KOL Management

What Is KOL Management?

KOL Management is a broad term that, in our minds, refers to the complete life cycle of identifying, mapping, segmenting, planning, engaging, and interacting with KOLs. From beginning to end.

In reality, KOL Management is a never-ending cycle — an ongoing process that requires constant fine-tuning and midcourse corrections to ensure you are working with the right people, in the right way, at the right time, through the right initiatives.

In this short paper we address the key questions to ask at every step of the cycle to ensure that your KOL Management is focussed, compliant, mutually beneficial, and of true scientific value.

Ensuring these important questions are answered within your organisation can also help you dramatically improve your approach to KOL Management from a strategic and tactical perspective.

There are no answers here, just questions (but for the answers, simply contact us because that’s what we excel at!).

Why Is KOL Identification Important?

Ensuring you are working with the most appropriate KOLs in line with your strategic and tactical needs to maximise the opportunities for your medicines is the first step of effective KOL Management. Because the people you work with today can impact your success well beyond tomorrow.

Identification involves more than just finding the right people to work with. It also involves keeping the “KOL pipeline” refreshed and up-to-date to avoid repeatedly using the same few KOLs for all your activities, because effective KOL Management requires a good mix of KOLs in your portfolio.

The “right Experts” who are most relevant to your work are governed by your strategic and tactical needs, not simply by who is the most prominent/influential/renowned KOL in your therapy area.

Your strategic KOL needs should reflect the unique clinical characteristics of your brand and the people you need to communicate that story to. Your tactical KOL needs should reflect the Experts you need to engage with in order to help lead and implement the unique tactics you have developed.

Questions To Answer

• Have you identified the right KOLs to support all the different parts of your product strategy?
• Do you have a broad enough base of KOLs to engage with many different stakeholders, and to ensure you’re not just working with the same people repeatedly?
• Have you got the right mix of Experts to give you the best possible base on which to build on and support your medicines?
• Have you gone beyond clinicians to also consider digital Experts, nurses, patient advocates, etc – all as KOLs?
• Have you ensured that the KOLs you need to engage with for effective KOL Management include anyone with the power to impact your success?
• Have you implemented an active pipeline policy to find the emerging Experts/rising stars of tomorrow, i.e. people that you should be engaging with today?

What Role Does KOL Mapping Play?

Effective and comprehensive KOL Management cannot look at an individual KOL in isolation of their peers and without consideration of the wider context — your KOL Management strategy must consider not just each individual KOL, but your entire KOL portfolio.

And the same applies to identify such Experts, hence the need for effective “KOL Mapping” which enables you to look at the KOL landscape and map Experts in context.

In many situations “KOL Management” also includes the engagement and management of other stakeholders such as patient groups, advocacy organisations, professional organisations, funding bodies, etc. This wider holistic “stakeholder management” approach requires wider mapping of the KOL landscape to include additional stakeholders.

Questions to answer

• Have you mapped the landscape in which your KOLs operate?
• Have you characterised their impact and medical influence to enhance patient care, their networks, who they work with, etc., all of which will feed into your KOL Management program?
• Have you disambiguated “connections” from” influence” as these mean very different things when it comes to KOLs?
• Have you mapped other stakeholders who can impact the patient journey around your product?
• Speakers, Advisors, Guideline Experts, HE/OR specialists, Educators — have you mapped Experts best suited for different activities?
• Have you identified the different clusters of Experts who tend to collaborate/work together?
• Have you considered the needs of special markets e.g. where a KOL’s activity may not correspond with their influence?
• Have you validated your current list of key Experts from an analytical point of view?
• Things change and people evolve, so are you making sure that the “people you are working with” and “people you should be working with” are always in sync?

How Does Profiling Help With KOL Management?

The link between understanding your KOLs and effective KOL Management is straightforward — the better you understand and know a KOL, the better you can engage with them in the best and most transparent way possible!

The public profile of an Expert can help guide decisions on how best to engage with that Expert e.g. the frequency of speaking, involvement with competitor companies on other initiatives, frequency of publications, involvement with guideline committees and other regulatory authorities, involvement in providing evidence to FDA panels, etc.

