Industry playbooks
Pharma sales call playbooks
Your buyers are watching an enrollment curve fall behind forecast while every month of delay burns millions, their field teams can't get past a no-see policy, and anything you say to an HCP has to survive med-legal first. Practising against a buyer like that — one who opens with 'we're mid-readout, nobody signs anything this quarter' — teaches you to sell around the review queue instead of walking straight into it.
Every call type for Pharma
Scripts, sample dialogue, objection handling and a live AI buyer for each one.
Cold Call
You dialled someone who was mid-something-else — reviewing a P&L, walking between meetings, about to eat lunch — and they picked up without knowing your name, your company, or why their phone rang. There is no prior email, no referral, no webinar download to reference. The first three to five seconds decide whether you get thirty more, and the first thirty decide whether you get a meeting. Your job on this call is not to sell the product, qualify thoroughly, or run discovery — it's to earn a next conversation by naming a problem so specifically that the prospect thinks 'how do they know that about us?' You will be interrupted, you will hear a reflex brush-off before they've processed a word you said, and you have to stay conversational through it without sounding like you're reading. Success is a calendar hold, not a good chat.
Read the playbook →Demo Call
A scheduled demo with someone who has already had the pitch conversation and said yes to seeing it — which means they are not here to learn what it does, they're here to find out where it breaks. They arrive with a mental list: how it hooks into the systems they already run, who on their team owns it once you're gone, what happens at 2am when it falls over, and how long before it's actually doing something useful. They will interrupt. Every interruption is either a buying question or a disqualification test, and your job is to answer it in their environment, not in your sandbox. If you run the standard tour — click here, then here, notice this dashboard — they go quiet, you hear typing, and you've lost the room without them ever saying no. The demo you rehearsed is a resource, not a script; the call is won by how well you handle the detours.
Read the playbook →Discovery Call
A 25-minute scheduled discovery call with a prospect who took your first touch seriously, cleared time, and showed up expecting to be diagnosed — not sold to. They already know your one-liner, so repeating it burns credibility. They have a real, layered problem: a surface symptom they'll hand over in the first two minutes, a mechanism underneath it they'll explain if you ask a decent follow-up, and a cost or political consequence they'll only name once you've proven you can hold the conversation without reaching for a demo. Your job is to earn each layer with open questions, quantify what you find, understand how a decision like this actually gets made in their shop, and leave with a specific, dated next step that both sides agreed to out loud. Pitch early, monologue, or run a BANT checklist and they will answer politely, in short sentences, and never take the next meeting.
Read the playbook →Pricing Negotiation Call
This is the call after the technical win. They've run the eval, they've told their VP your product is the pick, and the only thing left is the number. They are not trying to talk themselves out of buying — they're trying to buy the same thing for less, and they will use every lever they have to do it: a low anchor ("honestly, we budgeted about half that"), a competitor's quote they may or may not still be considering, a case study or logo trade dangled as if it's currency, a threat to push the PO into next quarter, and long, deliberate silence after they name a figure. The trap is that they're pleasant about all of it, so it doesn't feel like a fight — it feels like a friendly conversation in which you keep making small, reasonable-sounding concessions until you've given away 30 points and gotten nothing. Your job is not to win the negotiation; it's to hold price by trading, keep the relationship warm enough that they still want to sign with you, and leave the call with a dated path to signature.
Read the playbook →Renewal Call
This is a save call, not a renewal call — the paperwork is the last five minutes, not the first five. The contract ends in six weeks, the customer has already half-decided to leave, and they're taking the meeting partly to say out loud what went wrong this year. Adoption never got past the first team, support tickets went quiet for days in Q2 during their busiest stretch, and a competitor rep has been in their inbox with a number that's 20-30% lower. They still like one or two things — usually the thing their power user built a workflow around — but they need those failures acknowledged specifically and unflinchingly before they'll entertain another twelve months. Lead with the order form, the discount, or 'so what would it take to get this done,' and you confirm every suspicion they have that you only show up when money is due. Lead with the ticket numbers, the dates, what actually broke internally on your side, what changed, and a named-owner plan for the next 90 days, and the same person will start negotiating with you instead of against you.
