A conversation with Brian Carr, SVP of Marketing at Medisafe

Medisafe is the leading medication engagement platform that empowers patients to seamlessly manage their treatment. We have a suite of proven digital solutions driving innovation for our pharma partners, including Medisafe VIA, our breakthrough Voice Intelligent Agent transforming how specialty brands activate, engage, and retain patients.

Our lead generation focuses on reaching top pharmaceutical and life science executives with highly targeted messages based on the specific brands they represent. These are senior, highly sought-after decision-makers, and the only way to cut through the noise is to fully understand the brands they work on and draft highly personalized outreach. Without that depth of knowledge, you're just adding to the pile of generic emails they ignore every day.

We'd worked with different contact databases in the past, but consistently ran into the same problems. The data was often out of date, sometimes by months. More critically, these databases gave us no systematic way to match pharma executives to the specific brands they work on, and no way to engage with stakeholders when they're moving into new roles and are more open to having new conversations. Without that brand-level context, it's incredibly difficult to personalize your messaging in a way that resonates with senior executives.

What made Athena so enticing was the ability to easily identify the highest-priority people with the data needed to build truly personalized messages. That combination (knowing who matters most and having the brand-level context to engage them meaningfully) was exactly what we needed to elevate our outreach. We started working with Athena back in July 2024, and we've been really happy with that decision ever since.

We use Athena across several key areas of our business development process, and each one delivers significant time savings while helping us stay laser-focused on the highest-priority people and companies.

Timely Outreach Triggered by Key Events

One of the most valuable aspects is how Athena enables relevantly timed outreach linked to job changes and clinical trial news updates. We can reach out to high-priority contacts at highly desirable moments, when someone's just moved into a new role and is building their vendor relationships, or when positive trial results create new opportunities for conversation. This kind of timing is impossible to manage manually, but Athena makes it systematic and scalable.

Conference Targeting

Conferences are a perfect example of where Athena saves us enormous amounts of time. When you're looking at an attendee list of 4,000 (sometimes even 10,000 people) you need a way to identify who's actually worth your time. Athena helps us narrow that down to the 300-400 pharma-specific contacts, and more importantly, identify the 10-20 can't-miss people we absolutely need to connect with. Instead of generic "let's meet up" emails that everyone sends, we can craft detailed, personalized outreach that references the specific brands they work on and challenges they're facing. That's how we stand out and actually get meetings.

Staying Ahead on New Drugs and Brand Prioritization

We use the Key Drug Database and Brand Scoring tools to keep ahead of the curve on new drugs coming to market. These tools help us systematically prioritize which brands and companies to focus our efforts on. We can identify drugs in the early-stage pipeline that are a perfect fit for our solutions and avoid wasting time on contacts who are very unlikely to be good targets.

This prioritization directly shapes our outreach strategy. Once we've identified high-priority brands, we can focus our campaigns and messaging specifically around those opportunities. In the past, keeping track of brands and contacts this way was hugely time-consuming. Now it's streamlined and strategic, allowing us to concentrate our BD efforts where they'll have the most impact.

Meeting Preparation

Before calls or meetings, we use Athena to get up to speed. We can see the key brands in a company's portfolio, check recent updates like Phase 3 trial results or check the brands administration route, and walk into conversations fully informed. It's become a part of how we prepare for client interactions.

Across all of these use cases, the common thread is time savings and focus. We're spending our energy on the people and companies that matter most, with the context needed to engage them effectively.

The results have been great. We've seen our email open rates more than double across campaigns that leverage Athena data. Our engagement metrics have seen similar improvements, with more inbound RFPs, more high-quality meetings, and more genuine opportunities in our pipeline.

That improvement comes down to relevance. When you're reaching out to someone with specific knowledge about their brand portfolio, their recent trial results, or the challenges they're facing at their stage of the drug lifecycle, they recognize that you've done your homework. That gets you the second and third conversations, not just the initial response. We're able to have deeper follow-up conversations in ways we never could before (moving beyond surface-level discussions to really substantive partnerships).

If I had to point to the top three things we love about Athena, it would be: acute relevance, ease of use, and increased productivity.

The acute relevance is what makes the biggest difference. The platform connects contacts directly to the drugs they're working on, prioritizes them through lead scoring, and keeps everything up to date. We're never working from stale lists, we're operating with live, current intelligence.

The ease of use means we're never wasting time trying to navigate the platform or piece together information. Everything we need is there and accessible, which directly feeds into that third point, productivity. The efficiency gains have been significant. We're able to do more, with better targeting, in less time.

One thing that's particularly valuable is how Athena helps us identify high-value contacts that are really hard to spot otherwise. Everyone knows who the obvious top prospects are, and you can usually identify the ones that aren't worth your time. But there's this gray area of high-value contacts in between (people who could be incredibly valuable but aren't immediately obvious). That's where Athena really shines. The scoring mechanisms help us uncover those opportunities and validate our thinking about who deserves our attention.

This also creates internal focus for our team. When everyone agrees to the scoring methodology and can see which contacts and brands should be prioritized, it aligns our efforts and frees up time. There's much more efficiency in our outreach because we're all working from the same intelligence and focusing on the same high-priority targets.

Absolutely. Athena has opened up the ability to be significantly more personalized with better prioritization across our outreach and BD activities more broadly.

We use the Athena tools to identify the highest-priority brands, and then we're kept up to date on their activities and job change movements. It's opened the door to being much more focused in this regard. In the past, keeping track of brands and contacts this way was hugely time-consuming and you'd need someone manually monitoring news, tracking LinkedIn updates, and maintaining spreadsheets. Now it's systematic.

What's particularly valuable is how this allows us to be laser-focused on drugs in the late-stage pipeline. At the same time, we're not wasting time on contacts who are very unlikely to be good targets. That prioritization is built into our process now in a way it simply wasn't before.

The combination of better data and better tools means we're more strategic, more focused, and more effective. We know who to reach out to, when to reach out, and what to say. It's elevated how we approach BD in a meaningful way.

Athena is a fantastic tool that's laser-focused on pharma, and that focus is both its greatest strength and, in some ways, a limitation. The pharma-specific data is constantly updated and relevant. You can't get that depth anywhere else. But there are times when we'd like to branch out to adjacent audiences.

For example, we'd love to see expansion into life sciences more broadly, including medtech and agency stakeholders. At a large conference, we might want to connect with 600 people, not just the 400 who are on pharma brand teams. As we grow and our solutions become relevant to a wider set of stakeholders, having that same level of intelligence on adjacent audiences would be valuable.

This is where things get really exciting for us. We've just started using the updated Key Drug Database and Brand Scoring tools, and the improvements are game-changing.

In the past, we had an internal tool to score brands that were a good fit for our solutions. It was hugely time-consuming and hard to keep current. With the new functionality, we can save brand scores directly in the platform, push that data into the Key Drug Database, and keep everything organized and up to date automatically. That manual process is no longer needed.

What this opens up is the ability to be even more forward-planning in our approach. We can identify high-priority brands and companies 6, 9, even 12 months before we need to engage them, and start building long-term brand awareness. In pharma, sales cycles are long, and relationships matter. Being able to systematically plan for those long-term plays, rather than just reacting to what's happening today, is a significant strategic advantage.

We're planning to use Athena much more strategically in 2026. Instead of just reacting to news or current opportunities, we'll be looking 9 months ahead, identifying the teams and brands we should be building relationships with now, and laying the groundwork for partnerships well in advance of launches or major milestones. That's the kind of forward-thinking approach that separates successful BD teams from the rest.