Seems like most of the marketing investment in life science has gone to adopting and operating technology. To be sure, marketing technology stacks offer a plethora of promises, from pinpoint targeting, to precise personalization, all resulting in decillions of data points that fill dashboards and attribution models.
Every movement, click, open, and form filled by a scientist is captured, categorized, and pushed downstream.
But opportunity flow isn’t improving.
The problem isn’t the tools. The problem is a gap between what the tools measure, and what target audiences intend. As a result, marketers have no shortage of signals about what prospects did, but are starving for insight into what buyers meant.
That silent disconnect is stalling your funnel.
A life sciences instrument provider saw their lead generation efforts generate over 50% more leads, yet a year later their opportunities had only slightly increased and most of them had stalled, representing over $100M in potential. We re-engaged 30% of the stalled opportunities and discovered that most were stuck on two very specific issues. Meanwhile, the company’s marketing team had been sending broad application notes and solicitations for more webinars, none of which addressed the problems that had stalled decisions. By aligning the content with the specific validation information prospects needed, we re-awakened over 55% of the stalled opportunities, resulting in a 115x ROI for opportunities and over 20x ROI on sales.
This disconnect between what marketing technology measures and what actually drives scientific buyers is costing life science companies millions in wasted efforts, and tens to hundreds of millions in lost revenue. Here’s what’s really happening, and how to fix it.
The 3 Fatal Gaps Between Marketing and Scientific Buyers
Most life science companies generate the majority of their leads in three ways:
- Webinars: mostly educational or applications, presented by the company or a customer.
- Tradeshows: scanned badges
- Direct extraction: directly scraping or purchasing a list of scraped emails
Managers reason that a name collected through one of these vehicles assumes“captured interest.” However, a scientist who registers for a webinar to learn about a technique or an application, comes by your booth to get that funny t-shirt or that drawing, or downloads a playbook or a guide, may never be curious or have the intention of buying anything.
This is the earliest stall point: failing to provoke the curiosity of a technical audience, so that they are compelled to follow something. Curiosity is the first real spark in a scientific buyer’s journey. Without it, nothing else matters. And automation cannot detect it.
Our Persuasion model shows that scientists engage only when something genuinely captivates their attention: either a tension, a reframed assumption, or a surprising insight about their world. But most top-of-funnel content that we see is built to educate, not to provoke curiosity.
If your lead generation efforts don’t ignite curiosity, automation will dutifully report activity, while the scientific buyer quietly disengages.
How to Fix it: Engineer Curiosity Early
Your initial content should first address a key tension that you know the target audience is facing. By challenging assumptions or the status quo, and delivering unexpected perspectives or insights, you generate curiosity and build momentum.
2. You are Confusing Their Exploration with Their Readiness to Buy
Scientists operate by building a hypothesis before they take action, and here’s where automation creates the most misleading signals.
A prospect may attend a webinar, view a product page, or skim an application note, and many marketing automation tools may interpret these actions as indications of interest. But inside the buyer’s mind, something very different may be happening: they are likely exploring whether the product, technique or application is applicable to their situation, or whether the offering will help them solve the need they believe they have.
This hypothesis-forming stage is fragile. If you push rote scientific education, you will likely miss the specific information your prospects are looking for. Persuade them too early (i.e. through demo solicitations or product-heavy nurture tracks), and you’re likely to trigger the prospect filtering you out.
We’ve seen this repeatedly: buyers who looked “hot” in the system were, in reality, still trying to figure out if the offering mattered to them. The funnel says “MQL → SQL.”
The scientist says, “I’m still trying to figure out if the offering is the right way forward.”
How to fix it: Match Your Communication to Hypothesis Maturity
Instead of focusing on the traditional, two-dimensional, linear funnels, and scoring leads based on a number of behavioral moves, you can create multiple paths for prospects to identify which hypotheses they are forming.
Even if your audience is engaging in application information or reading your product pages, it doesn’t mean that they have a hypothesis on whether they want to change anything, let alone implement your solution. And if you misread hypothesis formation as buying intent, you trigger the scientist’s skepticism. Instead, you need to create content that advises their hypothesis generation, and then develop a multi-touch sequence to guide them through the process of forming their hypothesis.
By mapping the content to where the buyer is in their own thinking, rather than where the CRM or lead score says they are, you can better drive the scientist’s buying journey.
3. Your Nurture Content is Validating a Different Hypothesis than Your Buyer is Searching to Validate
Once a scientist has a hypothesis about how to move forward, they actively evaluate products and services from providers. But at this stage, they’re not just looking for the best performance specs; they’re looking to validate their own hypothesis.
But automation can’t know which hypothesis they’re validating. So automation sequences either treat a late-stage buyer the same as an early-stage one, recycling the same nurture tracks and task sequences, or pass the buyer to a sales rep with no further air cover or appropriate nurture streams.
Neither strategy is optimal.
In our work diagnosing stalled opportunities, we consistently find a way to identify the hypotheses that buyers are trying to validate (through self-selection), and then deploy late-stage nurture sequences with information specific to validating the hypothesis each prospect has selected.
How to Fix it: Diagnose the Real Reasons Opportunities Stall
When marketing releases leads to sales teams too early, they increase the chances of opportunities stalling. If opportunities are not moving forward, it’s important to understand the reason why. And the best data to signal why opportunities stall is to simply ask them.
We find that prospects are always happy to tell us exactly what they need in order to move forward.
These changes turn your lead gen from data-production to demand-creation.
The Core Problem: Behavior ≠ Intent
Automation is really good at tracking what buyers do, but is tone-deaf as to why they do it.
Clicks are not necessarily generated because of curiosity about a product. Webinar registrants aren’t real leads. The page views that so many lead-scoring regimes are built on are not hypotheses. And those lead scores that increase are not based on emotional readiness.
Automation can create the illusion of progress, but the scientist’s actual buying journey is standing still because they haven’t been emotionally invested in urgently overcoming a need, generated a strong hypothesis about how to overcome it, and validated their hypothesis.
Getting prospects to emotionally invest in satisfying their own need is where demand lies.
You Don’t Need More Leads, Better Tools or More Outrageous Content. You Need to Know Your Prospects Better.
If you suspect that automation is masking real buyer intent — even if you’re not sure where — we can help.
We run a Opportunity Generation Health Assessment that diagnoses:
- where your prospects are actually getting stuck,
- which stage of the Persuasion Model they’re stalling in,
- and what adjustments will immediately create momentum.
If you want more opportunities flowing into pipeline, let’s talk.
We’ll tell you exactly where your system is deaf — and how to fix it.
