Life Science Partner places entrepreneurial-minded sales exec to lead Cleveland Clinic’s diagnostic services spin-off
Life Science Partner announces the placement of Mark R.Willig, as CEO, at Cleveland-based PrognostiX, Inc. As the company’s chief executive, Willig will lead product development and commercialization of technology while overseeing finance and marketing strategy.
A medical diagnostics company founded by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, PrognostiX’s testing kits and laboratory services focus on inflammatory processes in major disease areas including cardiovascular, respiratory, neurodegenerative disease and obesity.
“It’s been invigorating to watch this come together for the Cleveland Clinic Foundation’s first homegrown spin off,” says Thomas H. Callaway, Life Science Partner’s founder and president. “PrognostiX has won product approval, defined a strategy, and prepared for production. What they needed was an entrepreneur to catalyze sales and organizational development. Mark fits that bill very well.”
Willig joins another Life Science Partner placement at PrognostiX, Vijay Aggarwal, who is a member of the board of directors.
At both established and specialized diagnostic firms, as well as companies serving other healthcare fields, Willig has demonstrated his ability to devise successful go-to-market strategies while planning, assembling and managing effective sales forces. Previously with Specialty Labs, a clinical reference laboratory and diagnostic research company, he was senior vice president of sales and marketing. There, he set strategy for the sales and marketing organization, guiding transitions to a customer-driven focus, a vertical-markets approach, and greater international revenues. Under Willig, Specialty was the only national reference lab to record eight consecutive quarters of organic revenue growth.
As vice president of sales at Myriad Genetics, a biopharmaceutical company, Willig led an organization that saw sales increase by an average of 200 percent annually over a four-year period. Willig managed a total in-house staff of 106 people in addition to an alliance partner’s sales force of 700. He also held responsibility for sales infrastructure and process improvements including a customer relationship management software implementation.
With software developer Orca Medical Systems, as vice president of sales and marketing, Willig devised the start-up’s first marketing strategies, which targeted hospital emergency departments worldwide. He also recruited and trained a national sales force. Within 18 months, Orca won $3 million in new business and added some of the most prestigious provider organizations in the US to its client roster.
Willig began his career in the diagnostics division of Abbott Laboratories, a provider of diagnostic instrumentation and reagents to hospitals, clinics and reference labs. Most recently at Abbott, as integrated health systems manager, Willig had responsibility over a staff of 42 sales reps selling to and serving large healthcare systems.
Willig holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Missouri.
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