Read the playbook →Upsell Call
You're calling a customer who is already paying you, already reasonably happy, and has no idea you're about to ask for more money. They picked up expecting a check-in. Your job is to convert an account review into an expansion conversation without burning the goodwill that made the account healthy in the first place. The buyer's default posture is defensive on three fronts: the budget for your category is already spent for the year, their team is underwater and can't absorb another rollout, and they suspect they aren't even getting full value from what they bought last time — a suspicion you must address before they'll hear anything new. This call is won or lost in the prep: if you can open with their actual usage numbers and the specific result they've already gotten, you get a real conversation. If you open with "I wanted to tell you about our new module," you get a polite ten minutes and a "send me something."
Read the playbook →Warm Call
A warm call is one where somebody else's credibility got you the answer. A peer downloaded your guide and said "you should call Dani", or a mutual contact fired off a three-line intro that the prospect skimmed on their phone and archived. They pick up expecting you, but expecting is not the same as knowing — they can usually name the referrer and almost never name what you sell. You start with maybe ninety seconds of borrowed goodwill and a very specific obligation: prove the referrer wasn't wasting their time. Warmth is a loan, not a grant. Two generic sentences — "So, just to give you a bit of background on us" — and you've converted a warm call into a cold call the prospect now feels mildly embarrassed to be on, which is worse than cold. The job is to cash the referral fast, convert it into one specific, testable reason you're relevant to *them* rather than to the referrer, and get out with a real second meeting.
Read the playbook →
Who you're calling
In Pharma, the people who pick up are Pharma clinical development, medical affairs and commercial leaders. The titles you will actually reach:
- VP, Clinical Operations
- Executive Director, Clinical Development
- Head of Patient Recruitment & Site Engagement
- VP, Medical Affairs
- Director, Field Medical (MSL Team Lead)
- Senior Director, Commercial Excellence / Launch Readiness
- Chief Medical Officer
What keeps them up at night
Name one of these in your first thirty seconds and you have earned the rest of the call.
Enrollment is behind the curve and the burn doesn't pause
The Gantt says FPI was in March and 40% of sites are still not activated. Half the activated sites have randomized zero patients. Every month the study slips costs $6–10M in run-rate plus a shifted readout, and if the readout shifts past the board meeting, the financing story shifts with it. Ops leaders are already rescuing it with a protocol amendment to loosen inclusion/exclusion — which means re-consenting, another IRB cycle, and a fresh three months gone.
Nobody can get in front of prescribers anymore
Access at large IDNs and academic centers has collapsed — no-see policies, credentialing portals, 'email the office manager.' Reps are averaging sub-two-minute hallway interactions and MSLs are booking scientific exchanges six weeks out. Field leaders are being asked to justify headcount against reach and frequency numbers that keep sliding, and the honest answer is the target list hasn't changed but the door has closed.
Med-legal review is the rate limiter on everything
Every slide, every email template, every unbranded disease-awareness piece goes into MLR/PRC and comes back with fifteen comments and a claim that needs a new reference. Two to three review cycles is normal; six to twelve weeks is normal. Launch teams build the timeline backwards from the review calendar, not from the market. Anything a vendor proposes that touches an HCP inherits that queue.
Site burden and CRO layers slow every fix
The sponsor doesn't own the relationship with the site — the CRO does, and often a second-tier site management org under that. Coordinators are running eleven other studies and the sponsor's protocol is not their priority. Any new tool, portal or pre-screening process is one more login and one more SOP for a coordinator who is already the bottleneck, so the site says yes and then doesn't use it.
Compliance risk makes anything new expensive to say yes to
Patient data, HCP payments, aggregate spend reporting, GDPR and HIPAA, 21 CFR Part 11 validation, no inducement to prescribe, no off-label. A vendor that touches patients or physicians triggers privacy review, IT security review, vendor qualification and a GxP assessment before procurement even opens a file. The buyer isn't saying no — they're pricing in six months of internal work they have to personally sponsor.
