Marinomed Biotech: Finding the right biotech partners without months of research

"Instead of wasting time hunting for contacts, we actually spend that time selling. That’s a big win."

Erich Durchschlag

Head of Business Development

Finding partners in one of biotech's hardest markets

Marinomed Biotech AG develops proprietary, patent-protected pharmaceutical technologies and licenses them to partners around the world. Every commercial opportunity depends on identifying the right pharmaceutical companies, CDMOs, CROs and formulation partners, then reaching the people responsible for evaluating new technologies.

For Erich, who leads Business Development at Marinomed, that process had always been research-heavy.

"We are market agnostic. Depending on the therapeutic area, we look for global partners, regional partners or single-country partners."

Finding those companies wasn't the difficult part. Finding the right ones, and the right people inside them, was.

When research becomes the bottleneck

Business development relied on 3 familiar channels: existing relationships, meetings at industry congresses and manual desk research. The process worked, but it didn't scale.

Building a long list of potential partners could take 1 to 2 weeks. Narrowing that list into qualified opportunities often required another 2 to 3 months of researching portfolios, clinical programs and strategic fit. When projects became urgent, Marinomed hired external consultants to accelerate the work.

"You really had to rely on the information published on each company's website. If you swim in your own pool, you always stay in your pool."

Even after all that effort, another challenge remained: finding the person who could actually make a decision.

"If you are linked to someone who is 50 percent involved, that's fine. If you are linked to the decision maker, that changes everything."

Why SalesPort worked

Marinomed initially adopted SalesPort to find verified contact details, particularly direct phone numbers. But as the team explored the platform, the biggest value turned out not to be contact data alone. It was combining company research, qualification and decision-maker discovery in a single workflow.

Instead of researching companies first and hunting for contacts later, the team now starts with Account Intelligence and the AI Sales Researcher to identify qualified targets, validates why each company is relevant, and then reveals the people responsible for partnerships.

"Before, you just had a hint. Now the tool selects a company because of specific facts, and those facts are easy to verify."

SalesPort also matched the way a focused business development team actually works. Department filters, regional targeting and one-click contact discovery helped the team reach exactly the right people, without paying for enterprise functionality they didn't need. It had already beaten the 3 or 4 alternatives the team tested, including a contact module from a provider they already used that cost far more.

"The reveal-contact button and the filters for department and region let us find exactly who we were looking for."

What changed

Research that once consumed months now takes a fraction of the time. Erich estimates the team spends only 20-30% of the effort previously required, saving the equivalent of 2 to 3 months of full-time work per research project, roughly €25,000 each, across 4 or 5 projects a year.

The quality of outreach improved as well. Rather than contacting 70-80 companies to generate a handful of positive conversations, Marinomed now approaches around 35-40 highly relevant targets and expects 10-12 positive responses.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was market visibility. During one sourcing project, Account Intelligence uncovered more than 40 relevant companies the team had not found after 2 months of manual research. The same precision reached individuals: searching for CROs in India, the team identified the right people directly and arranged a preclinical study.

"We got to know 40 companies we had no idea existed. SalesPort really expands your universe and your horizon."

Results at a glance

70-80% less research time, down to 20-30% of the previous effort.
~€110,000 in time savings across research 4-5 projects a year.
10x increase in positive reply rate , from about 2 per 70-80 companies to 10-12 per 35-40.
40+ relevant leads discovered in a single project that manual research had missed.
Right contacts reached directly, including CROs in India, where the team arranged a preclinical study.

What's next

SalesPort has become a repeatable part of how Marinomed finds partners. Contact discovery remains the core use case, but Account Intelligence is taking on a larger strategic role. For the second half of the year, Erich plans a more structured push for the company's Solv4U formulation partnerships: using Account Intelligence to identify targets, then narrowing a shortlist of around 200 companies before reaching the right contacts.

His advice to teams still weighing it up is simple.