Success in KOL engagement: finding the perfect partnership model
Watson and Crick, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Ben and Jerry, cheese and pickle: winning partnerships have one thing in common – a shared passion and true collaboration!
When thinking about successful partnerships between Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and pharma, the situation is no different.
At Scout, we use our expertise, built up over the last 20 years in the business, to find the right KOLs for a particular company or project, based on shared interests and expertise. While we use data to help us identify the most highly relevant KOLs, understanding them as people is critical too to ensure a truly collaborative approach.
The finest partnerships are not just about finding the most experienced partner: there needs to be shared goals and a truly collaborative approach to enable each partner to play to their strengths, personality, skills and interests. How you work with your partners, making sure they feel comfortable and engaged in their role is fundamental to the success of any collaborative project with KOLs.
At Scout, if you want your KOL partnerships to feel like the perfect cheese and pickle sandwich, follow these key elements to our approach of creating collaborative work with highly successful results:
1. Put the effort in upfront to find the right KOL partners
You wouldn’t make a jam and mustard sandwich, right? Just because a KOL is an expert in an overarching therapy area, it doesn’t mean they necessarily have a shared interest in your company, product or particular project. At Scout, we precisely analyse the research interests of each potential KOL partner, together with their professional experiences of publishing, advising, presenting, working as a trialist, taking part in educational meetings, etc., to match their interests with your business needs. If a KOL is interested in injection pain for example, they would be a good person to authentically support a drug that only requires injecting once a week. We also look at the full picture of your whole KOL list to ensure that you are working with an interesting and diverse list of people. Nobody wants cheese and pickle sandwiches every day! Our clients work with bespoke KOL lists, not a generic database download, to ensure that gourmet partnerships are on the menu.
2. Get personal to create authentic communications
It is also critical to understand KOLs as people, not data points. We don’t ‘use’ KOLs, we work in a partnership with them. By listening to your KOLs, through in-depth interviews or advisory boards, you will be able to develop a clinician-led engagement plan that is true to each KOL’s values and beliefs. You can use this understanding to build and improve your messages in an authentic way, so you end up with a better communication which is honest and true to your KOLs’ beliefs.
Probing your messages using in-depth KOL interviews can also help you to establish if they are going to hit the ground running with health care professionals or whether you need to do more work to set the context and rationalise any downsides. For example, a once weekly injectable medication might sound like all upside vs painful daily injections, but what if there are concerns about the longevity of the effectiveness and price point. It doesn’t pay to only tell part of a story.
KOLs will also be able to tell you what focus they think your medical activities should have and which they would like to be involved in. They might have a slightly different take to you but remember your menu should be appetising to your audience! In the end, the aim should be to develop scientifically valid and creatively interesting activities that are of genuine benefit to patients; activities that make sense for your medical messaging but are also going to be of interest to the KOL group and your broader audience and genuinely add to scientific knowledge around the subject.
3. KOL partnerships need long-term planning
Many of our clients partner with hundreds of KOLs over a 12-month period who in turn will go on to have thousands of engagements. It is essential to have a coordinated strategy to manage engagements of this scale to a high-quality standard.
We recommend a systematic process for this exercise ideally setting up engagement plans in Q3 of each year for the next 12 or even 18 months.
The Scout KOL Management System is a useful tool that can help you to plan and monitor your activities. Yearly engagement plans can be set up using the KOL profiles module to select the most appropriate KOLs for new activities. There can be a tendency to choose the ‘big names’ or people you are familiar with; however, this can lead to overreliance on and over-exposure of a few KOLs. Planning at a higher level enables you to smooth the curve and see if the engagements can be spread wider across the range of KOLs: creating more meaningful relationships with more KOLs and spreading your messages further and bringing in more diverse opinions and perspectives too.
And of course, compliance issues, such as implementation of FMV payments can all be taken care of with the system.
4. Make sure everyone has agreed to the plan
The plan only works if everyone knows the plan and buys into it, from the clinical department through to the medical team and the commercial team. The global team should plan first, choosing the most important KOLs for the global activities in line with the KOLs’ interests. The national team can then plan already in the knowledge of where the most important KOLs are engaged. In this way, you will have a coordinated approach to present to your KOL partners.
5. Monitor, track, analyse and improve
So how do you know if it all went to plan? We would recommend using a KOL Management system to monitor and track the activities. This can help you to analyse what were the popular dishes on the menu and what didn’t go down so well. These reviews can feed into next year’s plan so you can learn and improve year on year.
Whether you are after ham and mustard, or avocado and kimchi in your KOL partnerships, Scout is here with a menu for success.
By Lucy Walker, Operations Director, Scout
Lucy.walker@scoutdata.co.uk
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