Commercial Engagement Lead

Overview

You find and qualify pharmaceutical marketing leaders who might need AI content generation, then book demos for the three founding AEs. This means researching biopharma companies, cold calling/emailing marketing directors, and navigating gatekeepers to get 15-20 minute discovery calls. You're one of four "Commercial Engagement Leads" (fancy title for SDR/BDR) building the top of funnel from scratch.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Seed/early Series A (17 people)

Size: 17 employees

Growth: Hiring 17 roles suggests recent funding, building out GTM team from scratch

Market Position: New category (AI for pharma marketing) - you're educating market, not just generating demand

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 90% Your outbound: Cold emails, LinkedIn, phone calls to lists you build
• 10% Inbound: Minimal - maybe LinkedIn post engagement or website form fills, but don't count on this

SDR/AE Structure: 4 Commercial Engagement Leads supporting 3 founding AEs (roughly 1.3:1 ratio)

Lead Flow: You're building the lists and targeting strategy - no established ICP yet, you'll help figure that out

Tools: Likely basic stack - LinkedIn Sales Navigator, email sequencing tool (Outreach/Salesloft), some data provider (ZoomInfo/Apollo)

Competitive Landscape

Your Challenge: Pharma marketers get hammered by martech vendors. Your cold email is competing with 50 others in their inbox.

Differentiation: AI + pharma-specific compliance is novel, but also makes people skeptical

Common Brush-Offs: "We have an agency," "Send me info," "Not interested in AI tools," "Talk to me next quarter"

Your Hook: Speed and cost savings vs traditional agency model - if you can get them to engage

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Prospecting/Outreach (60%) | Research/List Building (20%) | Meetings/Handoffs (15%) | Internal (5%)

Key Activities

• List building: Research pharma companies (50-1000 employees), identify marketing leaders (Directors, VPs, Brand Managers), build lists of 100-200 targets per week. Use LinkedIn, company websites, ZoomInfo.
• Email sequences: Send 80-100 personalized cold emails per day across multiple sequences. A/B test subject lines, pain points, value props. Most get ignored. 2-3% reply rate is good.
• Cold calling: Make 40-60 calls per day. Lots of voicemails. Receptionists say "send an email." When you reach someone, you have 20 seconds to get them interested before they hang up.
• LinkedIn outreach: Connection requests with notes, InMails, engage with their posts. 10-20 per day. Most don't respond.
• Discovery calls: When someone bites, you do a 15-20 minute call to qualify - understand their content workflow, budget, timeline, compliance challenges. If qualified, book demo with AE.
• CRM hygiene: Log every call, email, response in CRM (likely Salesforce or HubSpot). Update lead status, document notes for AE handoff.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Rejection is constant: 95%+ of outreach gets no response. People are blunt - "not interested," "don't call again," hang-ups. You need thick skin.
• Pharma is hard to reach: Gatekeepers, compliance with contact policies, people ignore external emails, corporate phones go to voicemail.
• No brand recognition: "Solstice Health? Never heard of you." You can't lean on company reputation - you have to create interest from scratch.
• Skepticism about AI: Pharma is risk-averse. Cold calling about AI content generation gets "that sounds risky" or "compliance would never approve that" before you can explain.
• ICP is unclear: At a 17-person startup, you're still figuring out who to target. You'll waste weeks on wrong personas/company sizes/therapeutic areas.
• Meetings don't convert: You book a meeting, feel great, then AE tells you it was unqualified (no budget, wrong persona, just curious). That stings.
• Quota pressure: 12-15 qualified meetings per month sounds reasonable until you realize qualified means real budget, real pain, real timeline - not just someone willing to take a call.

What Success Looks Like

• Book 12-15 qualified meetings per month that AEs accept (not kicked back)
• 30%+ of your meetings advance to demo stage
• Build a pipeline of 60-80 active prospects you're nurturing at any time
• Identify patterns in who responds (company size, titles, pain points) and refine targeting
• Get promoted to AE role within 12-18 months if you crush it

Who You're Prospecting

Primary Targets:

• Director/VP of Marketing at biopharma companies (50-500 employees)
• Brand Marketing Leads for specific drug portfolios
• Marketing Operations roles at larger pharma companies
• Occasionally CMO at smaller biotechs

What Gets Them to Respond:

• Specific pain: "Saw your team just launched [drug name] - how are you handling the volume of campaign content needed?"
• Cost angle: "Most pharma marketers spend $200K+/year on agency content - interested in how AI could cut that in half?"
• Speed: "Reduce campaign turnaround from 8 weeks to 2 weeks"
• Peer proof: "Working with [competitor/similar company] on this" (once you have it)

Requirements

• 0-2 years SDR/BDR experience (or this is your first sales role)
• Comfortable with high-volume outbound - calls, emails, LinkedIn all day
• Thick skin - can handle rejection and keep making calls
• Research skills - can quickly learn about a pharma company and find the right people
• Curiosity about pharma/life sciences (you'll learn the industry on the job)
• Coachable - willing to test new messaging, take feedback, iterate quickly
• Self-motivated - at a startup, no one is micromanaging your daily activity
• NYC-based (early-stage company likely wants in-person team)
• Hungry to move up to AE within 12-18 months if you perform