But fully understanding the KOL goes just beyond simple profiling. There are many different components to understanding KOLs – the drivers behind KOL behaviour, how they want to work with you, their scientific focus and areas of interest going forwards, and their collaboration preferences.

The more you know about all these different components, each KOLs work, competitor activities, speaking credentials, experience, wishes collaboration preferences, etc., the better your KOL Management strategy.

Questions to answer

• Have you created comprehensive profiles about your Experts so that you understand their professional activity, involvement, and areas of interest?
• Have you understood exactly how your Experts would like to work with you, their preferences for collaboration, their restrictions and Caps?
• Do you have a good understanding of how a KOL would best like to consume the data and scientific information you will provide to them? What is their preferred vehicle of choice?
• Have you analysed the keen scientific messages being communicated and authored by your KOLs for your competitors - to help you better understand them?
• Are you aware of how KOLs perceive your company, your commitment to a therapy area, your clinical communications, your MSLs, etc., and how does all this compare to other companies in this space?

What’s The Relationship Between Mindset Benchmarking And KOL Management?

Going beyond a “regular profile” to understand and benchmark KOLs’ attitudes, beliefs, and sentiments towards drugs, data, and disease issues can significantly help the development of your KOL Management strategy and plans.

Questions to answer

• Have you mapped the scientific mindset and beliefs of your KOLs?
• Have you established a mindset benchmark of your KOLs against which future changes can be compared, including the effects of market events and your own initiatives?
• Are you aware of their views on key issues, and where they stand on key issues pertinent to your medicine?
• Do you know why your KOLs think the way they do — what data and evidence is driving their views about issues in the marketplace? And how strongly are they aligned to such thinking?
• Have you assessed their alignment with your scientific platform, story, and messaging — a critical part of future KOL Management strategy?

How Can You Segment Your KOLs?

Segmenting Experts is an important step in arriving at an effective KOL Management programme.

Accurate scientific segmentation allows us to summarise Experts into buckets based on their position, profile characteristics, collaboration preferences, mindset, etc.

Using this, you can then create effective KOL Management and engagement plans for each segment, driven by your broader scientific communication objectives.

At the very least, different “segments” should be engaged with different strategies and tactics tailored to their particular characteristics.

Use all available data (including internal knowledge and input from Experts themselves) to segment the Experts based on a variety of parameters e.g. where they stand on specific issues, their attitude/perception with regards to certain products, treatment regimes, companies, etc.

Questions to answer

• Have you finalised the criteria which will be used to segment KOLs?
• Have you created a good mix of behavioural, activity, mindset, and influence criteria?
• Have you considered potential KOL attitudes towards key management, prescribing, and therapeutic issues when defining segmentation criteria?
• Have you categorised and mapped all your KOLs onto a scientific grid based on your scientific platform?
• Have you segmented Experts based on their sentiments towards specific competitor products or classes?
• Have you benchmarked the advocacy of your KOLs on specific issues in the management setting, and fed that into the segmentation process?

Why Is Engagement Planning A Critical Part Of KOL Management?

Engagement planning involves taking all the information, insights, knowledge you have on KOLs (gained from both internal and external sources) and arriving at engagement/touch-point plans for each KOL based on strategy, tactics, benchmarking, segmentation, influence, available internal resources, and a whole host of other factors.

This is the heart of effective KOL Management; it's what drives the overall way forward.

Questions to answer

• Have you run an engagement planning workshop to get everyone’s input on how best to engage and collaborate with KOLs? Have you ensured that all valuable internal knowledge and viewpoints have been considered?
• Have you developed a scientific collaboration plan which will feed into the overall engagement plan?
• Does the plan address the strengths, requirements, and collaboration preferences of each individual KOL i.e. considering the needs of each KOL themselves?
• Does the plan address the most important components for KOL Management — who will you engage, what will you engage them with, where & when will this engagement happen, how will you measure the impact/success of your engagement?
• Are all your tactics aligned to the right KOLs based on not just your needs, but also the needs of the KOLs themselves?
• Is every stage and component of the above process driven by evidence which can also be used to justify your KOL engagement decisions to any external or internal party?

