KOL Services
KOL Identification & Mapping
KOL identification is about identifying anyone with the potential to impact your work — clinicians, authors, speakers, nurses, tweeters, youtubers, or the medics building cutting edge apps for their patients.
KOL mapping is about seeing the connections, collaborations, and networks, giving you a complete picture of the Expert/KOL landscape.
Our KOL identification & mapping services enable you to achieve all this and, most importantly, help you answer the three most important questions in this context: who should you be working with, what should you be doing with them, and why? All of it driven by the data and evidence.
Influence Mapping
Who influences whom? Whose opinion serves as guidance to others? Who’s connected to whom? These are just some of the characteristics when considering an influence mapping exercise. And each question is driven by its own research process.
For example, an influence map built by analysing publication co-authorship within a therapy area does not necessarily equate to true “influence” between those authors.
Our influence mapping exercises tell you about true influence – the 20% that can impact the behaviour and decision making of the other 80%, the KOLs with the right expertise, reach, and gravitas to engage and communicate with others.
Rising Star Mapping
Identifying and engaging with emerging experts and Rising Stars is a key component of medical affairs. Their role and value in supporting the successful clinical journey of a molecule is well established.
Identifying Rising Stars is a multifaceted process involving both objective and subjective metrics, because how an emerging expert is viewed by others is equally important as their uptick in outputs. Other cultural and social factors specific to each therapy area and geographical territory also come into play when identifying Rising Stars.
DOL Mapping
By Digital KOLs (DOLs) we mean anyone with the power to impact your work in the digital realm – the tweeting clinician, the blogging nurse practitioner, or the empowered patient who is active on social media. All such DOLs will be important and relevant to meeting the strategic objectives you have set around the adoption of your medicines or devices.
Our range of digital KOL services help you navigate all the facets of this brave new world – identification, analytics, segmentation, phenotyping, mindset, monitoring, and landscape mapping – without forgetting that the traditional underlying principles of thought leadership, expertise, and human influence still apply.
Advocacy Mapping
How do you know whether you are successfully ‘changing the needle’ amongst your KOLs with all your activities and initiatives? How do you demonstrate the ROI of all your work? And ultimately, how do you validate your spend?
Our Advocacy Mapping combines technology with direct KOL research to help you measure and track KOL advocacy in near-real-time.
With enough cycles you can get to an n=1 state where rich advocacy data can help you decide which experts to engage with, what activities to involve them in, and even the flow of scientific content to each and every KOL.
Sentiment Mapping
‘Sentiment’ is an assessment of a KOLs position made by those in your organisation who engage with those KOLs on a daily basis. ‘Mindset’ involves asking KOLs directly about their beliefs and where they stand in the context of your scientific story. Together they give you an unbelievably accurate and holistic insight about your KOLs.
Benchmarking and then tracking sentiment and mindset at regular intervals enables you to establish a baseline. Then you can view how KOL thinking evolves over time in response to the messages, communications, and initiatives of both you and your competitors.
KOL Research
What do KOLs think of the data you just presented at a Congress? How do they resonate with your scientific story? Is there a key issue around which you need to track KOL thinking? How are KOLs responding to a recent competitor data release?
These are just some of questions around which we conduct specific KOL research to support our clients.
Given that all we’ve done since our inception is work with and around KOLs, it’s no surprise that our connection with that community is absolutely unparalleled. This is what enables us to bring back insights to advance your strategic and tactical objectives.
KOL Engagement Planning
Once you understand the KOL landscape, then comes the most important decisions:who to engage with, what for, and why?
Our highly interactive Engagement Planning workshops help you get to the right decisions with ease and precision. Before the workshop we gather all the evidence needed, from multiple internal and external sources, to start the engagement planning process. There is always plenty of discussion and debate around every KOL with your internal stakeholders, ultimately arriving at the important decisions on how best to engage your most important KOLs.