Check for pharmaceutical sector experience, evidence of familiarity with regulatory review processes, and a portfolio of current, verifiable client work.
General healthcare experience and pharmaceutical experience are not the same thing. Ask directly about MLR or equivalent review processes, HCP verification, and multi-market regulatory variation — an agency that has not encountered these will learn on your project, at your cost.
Ask to see live, current examples of their pharmaceutical client work, not just written case studies, and check whether those sites still reflect good practice today rather than being outdated portfolio pieces.
An agency that treats your regulatory requirements as a genuine constraint to design around, rather than an obstacle to work around, is more likely to deliver something that survives contact with your review process. Watch for how directly they ask about your specific claims, review chain and market complexity during the sales conversation itself.
For a larger project, running a formal RFP process is often worthwhile, since it forces a consistent comparison across agencies on the same requirements. See pharma website RFP checklist for what that process should include, though a smaller project may not justify the time a full RFP takes to run properly.
Agency size matters less than genuine sector expertise, since a smaller specialist agency often understands pharma-specific constraints, such as MLR review and HCP verification, better than a larger generalist one that treats those requirements as an afterthought rather than a starting assumption for the project.
Ask directly how they have handled MLR review integration, HCP verification and multi-market rollout on previous projects, and ask for specific examples rather than general claims. An agency that can describe concrete past decisions on these points is a stronger signal than one offering only general capability statements.
Yes, references from current clients are worth requesting, particularly clients in a comparable regulatory position, since they can speak candidly about how the agency handled review cycles, delays and scope changes in practice. A reference conversation often surfaces working-relationship details a proposal or portfolio review will not show.
Tell us about your project and we will show relevant examples of our work.