The Art of the Market Shaping Deal, with Alan Staple

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• 02:09

  So, a lot of these assignments, especially when I first started, kind of, had the Mission Impossible, sort of, sound about them. Somebody would call you up and say, "Look, we've got to get this done. Here's what has to happen. Get on with it," and, you know, call me. And sometimes our goals were extremely audacious and very, very challenging. And you would get about as much background information as they do on the Mission Impossible show. You get two sentences, and then the tape, kind of, evaporates, and you're going, ″Oh, really? Okay, how are we going to do it?

• 19:17

  This was probably one of the biggest deals that had ever been done in market-shaping at the time, where the Gates Foundation and others risked over $300 million on a six-year-long volume guarantee, where quarterly orders had to be met over that entire period. And we committed to 40 million units of the product at a time when the sales were around 2 million units a year. So, we were predicting a very large increase in usage.

• 01:37

  If you are going to engage in bringing the supply side and the demand side together as a, kind of, trusted intermediary, the key to that is credibility. How are you going to have credibility with the sellers, the drug companies, and diagnostic companies? How are you going to have credibility with the buyers, who may represent national health services, in our case, or international agencies that are procuring products for these countries? How do you get that credibility, and then how do you utilize it to become a trusted intermediary?