Key Questions To Boost Your KOL Management – Part 7/8: Internal Processes
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 this series of articles, 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 real scientific value.
What Internal Processes Do You Need 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.
To help you get there, ask yourself these questions:
- 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 broader KOL Management program?
- Are all team responsibilities for tracking and managing execution against the plan clearly defined?
- Have you established the success metrics to judge the success of the engagement planning process and the engagements themselves?
- Is there an effective, unbiased, and independent process for auditing and reporting on success, improvements for the next cycle, feedback from users, etc.?
- Have you created additional redacted or summarised versions of KOL plans for sharing with multidisciplinary teams, e.g. medical versus commercial?
By addressing the questions above, you can make KOL Management decisions that rely less on faith and luck, and more on instinct and facts.
Costantino Ciotti
Services & Innovations
+44 (0)20 8191 9823
