The HEOR lead is always selling.

I spent today selling.

Not a product. An evidence generation plan. Multi-million dollars worth of studies that — if endorsed — will fund the launch-critical items our payers, clinicians, and access teams will need at approval.

The people writing the checks are not health economists. Some of them are not even scientists. They are commercial leaders, finance partners, executive sponsors. They don't speak ICER or partitioned survival or target product profile. They speak revenue, risk, and return.

And yet the room had to believe.

Because no matter how rigorous the science is, if the check doesn't clear, the study doesn't happen. The comparator doesn't get chosen. The endpoint doesn't get captured. The payer conversation three years from now goes differently — or doesn't happen at all.

Here's what I wish someone had told me earlier:

Technical skills get you the job. Soft skills let you keep it and thrive in it.

The HEOR lead is always selling something.

An idea. A budget. A study design. A tool. A narrative for payers, for commercial, for regulators, for the CFO, for the cross-functional partner who has fifteen other asks on her desk this quarter.

Having the right answer is table stakes. Advocating for it — in a language that lands with someone who does not share your frameworks, your vocabulary, or sometimes even your field — is the actual job.

Influence is not a bonus skill.

It is not the polish on top of the science.

It is the delivery system for the science.

The HEOR lead who cannot persuade doesn't get the study funded. Doesn't get the platform. Doesn't ship the evidence that moves the label, the access pathway, the eventual coverage decision that determines whether a patient ever gets the therapy.

That's not a soft skill. That's survival.

— Sanket

P.S. Hit reply with the question you've never been able to ask anywhere else. I read every one.