of the main ways an executive team reduces commercial risk — the discipline of replacing expensive guesses with customer evidence before the money is spent. That's the lens I bring as a fractional CMO, and it's the through-line for everything below.
What are the 9 stages of a life science company?
The nine stages come from a life sciences company lifecycle mapped by the Association of Corporate Counsel, in a presentation by attorneys at Hogan Lovells and OptiNose. It was built for legal and regulatory planning, and it lines up closely with what I've seen across device, biotech, diagnostics, lab technology, and digital health companies. Every company takes its own path, but most move through nine recognizable stages:
Discovery
Developing and protecting intellectual property
Research and development
Capital formation and developing partnerships
Team building
Regulatory review and approval
Commercialization and marketing
Growth and expansion
Exit
Most companies bring in marketing at stage 7. In my experience, that's years too late.
Nearly every earlier stage includes commercial decisions that get better when you understand customers, markets, and buyers. One question runs through the whole lifecycle:
What important business decision are we making today without direct customer evidence?
If leadership can't answer that with confidence, marketing probably belongs in the room.
Why this hits life science companies so hard
Life sciences isn't typical B2B. Products take years to develop. Clinical evidence takes years to generate. Regulatory review shapes how you're allowed to communicate. And the buying committee is rarely one person — it's clinicians, procurement, finance, researchers, administrators, engineers, and operations leaders, each defining the problem from a different seat.
Gartner puts the typical B2B buying group at six to ten stakeholders. In a hospital or a regulated enterprise, it's often larger. Every one of them has to be brought along.
That's what makes a commercial mistake so expensive here. Correcting it can take years, not months. So the companies that win commercially build confidence before they build demand — and that confidence comes from understanding customers earlier than competitors do.
I've watched leadership teams spend years perfecting a technology on the assumption they already understood the customer. Then they run their first structured customer interviews and learn the buying committee defines the problem differently than they expected. Finding that out after launch is painful. Finding it out during discovery changes the trajectory of the company.
Stage 1: discovery
Discovery is where the science starts. It's also where the commercial assumptions start, and those deserve to be tested as rigorously as the technical ones.
Founders understand the science. That doesn't automatically mean they understand how clinicians, researchers, procurement teams, or patients experience the problem. Those perspectives are earned through research. The most common mistake I see is a team treating its own expertise as a stand-in for customer evidence.
Marketing earns its place here by helping answer questions that decide everything downstream: Is this problem painful enough to change existing behavior? Who feels it most acutely? How are they solving it today, and where do those workarounds fail? What suggests they'd adopt something new?
Jobs-to-Be-Done is especially useful at this stage. Clayton Christensen's idea was that customers hire a product to make progress under real constraints, so the research focuses on the progress they're after rather than the features you want to build. Pair that with voice-of-customer research and you replace a lot of expensive guessing.
The move: talk to customers before you fall in love with your own assumptions. I've never seen a company regret learning too much in discovery. I've seen plenty regret learning too little.
Stage 2: developing and protecting IP
Most of the conversation here is about patents, and it should be. Protecting the invention is foundational.
But intellectual property isn't only the invention. Your company name, product names, brand architecture, visual identity, and core messaging all become commercial assets that carry the business for years. Teams of brilliant scientists routinely spend months debating a product name internally without asking whether a customer can pronounce it, remember it, or tell it apart from five competitors that sound almost identical.
Then someone spots the trademark conflict, or the regulatory implication, after documents are filed, decks are built, and the site is live. That's avoidable.
Marketing doesn't replace your IP attorneys — legal decides what can be protected. Its job is to make sure what gets protected is commercially strong in the first place. That's where early brand and naming strategy pays for itself.
Stage 3: research and development
Most teams think of R&D as a purely scientific function. Commercially, it's one of the biggest chances you get to reduce future risk.
Every prototype is a set of decisions. Every feature reflects an assumption. Every workflow assumes customers behave a certain way. The question is whether those assumptions have been validated. Engineering teams tend to optimize for technical performance, while customers evaluate the product inside real clinical workflows — staffing shortages, reimbursement, procurement, training, and implementation risk. Those are adoption problems, and the companies that commercialize well see them early.
Marketing brings customer evidence back into development through voice-of-customer research, workflow observation, day-in-the-life interviews, JTBD work, competitive analysis, and positioning research. None of it involves advertising. The target is better product decisions.
The question to ask before the next development round: which product decisions are still based on internal assumptions rather than validated customer evidence? If the answer is "quite a few," that's where the next investment should go.
Stage 4: capital formation and developing partnerships
Sooner or later, every leadership team has to convince someone else to believe in the business — an angel, a venture firm, a strategic partner, a licensing counterpart, or a board asking why more investment is justified.
