AAPS – A Killer App To Announce The CMO Award Winners
By Rob Wright, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader
Follow Me On Twitter @RfwrightLSL
By Rob Wright
I have always referred to the annual American Association of Pharmaceuticals Scientists meeting as A-A-P-S. Prior to attending this year’s event, which took place October 14 – 18 at McCormick Place in Chicago, I had several people ask me if I was going to “aaps” (pronounced the same as a smart phone app with an s on the end). When we hear about a killer app, we share the info with friends and colleagues because we think they will benefit from it. So let me tell you why I think this year’s AAPS was one killer app to announce and meet with the 2012 CMO Leadership Award winners.
CMO Leadership Awards
Life Science Leader announced the 2012 CMO Leadership Award winners at AAPS through the publishing of our special issue. We created quite a buzz on the show floor, which I walked end-to-end taking pictures of award-winning company representatives. These can be seen in a number of places, such as my new social media experiment – Pinterest – as well the CMO Leadership Awards site.
I met with folks from c-level execs to key account managers and got to explain why they should truly take pride in winning a 2012 CMO Leadership Award. Here’s why. Unlike other industry awards which involve subjective processes of either being nominated or self-completed applications that are judged by panel members to determine the winner, Life Science Leader’s CMO Leadership Awards are determined through the collection of objective data from your customers. Though some skeptics remain, on the whole, people are starting to get it. One person described it as, the Consumer Reports of the CMO industry. I’ll go along with that. For those who want to learn more about the data behind our CMO Leadership Awards you can check out Nice Insights at http://niceinsight.com/.
This Company Gets It
One company that really gets the CMO Leadership Awards is Norwich — one of only four companies to be a five category CMO Leadership Award winner. (If you want to know who the other three are, check out page 30 of our special issue here. Joseph Miller, marketing director for Norwich, informed me they have been using the data for quite a while as a means of benchmarking how they are doing in the customer service department. According to Miller, winning the 2012 CMO Leadership Award in all five categories is proof that what they are doing is working. But even bigger and more important proof is the fact that Norwich has achieved significant business growth in key areas such as volume of projects currently in development, commercial production, scope of projects expanded into multiple service categories, and total value of new business won. For example, in the first quarter, new client awards accounted for 33% of all Norwich projects and repeat business more than doubled when compared to the same period last year. They even have the CMO Leadership Awards logo on their website www.norwichpharma.com.
Show Me The Leadership Award
At a recent event, I had an employee from a CMO ask, “Hey, how do we get one of those CMO Leadership Awards?” My answer: Provide better customer service. You see, we don’t determine the award winners — you, our readers do. Unfortunately, however, it pains me to admit that there are some companies conspicuously absent from this year’s CMO Leadership Award listing. So if you are flipping through the issue to see if the company you hired as your strategic outsourcing manufacturing partner is a CMO award winner, and you don’t see them listed — don’t panic! They may still be an award winner but for whatever reason, chose not to be listed. Ask your CMO if they won. Let them know the importance you place on using the CMO Leadership Awards as a means of validating your CMO selection decision. Just like people rely on companies like Consumer Reports and CARFAX for research and validation for their personal purchase decisions, you can rely on Life Science Leader’s Leadership Awards for your outsourcing business decision-making needs. Just say, “Show me the Leadership Award.”