As the first entry to this Sales and Marketing blog, here are some of my favorite links to online stuff.
As the life science business is young, there are only a few places where scientists (customers) and commercial folks (sales reps, marketing folks, business development people) hang out online. One good place is Biofind's Rumor Mill, which is now officially for sale, so any of you who want to try an commercialize rumors can go give it a try. A little history, though - there was a ton of controversy to make this rumor site a paid-subscription site, complete with online polls, that caused no end to the level of noise, what with endless strings of posts that were nothing but complaining, whiny people too cheap to pay for information. Ah, the wonders of the Internet. Note: this site is difficult to navigate, as there is only a filtering function by biotech discipline, so be prepared to wear out your 'back' button, and regularly start over from the home page. Also some companies are represented much more than others, which has little relationship to market size, growth rate, number of struggles, amount of politics, or relative level of happiness. About that last comment - there might be a correlation to relative level of happiness to number of posts, but I don't have enough information at the present.
For another source of company-specific news where customers meet online with sales and/or marketing people would be the stock message boards at Yahoo! Finance, but the level of traffic may be hit-or-miss, depending on the company. And if you are looking for insider news about a small privately-held company online, good luck!
One of my trade magazines in my 'must-read' pile is Genetic Engineering News, but a lot of its content is not found online. Their website was recently revamped, now much easier to read, even with a discussion forum that is currently empty. If you are currently 'behind the bench' (say in an academic lab somewhere as I was for many years) and would like to find out more about the real business of biotech suppliers, this is a must-read, and do what you can to get a free or paid subscription if you don't get it already.
Another site that is well-worth bookmarking is GenomeWeb. They publish Genome Technology, and if you don't have a free subscription you can get one easily. Back to GenomeWeb - they have a twice-daily email alert service that is invaluable to me - another item on my 'must-read' list. It can often take the place of subscribing for 'investor alerts' from the websites of your competition. :)
For academic life-science literature, I'd be remiss not to mention NCBI (in particular PubMed), Stanford's Highwire, or Google Scholar. And the PLoS (Public Library of Science) is an interesting experiment in 'open-source' scientific publishing. But often as a busy Sales person you aren't going to do a lot of this footwork yourself - that's what Marketing and Technical Support people are for - and often a well-timed complaint will get you what you need.
Just a note to say that Biofind.com is no longer officially for sale and has finally had a first phase of redevelopment. There is more to come from Biofind over the next year or so.
Posted by: Dave Kinsella | January 03, 2007 at 08:16 AM