The adoption of outsourced marketing teams continues to rise across the life sciences technology sector, with good reason. According to Forbes, the model offers significant financial advantages as organizations only pay for the services they need rather than maintaining full-time salaries and benefits. Beyond cost efficiency, outsourced teams provide flexibility, allowing companies to scale marketing resources up or down based on specific projects or seasonal demands. These experienced professionals also bring diverse expertise from working across multiple companies and industries.
However, maximizing these benefits requires careful attention to potential challenges. Life sciences technology companies that successfully utilize outsourced marketing leaders (fractional CMOs) and teams manage four dimensions of every engagement: team integration, knowledge retention, communication, and accountability.
Here’s what we mean by that:
Seamless team integration: Treat the marketing contractors as core members of your commercial team, beginning with comprehensive onboarding that immerses fractional team members in your business goals, company culture, and key processes. A thorough discovery process and maturity assessment clearly defines responsibilities and scope and introduces the outsourced team members to internal stakeholders. Also, make sure the fractional team members have access to marketing technology resources and are included in relevant team meetings from day one.
Knowledge retention and transfer: Some executives worry about institutional knowledge “walking out the door” when the fractional engagement ends. Choose an outsourced partner that both documents its approaches to marketing programs in detailed playbooks and spends time training the full-time members of your own team. Fractional marketing leaders treat knowledge exchange as an essential to the partnership, proactively documenting best practices in growth marketing or omnichannel campaigns for easy reuse by the client.
Measurable accountability: Establish specific, quantifiable KPIs at the outset that align directly with business goals. Regular performance reviews drive timely adjustments to strategy and execution. Companies that successfully implement outsourced models define clear scope and expectations upfront and regularly review the impact of the outsourced marketing team.
Clear communications: When the outsourced team feels like integrated members of your commercial team, communications tend to be frequent and open. This fosters better collaboration on marketing projects, joint decision making, and best practice sharing. We also find that holding regular check-ins to inform your stakeholders about progress, providing feedback to improve the partnership, and tracking milestones in a scorecard ensure everyone is on the same page.
To mitigate any risks, both the life sciences tech company and the vendor must treat the engagement as a partnership. Both organizations should agree on priorities and scope, ensure the full-time and fractional individuals are well integrated, schedule regular meetings to brief leadership on results and address issues, and share knowledge back and forth.
At Rebound, we have a proven model for outsourced marketing that encompasses onboarding, maturity assessments, access to commercial applications, project management, performance scorecards and reporting, and more. Our approach ensures our clients capture the full value of their fractional marketing investment.
Contact Rebound to discuss how our marketing leaders and domain experts can accelerate time to value of your marketing function.