Would you know where marketing starts?

For many teams, especially in biotech, marketing is something they will think about later. It’s the cherry on the top of a final product ready to sell. But I want to discuss why marketing should be a core discipline, and how it can help you achieve commercialisation faster. We know that a founder building a biotech company spends effectively the whole of their working attention inside their own technology. They know its mechanism, its edge cases, the three ways it outperforms the nearest alternative and the one way it does not yet. However, the person deciding whether to back that technology (a grant assessor, a scientific advisor, a design partner, eventually a buyer) spends a fraction of their day thinking about it, often less than 5%. The natural assumption is that this is a communication problem, one a better slide deck or a more polished website might fix. It is not. It is the central strategic fact of early-stage biotech commercialisation, and most technical teams build their entire go-to-market approach as though it does not exist.

So where should we start?

In conventional B2B marketing, buyer and seller at least agree on who the customer is from day one. Biotech doesn’t tend to work in that way because of the fact that a technology moving through early-stage validation towards functional proof isn’t being sold to anyone. It is being evaluated by a sequence of different audiences, each assessing a different kind of risk, long before a commercial buyer enters the picture at all. Early on, the “audience” is a validator, someone or a group of people who are deciding if the science justifies a next step. The endorsement becomes the credibility signal that opens the next door. Marketing’s job here is narrower than founders expect: build credibility, not demand. Content should stay at the level of the problem, the team and the technical foundation, patents filed, papers published, advisors attached, rather than reaching for customer outcomes or commercial claims the company cannot yet back up. Further along, the audience becomes a design partner, an organisation willing to test the technology in something closer to a real operating environment, often at reduced cost, in exchange for shaping the product and early access. This is a de-risking conversation, not a sales conversation, and founders who pitch it with pricing and ROI language tend to stall, because they are answering a question the design partner has not yet asked. Marketing’s job shifts to relationship-led recruitment: founder and technical-team visibility, speaking, writing, a credible presence in the room, does more work here than any campaign, because the design partner is assessing the people as much as the technology. Case studies can start to appear, but only framed honestly as early collaboration, not proof, since overstating this stage damages credibility with the next prospective partner, who will check. Only once functional performance is demonstrated, typically well into later-stage validation, does a genuine commercial buyer appear, and only then does the conventional toolkit finally earn its keep. Ideal customer profiles, differentiated positioning, paid channels and demand generation all assume a defined buyer exists to aim them at, and before that point they simply produce noise aimed at nobody. This is also where customer proof points and outcome-based case studies replace the design-partner narrative as the dominant credibility asset. The practical consequence is that “know your customer” is harder advice to execute in biotech than in almost any other sector, because the customer keeps changing shape as the science matures. Marketing has to translate accordingly at each stage rather than write one narrative and repeat it. None of these gatekeepers, whichever stage they sit at, are evaluating the science on its own terms. They are evaluating what backing it would cost them personally or organisationally if it goes wrong. A pitch built entirely around technical merit answers a question none of them are actually asking. This does not stop once a company reaches market. The pattern is best documented in pharma, where McKinsey research has found that roughly two-thirds of new drugs fail to meet pre-launch sales expectations in their first year, and even the minority that succeed often can’t sustain that performance into year three, but the same underdeveloped commercial muscle shows up across biotech more broadly. As one director specialising in alternative protein financing put it, companies consistently underestimate the gap between execution infrastructure and team capacity: brilliant tech founders, and no one with the commercial, manufacturing or regulatory expertise to close it.

Do I need a marketer then? 

Not necessarily, and you certainly don’t need a bigger marketing budget. A disciplined habit of asking, before any pitch, presentation or piece of content is built, a small set of questions about the specific person on the other side of the table this quarter, not the customer three years from now. What kind of bet is this person making by engaging at all? What is genuinely occupying their attention in this role right now, independent of your technology? What does success look like for them personally, not for their organisation? Where does your technology actually sit in their world, and what makes up the rest of it? And, the most difficult question, how critical is your technology to them today?

A starting exercise

Before your next pitch, application or investor update, name the one person you most need to say yes next, not your eventual customer, the actual gatekeeper in front of you this quarter. Write a single paragraph answering the five questions above from their seat, not yours. If two or more come back blank, that is the real gap in your go-to-market. Most founders discover they can describe their technology in far more detail than they can describe the person deciding its fate.

Where a marketer can add value? 

Certainly not in producing more content, or selling you a campaign. The value sits in holding that translation discipline when the founder is too close to the science to see where it’s breaking down, spotting which gatekeeper is actually in the room, catching the overclaim before a validator does, keeping the story’s substance consistent while its emphasis shifts. That is a specific, learnable skill, and it is usually cheaper to bring in early than to fix after a stalled design partnership or a rejected grant application. About the  Author: Laura Curtis is a B2B marketing consultant working with deep tech and biotech founders across the Cambridge ecosystem. She also runs the Startup Marketing Clinic (SMC+), a community for founders working through their marketing and go-to-market challenges.