At that point, the science is only part of the story. Investors back companies because they believe the team understands how the technology becomes a business. The first thing I look for in a deck is whether leadership clearly understands the customer: Who buys? Who influences the decision? How big is the opportunity? What evidence supports demand? What makes this commercially different?
I've reviewed pitch decks with thirty slides on the technology and three on the market. Investors assume competent science. What they're weighing is whether the company can become a commercial success. Adding another slide about the technology rarely fixes a gap in commercial evidence.
Marketing supports the raise by building market segmentation, competitive analysis, customer research, positioning, and the investor narrative that ties the science to a credible business. You raise capital by showing you've reduced commercial uncertainty.
Stage 5: team building
Hiring in life sciences has gotten harder over the past decade. Scientists, clinical specialists, regulatory professionals, and commercial leaders all have options, and they're evaluating more than compensation.
Do I believe in this leadership team? Do they understand where they're going? Does this company look capable of succeeding? Can I build a career here? Those impressions form long before an interview, often from the outside — the website, the messaging, the brand.
I've watched companies with exceptional science lose outstanding candidates because their external presence created doubt. The site felt unfinished. The message shifted depending on who was speaking. None of that changed the science; all of it changed perception. Leadership sometimes calls those concerns cosmetic. Candidates don't.
Marketing helps by creating consistency, so that your website, recruiting materials, presentations, executive messaging, and social presence all tell the same story. Candidates then spend less time wondering who you are and more time deciding whether they want to join.
Stage 6: regulatory review and approval
This is usually where general marketing agencies start to struggle, because regulated industries operate differently. Every claim needs evidence. Every asset moves through structured review. Every revision can involve Medical, Regulatory, Legal, Clinical Affairs, Product Management, and Marketing. Those cycles exist for good reason, and shortcutting them creates bigger problems later.
What I see more often is a different issue. Leadership assumes the delays come from Regulatory, when the real problem is that nobody designed an efficient review process. Marketing writes content one way, Medical reviews another, Legal edits differently, Product adds feedback, version control falls apart, and weeks disappear.
Teams that handle this well build review into the process from the start. Marketing should help establish modular content libraries, claims management, review workflows, content governance, and digital asset management — and companies under FDA oversight should align commercial planning with the rules for promotional communications rather than treating compliance as a final step.
The mindset shift: design for getting hundreds of future assets approved efficiently, not just the one in front of you.
Stage 7: commercialization and marketing
This is where marketing becomes visible, and where many organizations mistake visibility for the starting line.
By commercialization, your company has already made hundreds of commercial decisions: customer research, positioning, pricing assumptions, competitive strategy, brand architecture, product messaging, investor communication, hiring, and partnerships. If those foundations are weak, launching only surfaces the cracks.
The strongest commercial launches I've been part of felt almost uneventful, because the hard decisions were already made. Everyone understood who the customer was, what problem the product solved, why it was different, what evidence backed the claims, how sales would communicate value, and what success looked like after launch. That's alignment. When commercialization feels chaotic, it's usually because leadership is trying to answer strategic questions and launch a product at the same time.
Marketing's role now shifts from reducing uncertainty to accelerating adoption — go-to-market planning, sales enablement, customer education, launch strategy, commercial analytics, and demand generation. Those activities land much harder when the first six stages were approached with the same discipline.
Stage 8: growth and expansion
Growth exposes problems that were easy to ignore when the company was small. A positioning statement that worked for one product strains across a portfolio. A sales process built around the founders doesn't scale to a commercial organization. The story starts to drift because different teams tell different versions of it.
None of those problems arrive overnight. They accumulate. I've seen leadership blame slowing growth on competition when the real issue was internal inconsistency — sales describing the product one way, marketing another, product management with its own language, and customer success making different promises at implementation. Nobody was wrong. Nobody was aligned. Customers felt the disconnect.
At this stage, marketing becomes responsible for commercial systems rather than individual campaigns: brand governance that keeps messaging consistent across business units, sales enablement that helps new reps communicate value the same way, customer education that improves adoption after the sale, partner enablement for distributors, and account-based programs that keep multi-stakeholder deals aligned.
The question before the next expansion push: can every customer-facing employee explain why customers choose us in essentially the same language? If not, solve that before spending more to generate demand. Driving more prospects into a confused commercial system rarely produces better results.
Stage 9: preparing for an exit
Whether the goal is acquisition, private equity, or an IPO, buyers are evaluating the quality of the whole business. The technology is assumed; what they're weighing is everything around it.
An acquirer wants confidence that the company can keep growing after ownership changes.
That means showing more than scientific excellence: Can the company consistently generate demand? Does leadership understand the market? Is positioning clearly differentiated? Are commercial processes repeatable? Can sales explain the value proposition consistently? Is there evidence customers are adopting the solution?
