Challenge

Targeting the right Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) is a vital sales tool in today’s market. Knowing who can influence decision-makers can make your strategic communication more effective and ensure that your messages are heard.

In this case, our client thought they knew their KOLs in the defined therapeutic and geographical area. But through testing and validating the knowledge of their market influencers and decision-makers, they realized that they didn’t know everyone. Signum was able to provide them with a comprehensive analysis that included valuable insights into new and upcoming KOLs that were not previously identified by the company.

Solution

The company initially provided Signum with the names of their top ten KOLs. We also worked with the client to define critical keywords related to the specific therapeutic area for the research. Using machine learning, we could identify the most important publications, and the authors of each of these publications. A qualitative evaluation of the search results determined the importance of these publications. Criteria included date publication (old vs. new knowledge), which KOLs were the most productive, who are upcoming and areas of interest, to cluster them into specific groups based on medical interest and institutions.

The result

Through Key Opinion Leader Mapping, we identified 135 publications (since 2000) by several different KOLs. Ten of these KOLs were already on our client’s list of influencers, and we were able to identify four upcoming talents who were not previously known to our client. That’s 40 percent more market influencers than were previously known to the client. We provided a profile of each KOL to help our client strengthen their partnerships with them.