Matthew DeLisle
Senior Director, Marketing
Salix
A Simple Plan for Success
“My experience over the past 17 years in pharma has told me that the key to execution is simplification,” explains Matthew DeLisle. That key helped Matthew grow a nearly billion-dollar brand 20% YoY. It also meant that he made the right career choice when he decided to move on from Novartis.
“The reason I left Novartis and I came to Salix was because I wanted to have the pressure of being responsible for the biggest brand at an organization,” Matthew says. That’s exactly what he got when he arrived at Salix and took over as brand director on their IBS drug. The first thing he noticed: The current approach was way too complicated. So he decided to break it all down and rebuild. Through talking with several physicians and reps, and utilizing market research, they learned that the main reasons physicians choose an IBS treatment comes down to three things: Efficacy in managing the diarrhea symptoms, efficacy in managing the abdominal pain symptoms, and safety. All three were strengths of the brand, and that was all that they would need to build a message platform that contributed to growth.
Currently, Matthew is working on a relaunch drug for diabetes with a different mechanism of action—it works in the brain rather than the pancreas or other common organs associated with diabetes. As part of the campaign, they are building a new movement to educate the HCP community on the role of the brain in diabetes and how it plays a major part of managing the metabolic activity. They are currently carving out a marketplace ahead of its launch in the near term. In the longer term, Matthew has larger career goals he hopes to achieve.
“I’ve obviously been in charge of brands, but I eventually would like to lead a business unit that has sales and marketing responsibility where I have the accountability to try to shape a particular area of disease management,” Matthew says. “I really want to be in a position that allows me to help develop people, because that’s one of the things that get me out of bed in the morning.”
