A framework for success as an emerging life sciences CCO: A Q&A with Todd Wood

Key takeaways:

• Chief commercial officers (CCO) need diverse career experiences, which may be acquired by making more lateral moves instead of climbing the ladder as fast as possible
• Emerging life sciences companies often only obsess over science; CCOs must add to that an obsession over patients, healthcare providers, payers and investors
• Agility without strong systems leads to ambiguity; CCOs must champion clear planning systems to empower and drive accountability

After a diverse career in large pharma, Todd Wood went on to become the chief commercial officer at two emerging life sciences organizations. Most recently, he was the U.S. president of a small-cap pharma company. What follows is an edited transcript from a discussion with ZS Principal Adam D’Luzansky.

ZS: Let’s start with your journey to your first chief commercial officer role. How did you think about getting to that point in your career?

Todd: Looking back, I never thought, “Someday, I’m going to be a chief commercial officer.” As I climbed the corporate ladder at a large pharma company, which I thought of more often as a spiral staircase than a ladder, I took many lateral moves that enabled me to work in different functions. I was exposed to many different leadership styles, customer groups, selling models, strategic approaches and operating systems. One career path is to try to shoot right up the ladder, but I sought to follow some advice I received early in my career to chart a path focused on learning. I sought roles that would allow me to build new and broad skillsets even if it meant not climbing as fast as possible.

ZS: What would be an example of that?

Todd: One instance was a move I made from marketing to market access. I was the product lead for a brand that eventually grew to $600 million. An opportunity to make a lateral move into market access emerged during the Medicare Part D launch. Many advised me against it, but I decided to take the leap into this new function. That managed care experience in a new channel prepared me for future commercial roles in a powerful way later on. My next career stop after that was leading sales teams in a category-creating aesthetics business, which had no reimbursement dynamics at all. These kinds of moves helped me build a variety of new and different skills that were required later in my career.

ZS: So I’m hearing that you have sought out many new challenges, from marketing to market access to sales leadership, and you did so across many types of businesses—retail, buy-and-bill and pure consumer. You were able to build a very interdisciplinary experience set, but it perhaps came at a cost of progressing within a given function or business as fast as possible.

Todd: Exactly. To be a chief commercial officer, you need to be able to lead many different functions. While I may not have grown up in each of those functions, I knew enough to hire the right talent, know the questions that needed to be asked, what kind of strategy needed to be built out, how to communicate to a variety of stakeholders, etc.

ZS: So how did you end up getting your first chief commercial officer role? And what are some of the lessons you learned being new in that position?

Todd: In both my first and second stints as a chief commercial officer, other executives in the respective categories recommended that the CEO contact me to fill a particular leadership need they had. Like I said earlier, I didn’t necessarily seek out becoming a CCO, but my mindset and approach to my career did prepare me well for the role.

Reflecting on the lessons learned, two things challenged me when I moved from a larger company into smaller companies. First, I experienced a smaller company that was not highly customer-centric. They tended to be more science- or product-centric rather than prioritizing external stakeholders. I found that it required a lot of effort on my part to champion an outward customer focus.

Second, smaller companies often pride themselves on being agile, but what I found is they lack sufficient process to achieve the real benefits of agility. The consequence is everyone is moving too fast, yet not coordinated and effective, or too slow because it is unclear how much consensus is needed to decide and act.

ZS: I imagine many commercial leaders in emerging life sciences organizations will resonate with the first challenge about customer centricity. Every year I work with commercial executives in smaller companies on how to engage the scientist or banker CEO who thinks the “product is going to sell itself” or “all customers in our market will benefit from this product.” When you come from a large company, these debates really surprise leaders.

Now on that second challenge, the lack of process, my guess is that perspective will be more controversial. Don’t most people leave bigger organizations because they are too bureaucratic and process-oriented? Can you elaborate?

Todd: Yes, I see two reasons why smaller organizations lack the sufficient processes to drive alignment and effective commercial execution. First, they typically have little practice operating as a commercial organization. In first-launch companies, everything and everyone are new, and they haven’t gone through the journey of deciding what needs a process and what doesn’t. Even for second- or third-launch companies, they face the challenge of balancing priorities, which requires thoughtfulness and making tough decisions of what not to do. Second, as you said, many people came from larger companies where too much process killed the culture and effectiveness, so there is a paranoia about process. But as I said, this absence of a clear and simplified process prevents the organization from achieving effective execution. Therefore, I began to replace the word “process” with “systems.”

ZS: As the CCO, I imagine setting up these right-sized processes or systems requires you to regularly negotiate with the CEO, CFO and other executive leadership team members. Can you describe that?

Todd: Correct, one foundational element of this is establishing an annual operating planning system to clarify what we are prioritizing, what we are agreeing to do, what we are not going to do and why. Strategy is about saying no as well as yes, so we must get it on the record what we said no to and why. This reduces distraction and drives focus. When you are building a business, you know that you’ll get curve balls, and you need to be agile enough to pivot. But when you get those curve balls, you need to rapidly discern whether you are facing a strategy problem or an execution problem. Establishing a clear system to align on a strategy across functions that combines our goals and beliefs is critical to navigating the dynamic environment of an emerging life sciences company.

ZS: If I tie back your observations on the need for setting up effective process or systems as the CCO, I can see how your diverse experience across functions earlier in your career would help you anticipate the types of decisions and challenges that the commercial organization would face.

Todd: I was fortunate to have that diverse background, not just for being able to anticipate the decisions and systems we need but also to champion comprehensive customer centricity. You see each function on its own will think about a particular “customer”—CEO and finance, perhaps, on investors, clinical on investigators, sales on physicians and staff, market access on payers. As the CCO, I see my role as driving customer centricity in our strategic planning and external communication for all of my organization’s customers. Someone must link it together, ensuring a positive and productive customer experience across functions is aligned and consistent.

Perhaps I can leave you with my framework for thinking through what I need to accomplish as a CCO. It enables me to capture the rich energy of an eager and growing company yet build in the sophistication of cross-functional thinking. I call it my SOCR (pronounced soccer) framework.

You first combine thoughtful strategy and operational excellence, then multiply by an empowered culture, which enables optimized results.

A thoughtful strategic annual operating plan or system enables externally focused cross-functional thinking to prioritize resources against key stakeholders. The operational excellence component is additive to the strategy. It requires simplification of the strategy to ensure a clear focus on key performance indicators that are executable at a high level. Even if the strategy is tight and the execution plan is aligned, a team may miss goals if they did not create a high-performing, empowered culture. This is a critical multiplier to the systems. This type of empowered ownership within the culture links involvement, engagement, accountability with responsibility to the plan and customers. This culture component probably deserves much more time and effort to fully describe it, but it is critical and can amplify output. Driving the aligned system enables both smart decision-making and operational excellence with a culture that attracts and retains talent.

ZS: Excellent. Thank you for sharing that framework. I can see how that ties a lot of the topics we’ve covered today together. I know we didn’t get into the important topics of board engagement and navigating the CCO-CEO relationship. Perhaps we can come back to those topics in an upcoming piece.