Launch readiness on a moving regulatory date
Teams are hiring, training and building the field model against a PDUFA date that can slip on a CRL or an information request, and against a label they haven't seen yet. Everything commercial is provisional until the label lands, so budget commitments get made twice and killed once, and the launch lead is measured on being ready for a date they don't control.
What they'll push back with
The objections that come up on nearly every call, and a response that keeps the conversation alive.
- “Anything touching HCP engagement has to clear med-legal — that's months.”
- Understood, and I'd rather you not put it in the queue yet. What I'd propose first is a scoping conversation with your MLR lead and privacy on the process only — no content, no promotional claim, nothing branded. Most of what we do sits pre-consent and never touches a promotional asset. If we can define what actually needs review, you're submitting a two-page process description instead of a full campaign, and I've seen that go through in one cycle.
- “We're mid-trial readout — nobody signs anything new this quarter.”
- Then this isn't a signature conversation. Your next protocol starts enrolling when — Q3? The sites you'll need are being selected right now, and feasibility takes 90 days regardless. Give me thirty minutes with your ops lead to map the site list for that study, so the day the readout clears you're not starting from a blank feasibility questionnaire.
- “Our CRO owns recruitment. That's in their scope of work.”
- It usually is, and it's usually the line item they're behind on. What's the actual randomization rate per site per month against what they forecast in the bid defense? If it's under, the change order to fix it costs you more than a parallel channel would. We're not replacing them — we work alongside the CRO, and we've been added as a sponsor-direct vendor on studies where the CRO welcomed it because they were the ones getting the escalation calls.
- “Sites won't adopt another platform. Our coordinators are drowning.”
- Agreed, and if it needs a coordinator login it fails. The pre-screening happens on our side — the site receives a pre-qualified referral with the inclusion/exclusion boxes already checked and the consent conversation already teed up. Their workload goes down, not up. Ask any site you've got a good relationship with what they'd say to that.
- “This is a budget that was set last year. There's no line for it.”
- Where does a month of trial delay get charged? Most groups I work with fund this out of the study budget as a rescue line or out of the change-order money they'd otherwise send to the CRO. If your burn is $4M a month and this pulls LPI in by six weeks, the funding conversation is a redirection, not a new ask. Who owns that study-level budget — you or clinical finance?
- “We tried a recruitment vendor on the last study. Half the referrals were screen failures.”
- That's the right thing to be angry about — you paid for volume and absorbed the screening cost. What was the screen failure rate, and where did they fail: eligibility, washout, or lab values? We contract on randomized patients, not referrals, and we build the pre-screen off your actual I/E criteria. If we send you someone who screen-fails on a criterion we should have caught, that's on us.
- “Privacy and IT security will take four months to clear you.”
- They will if we start cold. Send me your vendor security questionnaire and DPA template now — we've got the completed pack, SOC 2, the HIPAA and GDPR positions and the Part 11 documentation ready to go. That work happens in parallel with your team evaluating whether this is even worth doing. It costs you nothing to start the clock.
Their language
Use these the way they do. Getting one wrong costs more credibility than getting none of them right.
Jargon
- FPI / LPI (first patient in, last patient out)
- screen failure rate
- site activation and green-light
- I/E criteria and protocol amendment
- MLR / PRC review (med-legal-regulatory)
- MSL and scientific exchange
- KOL / DOL and tiering
- database lock and topline readout
- DSMB and interim analysis
- PDUFA date, CRL, NDA/BLA
- Sunshine Act, aggregate spend, fair market value
- NBRx vs TRx, reach and frequency
Metrics they are measured on
randomizations per site per month vs. enrollment curve forecast, screen failure rate (%), site activation cycle time — contract to green-light, in days, cost per randomized patient, days from FPI to LPI vs. protocol timeline, MLR cycle time — days and number of review rounds per asset, target HCP reach and frequency; MSL interactions and insights logged per quarter, patient retention / dropout rate through primary endpoint
Related industries
Buyers with adjacent pressures, and the same call types against them.
Practise against a Pharma buyer
A live AI prospect with Pharma context — their pressures, their jargon, their objections. They talk back, they interrupt, and they can hang up on you. You get a scored breakdown when the call ends.
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