How Can You Track Your Work With KOLs?

As mentioned earlier, KOL Management is a never-ending cycle where each step feeds into the next, with constant refinements and midcourse corrections to ensure powerful engagement.

A key component of the process is to effectively track, audit, and report on your engagements. Without this data, a KOL Management program cannot be planned, tracked, or analysed effectively.

Questions to answer

• Have you put in the appropriate solutions to track and monitor your engagements?
• Does the solution cover not just technology, but also human behaviour, i.e. your colleagues engaging in interactions must report and track their engagements to give you a true picture of your KOL Management program at any one time?
• Does your engagement tracking plan include an effective analytics and reporting component to help you constantly see your KOL Management plan being implemented, in real-time, and act on any signals coming through?

What Internal Processes Are Needed For Effective KOL Management?

Designing, developing, and implementing the necessary protocols, plans, and assets for building, implementing and monitoring engagement plans are critical components of effective KOL Management.

That’s because engagement planning strategies and tactics are of limited use without the relevant tools, protocols, and assets to help create, track, implement, and audit those plans.

It’s vital to get these processes and templates established and confirmed right from the start, including all the success metrics, and the auditing/reporting process to help measure and improve each round of the KOL Management cycle.

Questions to answer

• Have you developed a formal KOL Engagement Plan template (the format to create and store a KOL engagement plan)?
• Have all relationship owners been assigned (key contacts who play a critical role in overseeing the implementation of the engagement plan for their KOLs)?
• Has a review phase cycle been set up to review the progress of each KOL plan as part of the wider KOL Management program?
• Are all team responsibilities for tracking and managing execution against the plan clearly defined?
• Have the success metrics to judge the success of the engagement planning process, and the engagements themselves been established?
• Is there an effective, unbiased, and independent process for auditing and reporting on success, improvements for the next cycle, feedback from users, etc?
• Have additional redacted or summarised versions of KOL plans been created for sharing with multidisciplinary teams, e.g. medical versus commercial?

How Do You Measure The Success Of Your KOL Management Strategy?

A good KOL Management programme should not be fixed and unmovable — it should be adaptable and flexible to changing conditions.

And measuring and monitoring the impact and success is the final important step of any ongoing, continuous KOL Management program.

A positive side effect of good KOL Management strategy and planning should be that you “move the needle” amongst Experts.

Measuring and monitoring all these different parameters and components, e.g. measuring the impact of your work on external KOLs, measuring the efficiency of your work internally, assessing the success of your strategy and tactics should be an integral part in any KOL Management program

Questions to answer

• Are regular (e.g. monthly, quarterly) meetings arranged to support the implementation of engagement plans, input on decisions, share experiences of previous engagements to ensure alignment and execution going forwards?
• Is there an ability for people to call for ad-hoc reviews due to unexpected developments in the marketplace, or by new/material information, e.g. feedback from team members interacting with the target KOL?
• Have you put in place a mechanism for evaluating the impact of your activities on Expert advocacy and behaviour, e.g. by evaluating the “sentiment” of each Expert based on your interaction with that Expert?
• Is there a process for regularly comparing live mindset/benchmarking/sentiment data with the original KOL benchmarking exercises?
• Do the appropriate internal processes support the ability to refine KOL engagement strategy and tactics in response to shifts in mindset across the KOL population?
• Have you created an effective medical ROI framework which can be used to assess how much you are moving the needle amongst your KOLs?
• Have you put in place independent mechanisms to assess how KOLs receive, perceive, and view your outreach and engagements with them?

Summary

Effective KOL engagement planning and implementation can involve many different steps as outlined above — identifying the right Experts, establishing benchmarks, debating how to engage each Expert, arriving at plans, overseeing the implementation of those plans, making mid-course corrections, and measuring the impact.

Judicious planning on your part, by addressing the questions above, can help you make KOL Management decisions quickly that rely less on faith and luck, and more on instinct and facts.

System Analytic provides a range of services and tools to help support the entire engagement cycle and maximise the investment you make in KOL interactions and activities. Supporting KOL Management and engagement is what we’ve been doing for nearly a decade now.