Pharma is under pressure. Their answer? Push more work downstream, demand it faster, and expect the same (or higher) standard for less.
Over 30 years' experience in the pharmaceuticals industry, specialising in commercialization
You’ve been there.
It’s late Thursday afternoon. The client just dropped an urgent ask: a revised TPP framework, fully aligned to a new draft label and ready for global input by Monday. The scope has doubled, the timeline’s halved, and the fee hasn’t moved an inch.
You look at your team, already stretched across two other launches, and realise: this is going to cost you. Maybe not in revenue, but in sleep, margin, morale, or all three.
And no one’s complaining.
Because this is the new normal.
Pharma is under pressure. Their answer? Push more work downstream, demand it faster, and expect the same (or higher) standard for less.
And consultancies, especially in market access, are caught in the middle.
It’s a quiet kind of pressure. A slow tightening of the business model that’s changing how consulting firms pitch, deliver, and survive.
And if you’re not adapting, it’s only going to get tighter.
Over the past five years, pharma has undergone a transformation: budgets are tighter, pipelines are more complex, and internal teams are leaner. So they’ve done what any large organisation does when under pressure, they outsource their pain.
To you.
Market access teams used to call consultancies when they needed extra thinking power. Now they call because they need everything done: strategy, structure, analysis, deliverables. Start to finish, at speed.
And the scope? It expands daily.
What began as a simple TPP refresh now needs competitor mapping, KOL validation, and pull-through materials for affiliates.
Same price. Less time.
This isn’t scope creep.
This is the new client mindset.
Consultancies were never built to absorb this kind of pressure. At least, not profitably.
You quote a fixed-fee project based on best-case timelines. The client pushes the start date. Then they compress the delivery. Suddenly you’re pulling in more resources to hit a tighter deadline, while silently watching the margin evaporate.
And it’s happening everywhere:
The work isn’t harder because the science changed.
It’s harder because the model no longer matches the reality.
If your margins are being squeezed, your people are being crushed.
Talented consultants who should be doing sharp strategic thinking are instead chasing documents, formatting slides, and re-checking references. Juniors are thrown into the deep end to keep timelines moving. Seniors become quality control machines.
No one has time to breathe, let alone innovate.
And high churn becomes an accepted line item in the business plan.
All because the system is being held together with willpower and Sharepoint.
Most firms react the same way: they add bodies. Bring in a freelancer. Pull in another analyst. Hope more hands will keep things moving.
But more people means more fragmentation. More onboarding. More inefficiency.
And more cost.
At some point, the answer has to be: do the work differently.
Not with generic automation. Not with generic AI.
But with infrastructure that understands the unique, high-pressure world of market access consulting.
The consultancies that will survive this squeeze, and grow through it, are the ones redesigning how work gets done.
They’re cutting down manual work by structuring knowledge once and reusing it across teams and projects.
They’re pulling insights in minutes, not hours.
They’re freeing consultants from grunt work and giving them back their thinking time.
And the result?
They deliver faster. Stay profitable. And retain their best people.
Because in a world where clients expect more for less, doing more of the same just isn’t sustainable.
The squeeze is real. But so is the opportunity.
Rethink the model. Reinvent the machine.
And build a consultancy that thrives—on your terms.
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