A conversation with Lyubo Ivanov, Director of Business Development at Remap

Remap is a specialist pricing and market access consultancy supporting pharma companies on launch execution, pricing strategy, and making sure new products reach the patients who need them. With a small and highly experienced team, we help clients clearly communicate the scientific and commercial value of their medicines to drive real-world access.

When we moved into HubSpot earlier this year, we wanted to build out our CRM properly, but doing that manually would have taken forever. We needed both more relevant contacts to target and a faster way to get them into HubSpot without spending half our day on admin.

That is what stood out about Athena. We could instantly access a much bigger universe of pharma contacts and then push them straight into HubSpot in a click. For us it came down to three things: speed, visibility, and scalability, getting in front of the right people faster and growing our CRM in a way that keeps up with our goals.

The two things we use the most are the Pipeline News Prompts and the Job Change Updates. Every month, Athena highlights the highest-priority people we should be talking to, whether that is because the drug they work on just had a major update, or because they have moved into a new role and are more open to new conversations. It means we do not have to go looking for this ourselves and we do not miss opportunities just because we are focused on other priorities that week.

The scoring makes prioritisation a lot easier. Athena shows us not just the score, but why someone is high priority. For example, if we already know them or they are already connected with us, that gets flagged too, so we can go after warmer paths first. And because Athena shows us what drugs they work on, outreach is much more relevant and we know immediately what the conversation should be.

We also use Athena to pull together targeted lists for campaigns and events. For example, when we are planning an activity in a particular city, we can build a location-specific list almost instantly. Previously, we would have had to filter that manually across different systems, which would have taken a lot longer.

We have seen a clear uplift since starting with Athena. One of the biggest advantages is the reach we now have. Before, our CRM had a limited number of contacts. With Athena, we suddenly have access to over 45,000 people who are relevant to what we do, so immediately that increases the number of conversations we can be having.

But it is not just more people, it is more of the right companies. We are very focused on working with brands that are launching or close to launch, and the Key Drug Database has been very useful there. It flags drugs we may not have been aware of, especially from companies that would not normally be on our radar. And because these are brands expecting to do significant revenue, it makes sure our time is going into the opportunities that matter.

We are also seeing meetings come through from the outreach we are doing, including with new logos, which is a big focus for us. We do not have exact metrics to share yet, but the impact is evident in the increased engagement we are receiving and the expanded reach we now have into key segments.

The monthly prompts help ensure we keep BD moving and stay focused on high-priority prospects. That is why we ultimately decided to switch to a yearly subscription. We can see the value clearly and want to keep building on it.

One thing for us is the reliance on Apollo for contact details. Most of the time we are in a good place, probably 75 to 80 percent of the contacts have an email available. But sometimes we will find exactly the right person and there is no email or phone number. Then we need to rely on LinkedIn outreach instead, which can slow things down.

From a workflow perspective, the biggest improvement for us would be to have the drug information and contact information more connected. If we are looking at someone in the contact database, it would be ideal to easily see the drug data linked to their role. And if we are in the Key Drug Database reviewing an update, being able to see the people working on that brand straight away would save extra steps.

Right now we are mainly using Athena for targeted one-to-one outreach, which has been great. But we want to expand that into more marketing activity, building awareness and engagement earlier in the process. There is also a big opportunity to use Athena more consistently for event planning to make sure we get the right audience in the room each time.

We are excited about the future updates we have been hearing about, including improved monthly prompts reporting and the AI-driven messaging tool that would help us build tailored outreach using all the drug and contact data in Athena. That would be huge for us and make our outreach even faster.

We have not fully explored the Brand Scorer yet, but we are looking forward to using that to further refine our focus and make sure our time is directed to the best opportunities.

If the next evolution of the platform continues to make it easier and faster to take action, we know we will keep seeing more value from Athena.