Those questions come up in diligence, and companies that treated marketing as a strategic business function tend to answer them more convincingly. I've watched organizations spend the months before an acquisition refreshing a website or redesigning decks. Those projects aren't bad. They're just late. Commercial credibility is built over years, and you can't manufacture it during due diligence.
Where commercial momentum usually breaks down
The companies that struggle commercially tend to make big business decisions without enough customer evidence. A few patterns show up again and again.
Falling in love with the technology. Founders should believe in their innovation. Customers buy solutions that improve outcomes, reduce risk, save time, or lower cost — which aren't always the same thing the team is most proud of. A healthy habit is to keep checking whether customers describe the problem the way you do. When the answers diverge, pay attention.
Waiting until commercialization to learn the market. I've never heard a CEO wish they'd spent less time understanding customers. Market research works best as an ongoing habit that runs throughout the company's evolution. The teams that keep listening usually outperform the ones that assume they already know.
Treating marketing as a support function only. Marketing does support sales, product, and regulatory. It also supports executive decision-making. When it only enters after the decisions are made, leadership loses one of its most valuable sources of commercial insight, and that's hard to recover.
Measuring activity instead of business progress. Website traffic, social followers, conference leads, and email open rates have operational value, but they don't tell you whether the business is getting stronger. Executives should spend more time on customer acquisition cost, sales cycle length, pipeline quality, product adoption, retention, expansion revenue, win rates, and share within target accounts. Those are commercial outcomes. Everything else should ladder up to them.
How to measure whether marketing is contributing across the lifecycle
Marketing shouldn't be measured the same way in discovery as it is after commercialization. The objective changes at each stage, so the measurement should too.
During discovery, you're measuring learning. Have we validated our assumptions with customers? Identified the highest-value segments? Do we understand how buyers define success? Have we documented real competitive differentiation? Success here is reducing uncertainty before expensive decisions get made.
During development, you're measuring readiness. Voice-of-customer research completed, positioning validated, investor readiness, brand consistency, sales readiness, regulatory-content preparedness, and cross-functional alignment. Weak foundations here make commercialization much harder.
During commercialization and growth, the traditional business metrics take over. Pipeline quality, win rates, revenue growth, customer acquisition cost, sales cycle duration, customer lifetime value, retention, and market penetration. At this stage, marketing is working when business performance improves.
Try this with your leadership team
Put 60 minutes on the calendar with leaders from Product, Clinical, Regulatory, Commercial, Sales, and the executive team. Ask one question:
"What important commercial decision are we making right now without direct customer evidence?"
Have everyone write their answer down before anyone speaks. You'll usually find several departments making assumptions about the same customer from completely different angles. That gap is the opportunity.
Before you approve the next feature, campaign, hire, or funding round, identify which assumptions you could replace with customer evidence first. It's one of the fastest ways to improve commercial decisions, at any stage of the lifecycle.
Frequently asked questions
What are the 9 stages of a life science company?
Discovery; developing and protecting IP; research and development; capital formation and developing partnerships; team building; regulatory review and approval; commercialization and marketing; growth and expansion; and exit. The framework comes from the Association of Corporate Counsel's life sciences company lifecycle.
When should a life science company invest in marketing?
Earlier than most do. Most wait until commercialization (stage 7). Because nearly every earlier stage involves commercial decisions — market, positioning, brand, evidence, partnerships — marketing adds the most value when it's helping make those decisions, well before they show up in a campaign.
Isn't marketing just advertising and lead generation?
Those are outputs of marketing near commercialization. The broader job is helping leadership make better commercial decisions with customer evidence: who the buyer is, what problem they're solving, how they evaluate options, and what they'll actually adopt.
How is marketing different in regulated life sciences?
Claims need evidence, assets move through structured Medical, Regulatory, and Legal review, and buying groups are large and multi-disciplinary. Marketing has to be built for those review cycles and buying dynamics from the start, which is where general agencies often struggle.
How do you measure marketing before there's a product to sell?
By measuring learning and readiness. In discovery, that's validated assumptions and clearer segmentation. In development, it's voice-of-customer research, validated positioning, and cross-functional alignment. Business metrics like pipeline and win rate come later.
What's the one question to ask my leadership team?
"What important commercial decision are we making right now without direct customer evidence?" It surfaces the assumptions worth replacing with research before you spend against them.
Where you are in the lifecycle is where we start
Wherever your company sits — discovery or diligence — marketing's job is the same: reduce commercial risk by replacing assumptions with customer evidence, so the expensive decisions are the well-informed ones. That's the work I lead as a fractional CMO. If you're earlier than stage 7, that's a good thing. It means there's still time to get the commercial decisions right.
