Clarity in Complexity: The Benefits of a Business Stance Playbook

By Lisa Damhof

Medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers regularly face commercial contracting challenges in a complex healthcare environment. Whether a manufacturer is a small start-up or a large global organization, it operates under increased pricing scrutiny, often complex contracting models, and evolving regulatory and stakeholder expectations. One practical approach to addressing these challenges is the creation and implementation of a commercial contracting business stance playbook.

A well-designed playbook may help your organization strengthen commercial performance while maintaining legal and regulatory compliance by serving as a cross-functional, standardized framework that guides pricing strategy, outlines business and legal guardrails and negotiation boundaries, and defines approval pathways.

“A well-designed playbook can be a powerful risk-management and efficiency tool. By clearly outlining the company’s stances, including potential fallback positions, organizations can achieve consistency and efficiencies in contract negotiations. A playbook also aligns internal teams around shared principles and strategies, creating an opportunity to pursue growth objectives without compromising legal and regulatory obligations.”
Lisa Damhof, Associate Attorney

Drives Consistency

A business stance playbook promotes organizational consistency across contract negotiations, aligning the company on pricing decisions and other business obligations by documenting the underlying strategy rationale, approval matrices, and negotiation guardrails.

A well-prepared playbook can streamline pricing actions and decisions across the sales, marketing, finance, legal, and contract operation functions through standardized customer pricing tiers, discount thresholds, and rebate structures. Such alignment can reduce variability and ad hoc concessions that, over time, may erode margins, hinder market access, and undermine reimbursement goals and strategies. A predefined negotiation strategy also reduces the likelihood of unnecessary and potentially risky “race to the bottom” price offerings, which can occur when manufacturers are pressured by competitive customer terms and deadlines.

A playbook creates a framework that can generally be applied in various forms time and again across product lines, customer profiles, and geographic regions. It is a “living” document, shifting and adjusting with company growth, regulatory changes, market dynamics, and changes in company leadership. Insights and internal learnings gained over time and with each customer negotiation are incorporated back into the playbook, ultimately improving future negotiations. Manufacturers can be confident that their customer contract negotiations are based on well-thought-out strategic discussions, structured to reflect product value, rather than undocumented, ad hoc decisions made in a scramble to reach a deal’s finish line.

From a business operation standpoint, playbooks can also help simplify the onboarding of new team members. In addition to quickly bringing new team members up to speed regarding company positions and strategies, they can also support an overall understanding of how a company’s individual departments are structured by detailing approval pathways.

Enhances Company Efficiencies

A business stance playbook creates efficiency, ultimately providing an opportunity to strengthen customer relationships and improve each customer’s experience with the company. The essence of a playbook is to outline pre-approved “stances” that commonly arise in contracting requests. These requests may include items like price protections or discounts, rebate structures, purchase volume tiers, or the ability to enter multi-year agreement terms. Putting in the work up front to proactively define the company’s stances on these items minimizes internal back-and-forth and accelerates customer response time.

Valuing or prioritizing stances also equips negotiating stakeholders with a clear understanding of where they might have an ability to “give” or trade off on a contract provision that may be important to the customer but is less valued by the company, in exchange for more beneficial terms on a provision that is highly valued by the company.

A playbook equips company sales and contracting teams with clear, consistent messaging, enabling sales representatives and contract managers to efficiently articulate clinical and economic value to customers. Customers experience a predictable and professional contracting negotiation process with the company, which instills confidence in the company’s ability to respond to proposals, requests, and inquiries. A steady contract negotiation process can position a manufacturer as a disciplined and compliant industry partner. This can shift the overall focus of the negotiation to more lasting outcomes with customers that are established on a solid base, one that is built upon and prioritizes the shared goal of ensuring patients receive the products they need.

Enhances Cross-Functional Alignment

A well-prepared business stance playbook can also play an important role in unifying leadership and aligning commercial, legal, compliance, and finance teams around shared pricing decisions, risk tolerances, and company priorities. Proactive conversations during the playbook’s development and refinement create internal transparency around expectations and boundaries. This inevitably reduces friction and debate between stakeholders across the company when a contract negotiation deadline is looming. A playbook provides the tools and information that negotiating team members need to adequately and consistently represent stakeholder positions across company functions.

Company unity and organizational clarity reduce internal and external confusion, re-work, and down-to-the-wire escalations and concessions during all types of customer negotiations that a manufacturer may face, whether the negotiation is fast-paced and involves competitive pressures or long and drawn-out, with a customer that may not prioritize the deal in the same manner as the company.

Supports Legal and Compliance Requirements

A playbook aligns with and incorporates legal and compliance feedback into the company’s application of its commercial business stances; this limits the potential removal of required language that may inadvertently create legal and compliance risks. Further, a playbook demonstrates uniformity and consistency in what a manufacturer offers and how it treats its customers.

As outlined above, standardized pricing and other commercial decisions and strategies provide justification based upon documented consideration and product value. This reduces the risk of offering customers inconsistent or overly aggressive terms or pricing, which could ultimately present anti-kickback concerns. The company can also negotiate with confidence, knowing its legal guidance and requirements have been integrated into contract language regarding privacy, how sensitive customer data and confidential information are handled, and how confidentiality obligations are upheld.

How Gardner Law Can Help

You can start small: rather than tackling the creation of a robust, intricately detailed playbook immediately, outlining every position a company may take in a negotiation, begin the process by identifying a few key positions on which to define initial stances. The playbook can evolve and grow as the company matures and gains insights over time.

In a highly scrutinized healthcare environment with continuous innovation and evolving stakeholder expectations, a well-designed and carefully crafted business stance playbook creates a steady base. Our team can help create this tool, enabling medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers to negotiate consistently, compliantly, and confidently, while protecting trust and supporting long-term collaboration with customers. Contact us to get started.