Introduction
Medical affairs plays a crucial role in engaging with key opinion leaders (KOLs) to advance clinical and scientific knowledge. However, medical affairs teams often face challenges in thought leader planning, which can hinder their effectiveness. This blog post will provide an overview of these common challenges and offer suggestions for overcoming them.
1. Teams Lack a Process for Collaborating Across Teams
Challenge: Multiple teams within an organization, such as medical affairs, commercial, and R&D, often compete for engagement opportunities with top KOLs, leading to conflicting priorities and relationship challenges.
Solution: Establish a clear and transparent process for cross-functional collaboration. This may include regular meetings, shared goals, and an agreed-upon method for prioritizing KOL engagement opportunities. By fostering a culture of collaboration, teams can work together to optimize engagement and minimize conflicts.
2. Prioritize the Right Strategies for the Right Stakeholder
Challenge: Organizations must determine how to execute their strategic priorities through individual engagement tactics to ensure consistency and alignment with strategic objectives.
Solution: Develop a framework for prioritizing KOL engagements based on strategic goals, KOL influence, and the potential impact of each engagement. This framework should help teams identify the most valuable engagement opportunities and ensure that all activities support the organization’s overall objectives.
3. Identifying New Ways to Engage
Challenge: Medical affairs teams face challenges in identifying and defining ways to engage with different segments in a rapidly evolving digital and regulatory landscape.
Solution: Embrace innovative engagement methods that cater to a broader audience based on specific goals. These methods may include video conferences, web chats, chatbots, self-service web portals, and mobile apps. Additionally, consider expanding educational efforts through scientific education programs, engaging digital opinion leaders, and creating content hubs to reach larger audiences at top institutions or more broadly.
4. Current Systems are Too Complex and not built for Collaborative KOL Planning
Challenge: Current CRM systems often do not effectively facilitate the KOL planning process due to various limitations, such as lack of global access, compliance concerns, and insufficient notifications for potential conflicts.
Solution: Implement a purpose-built KOL engagement platform that supplements local CRM systems. This global solution should enable all members of the engagement team to compliantly coordinate with shared access to a single platform that contains all top thought leaders. By streamlining the KOL planning process, teams can optimize their engagement efforts.
5. Aligning Global and Local KOL Engagement Planning
Challenge: Global thought leader planning primarily focuses on coordination to maximize limited opportunities with experts, while local planning aims to maximize MSL’s time to achieve goals across all experts. These two processes are often not aligned, starting with different target segments.
Solution: Develop a process that addresses the unique needs of both global and local KOL engagement planning. This may involve creating separate but complementary strategies for engaging top thought leaders and local experts, while ensuring that the primary objectives of each process are met. By aligning these two approaches, organizations can better achieve their goals and optimize engagement with KOLs at different levels.
