Winston Francois builds marketing systems that survive audits, respect HIPAA and 21 CFR Part 11, and shorten the distance between a qualified HCP and a signed contract. We embed as your fractional growth engineering team, not a slide-deck consultancy.
The Problem
Marketing Runs on Infrastructure Built for a Different Company
Most biotech and pharma companies at this stage scaled their tech stack around clinical operations, not commercial ones. Marketing gets bolted onto whatever CRM regulatory or medical affairs already validated, usually years after it was built for a different purpose. The result is a stack held together by manual exports, disconnected spreadsheets, and a marketing team that spends more time reconciling data than generating pipeline.
Every Martech Change Runs Through a Validation Bottleneck
21 CFR Part 11 requirements around validated systems make IT and QA the default gatekeepers for any tool that touches regulated data, even when the actual use case is a lead-nurture email. Marketing teams either avoid automation entirely or wait months for a validation review that was scoped for clinical systems, not campaign tooling. The company ends up choosing between compliance risk and commercial stagnation.
Patient and HCP Data Sits on Top of Two Privacy Regimes at Once
HIPAA governs anything that touches patient health information, and standard consumer privacy law governs the rest, and most martech platforms were not built to separate the two inside one database. When HCP engagement data mixes with any patient-level signal, lead scoring and segmentation logic has to be built with data handling rules a typical marketing ops hire has never worked with. Get it wrong once and the fix costs more than doing it right the first time.
Sales Cycles Run 12 to 24 Months, Nurture Infrastructure Runs on Nothing
A clinical-to-commercial buying cycle does not fit a standard demand-gen playbook built for 30-day sales cycles. Without a real lead-scoring and nurture system, marketing loses visibility on an HCP or institutional buyer the moment they go quiet, and reengagement becomes a guess instead of a triggered sequence. Momentum built during a conference or a trial readout evaporates by the time the buyer is ready to talk commercial terms.
Medical Affairs and Marketing Do Not Share a Data Model
MSL interactions live in Veeva or a similar medical affairs system, marketing activity lives somewhere else, and the two rarely reconcile into one view of an HCP relationship. Sales ends up working a contact who was already engaged by an MSL last quarter, with no record of what was discussed. Every team thinks they own the relationship and none of them can prove it.
The Analytics Pipeline Would Not Survive an Audit
Marketing attribution gets built in spreadsheets, dashboards get rebuilt from scratch every board cycle, and nobody can reconstruct how a number was calculated six months later. In a regulated industry, that fragility is not just an inconvenience, it is exposure. When compliance or a board member asks where a metric came from, the honest answer is often that nobody remembers.
How We Help
We start with a two-week audit of your actual marketing stack, not the one in the org chart. That means mapping every system that touches an HCP, patient, or institutional lead – CRM, marketing automation, MSL tools, forms, ad platforms – and tracing exactly where data enters, where it gets duplicated, and where compliance already has, or has not, signed off on how it is used.
From the audit we build a prioritized roadmap, not a wish list. Every recommendation gets scored against three things: commercial impact, compliance exposure, and time to validate. We tell you which fixes need a full validation cycle and which can move fast because they never touch regulated data in the first place.
Then we build. That typically means a lead-scoring model that accounts for a multi-year buying cycle instead of a 30-day one, a nurture sequence architecture that survives long silence periods without losing the thread, and a data model that keeps patient-level and HCP-level data properly separated so your legal and compliance teams are not relearning your schema every quarter.
We integrate your marketing automation with whatever medical affairs and sales already use – Veeva, Salesforce Health Cloud, or a homegrown CRM – so an MSL touch, a marketing touch, and a sales touch all show up on the same timeline for the same contact. Nobody should have to ask three people in three departments what happened with an account last quarter.
On the measurement side, we build attribution and reporting pipelines with documented data lineage from day one, so if compliance or the board asks where a number came from, there is an answer that does not start with checking a spreadsheet. Dashboards get built once, version-controlled, and designed to hold up under the kind of scrutiny a regulated business actually gets.
We work fractional and embedded, not project-and-disappear. That means the person building your lead-scoring logic is the same person on your Slack when QA flags a question about it three weeks later.
