Why the Best Commercial Leaders in CDMO Often Don't Fit the Brief

There's a particular kind of commercial leader that CDMOs and CROs have been trained to recognise. Scientific fluency. A CV that reads like a progression up a clearly defined ladder. Confidence that looks a certain way in a room.

The problem is that description rules out some of the best commercial talent in the industry.

Henny Zijlstra, Chief Commercial Officer at Ardena (former CCO at Adragos Pharma), is a case in point. In a recent conversation on Vector Talent's podcast, Elevate, she was refreshingly direct about her background: "I failed science at school, actually, and I would fail again and again and again." She doesn't hold a PhD. She didn't come up through the lab. And she's built a career that has taken her from senior director roles to CCO positions at some of the most respected names in contract pharma.

So what does she have instead? Something that hiring managers in this space are often slower to value: the ability to build trust quickly, to move fast, to read a room, and to know precisely where her expertise ends and someone else's begins.

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"Maybe I don't know this," she says, "but I do know all of the other things."

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The confidence trap in senior hiring

When organisations talk about hiring confident leaders, they often mean something quite specific. They mean someone who commands a room in a way that feels familiar. Someone whose authority reads clearly on paper before they've even walked through the door.

But confidence in commercial leadership is more nuanced than that. Henny describes walking into C-suite conferences with ratios of 80 men to 6 women and making a deliberate choice about how to carry herself in those spaces. She talks about a morning routine built specifically to protect her focus, limiting social media, gratitude journaling, walking her dogs before the day begins. Not as wellness accessories, but as tools that allow her to show up and perform at the level her role demands.

That's a different kind of confidence. Not the kind that relies on the room already being set up for you. The kind you have to build and maintain on purpose.

CDMOs and CROs operate in an environment where that distinction matters enormously. Commercial leaders in this space aren't just selling a service. They're managing relationships with biotech clients whose molecules are, as Henny puts it, "their baby." The stakes are high, the science is complex, and the trust has to be earned on multiple levels simultaneously.

Hiring purely for scientific pedigree or for a confidence that reads well on a shortlist can mean missing the people who are actually best equipped to do that work.

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What gets overlooked

Henny describes her edge in commercial settings clearly. She responds to enquiries before competitors have finished drafting theirs. She brings in subject matter experts at exactly the right moment rather than trying to be the expert herself. She's transparent about what she doesn't know, which, far from undermining her credibility, tends to build it.

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"I say that all the time," she explains. "Please tell me again, because I'm still not following. Not as if I'm five years old, as if I'm three years old."

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That kind of intellectual honesty is rare at senior level. It requires a security that doesn't depend on being the smartest person in the room. And in an industry where CDMOs are increasingly expected to act as genuine development partners rather than just service providers, that quality is commercially valuable in ways that don't always show up in a job spec.

The other thing that gets overlooked is the relationship-first instinct that underpins the best commercial hires. Henny is direct about this: "People buy from people." Her role at Ardena came through her network, not through a formal search process. The introduction came because of relationships she'd invested in over years, long before there was a specific opportunity on the table.

For organisations looking to build commercial functions that can genuinely open doors in a competitive market, that kind of networked credibility is worth more than it's often given credit for in hiring decisions.

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What this means for how CDMOs hire

At Vector Talent, we work across CDMOs, CROs and biotech, and we see this pattern consistently. Organisations set out to hire a CCO or VP Commercial and write a brief that describes someone who already exists in a very narrow band. Scientific background preferred. Experience at a named competitor. A certain seniority that proves itself through titles rather than outcomes.

What they often end up with is a hire who fits the template but doesn't move the needle. The person who could have moved the needle didn't make the shortlist because their journey looked unconventional.

The commercial leaders who tend to build the strongest teams and the most durable client relationships in this space are often the ones who've had to work differently. Who've compensated for what they don't have by sharpening what they do. Who've developed resilience not as a personality trait but as a practical tool for operating in environments that weren't built with them in mind.

If your hiring process is designed to find the obvious candidate, it's probably filtering out the exceptional one.

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Henny covers a lot more ground in the full conversation, from negotiating your salary to trusting your gut on a career change. Listen to the full episode here: www.vectorta.com/article/gut-feeling-guilt-and-getting-to-the-top-a-conversation-with-henny-zijlstra

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