By the time most pharma companies realise a launch is underperforming, it’s already too late to fix it.
The uncomfortable truth is that many are flying blind from the start.
Under pressure
Launch teams know the pressure. Expectations are high, timelines are tight and the first year carries disproportionate weight. Evidence suggests that more than 80% of launches continue as they start in their first 12 months – well or badly. In other words, what happens in year one tends to stick.
Yet across Europe, launches consistently fall short of expectations.
It’s not for lack of effort. Teams are experienced and well-resourced, with highly detailed plans. When pressure builds, the response is predictable: refine the national strategy, add headcount, commission more research. It feels like the right response: more rigour, more resource, more analysis.
And yet something critical is missing: a clear view of what’s actually happening on the ground.
Too many companies treat national reimbursement as the finish line. In fact it’s only the starting point. What happens next is determined at a sub-national level. Regions, payers and local decision-makers ultimately shape whether a medicine reaches patients.
This is where the blind spot emerges.
National decisions are visible. Local implementation is not. It unfolds unevenly, with significant variation between localities. Even when medicines are recommended, access can be delayed, restricted or deprioritised depending on local dynamics.
The result is a persistent gap between national intent and real-world delivery.
UK data illustrates the point. In the first two years of VPAG, 73% of formularies failed to list new medicines recommended by NICE within the mandated time frame. While the structures differ across Europe, the underlying pattern is consistent: a national ‘yes’ doesn’t automatically translate into access.
For launch teams, the implications are uncomfortable. Without visibility below the national level, it’s difficult to know how uptake is progressing. More importantly, it’s almost impossible to respond in time.
Sales data, often the default measure of performance, arrives too late to be useful in year one. By the time a problem shows up in the data, months have already passed. Course-correcting takes time; it requires new materials, new messaging and renewed engagement with local stakeholders. Before you know it, you’re in year two.
That’s the cost of going in blind.
Teams are expected to deliver rapid uptake, but lack the real-time, local-level intelligence to manage it.
A better way
The reality is this: sub-national visibility is a prerequisite for launch success.
The companies that win are those that move beyond lagging indicators and towards continuous visibility of how access evolves across local systems.
At ValueBase, we believe addressing this blind spot starts well before launch.
Using analogue data – evidence of how comparable products have performed at a local level – teams can build a clearer picture of how access is likely to unfold. You can identify early and slow adopters, anticipate barriers and plan resource with far greater precision. Global expectations can be grounded in reality, while in-country teams focus where it counts.
This fundamentally changes the nature of launch planning. Instead of entering the market with an incomplete picture, you start with a clear view of where uptake is most likely to be won or lost.
That visibility must continue once the product is live. Real-time tracking of local access dynamics allows teams to see where uptake is deviating from plan and where action is needed. Instead of waiting months to realise there’s a problem, teams can intervene early – adjusting strategy, redirecting resource and maintaining control during that critical first year.
This is exactly the model ValueBase has been built to support.
Our launch intelligence platform provides continuous, local-level visibility across the full launch window – from pre-launch landscape mapping through to real-time visibility of access metrics. It redefines how launches are managed: from reactive to proactive, from broad allocation of resource to precise, locality-driven execution.
That means more accurate forecasting, more targeted deployment of resources and faster, more confident decision-making under pressure. It changes the internal conversation too. When performance is under scrutiny, teams can look beyond lagging indicators and demonstrate clearly where uptake is progressing, where it’s not and what’s being done in response.
Most importantly, it changes the outcome. With clear local-level visibility, medicines reach patients sooner.
Act now
The first 12 months of a launch determine what follows – and too often, they are navigated blind. The teams that succeed eliminate that blind spot early, enabling them to act before trajectory is set.
The choice is simple: get visibility – or lose control.