What we deliver
- Full martech and data-flow audit with a validation-status map
- HCP and patient data segmentation model built for HIPAA and standard privacy law
- Lead-scoring model calibrated to multi-year clinical-to-commercial cycles
- Nurture sequence architecture for long-dormancy re-engagement
- CRM integration between marketing automation and medical affairs/MSL systems (Veeva, Salesforce Health Cloud, or equivalent)
- Attribution and reporting pipeline with documented data lineage for audit readiness
- Documented handoff and change-management process for future validation cycles
The martech stack that got you through Phase 2 is not the one that gets you to commercial launch, and pretending otherwise is the most expensive mistake a growth team can make.
Our Methodology
We run in 90-day sprints because that is long enough to build something real and short enough that you are never locked into a plan built on stale assumptions. Days 1-15 are audit and prioritization. Days 16-45 are build: the infrastructure, integrations, and data models that came out of the roadmap. Days 46-75 are instrumentation and testing, run against live campaigns instead of a staging environment. Days 76-90 are handoff, documentation, and a plan for what compliance and validation need to sign off on next.
This is different from traditional consulting in one specific way: we do not hand you a recommendations deck and leave. We build the thing, ship it into your actual environment, and stay embedded while your team runs it, because a lead-scoring model nobody trusts is worse than no lead-scoring model at all. If QA has a question about how we handled a data field, they ask us directly, not an account manager relaying questions to an engineer who left the project two months ago.
How We Work
The first 30 days are diagnostic. We embed with your marketing, IT, and compliance teams, map the real state of your systems, and come back with a prioritized build plan – not a 60-page audit deck nobody reads.
Days 31-60 are build and integration. We are inside your stack working alongside your existing marketing ops and IT resources, not handing off a spec and waiting. Weekly working sessions replace status update calls, because a status update does not fix a broken integration.
By day 90 you have live infrastructure, not a roadmap for infrastructure. From there we typically stay on as a fractional team, cadence set by what you need – weekly for active build phases, biweekly once systems are stable and the focus shifts to optimization. You get direct access to the people doing the work, not a rotating account team.
If your biotech or pharma company needs growth engineering, we should talk.
- Marketing systems that pass compliance review without a rebuild
- Faster HCP re-engagement after multi-month dormancy periods
- One shared view of HCP relationships across marketing, MSL, and sales
- Attribution reporting that holds up under audit scrutiny
- Reduced manual data reconciliation work for marketing ops
- Shorter validation cycles for future martech changes
If your biotech & pharma company needs growth engineering leadership, we should talk.
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Frequently asked questions
How do you handle 21 CFR Part 11 validation requirements when building marketing systems?
We scope every build against what actually requires validation versus what does not touch regulated data in the first place. A lot of marketing automation work – email sequencing, ad targeting, campaign reporting – never touches a system that needs Part 11 validation, and treating it like it does just slows the whole company down.
What happens to patient and HCP data during a growth engineering engagement?
We treat patient-level data and HCP engagement data as two separate categories from the first day of the audit, because HIPAA governs one and standard privacy law governs the other, and mixing them creates exposure neither your legal team nor ours wants. We build the data model to keep that separation clean at the schema level, not just in a policy document.
Can you integrate marketing automation with our existing Veeva or Salesforce Health Cloud setup?
Yes, that is one of the most common builds we do for companies at your stage. The goal is a shared timeline where an MSL touch, a marketing touch, and a sales touch all show up against the same contact record, instead of three departments working the same account with no visibility into each other's activity.
Why does our clinical-to-commercial sales cycle break standard lead-scoring models?
Most lead-scoring models are built for a 30 to 90 day buying cycle, and they treat silence as disqualification. A biotech or pharma buying cycle can run 12 to 24 months with long dormant periods driven by clinical timelines, budget cycles, or institutional approval processes that have nothing to do with buyer intent.
Is Winston Francois a good fit for a company that has not built any marketing infrastructure yet?
Yes, and it is often easier than fixing a stack that already has years of technical debt in it. Companies that scaled through clinical stages without commercial marketing infrastructure sometimes have an advantage here, because we are building on a clean slate instead of untangling a legacy CRM with years of undocumented workarounds.
What does a growth engineering engagement cost?
Engagements are scoped fractional, typically in the range of $15K-$35K per month depending on the size of your stack and how much integration work is involved. That covers the embedded team, not a fixed deliverable list, because the highest-value work in the first 90 days is usually the audit finding it.
Should our IT and compliance teams be involved from the start?
Yes, and we insist on it. Marketing infrastructure that gets built without IT and compliance in the room from day one is infrastructure that gets rejected, delayed, or rebuilt six months later when someone in QA finally reviews it.
