Speakers are one of the most promising methods of influencing prescribers. They are often clinicians who have experience with a product. Coupled with their scientific training, they have the know-how to guide their colleagues who may have less experience. Peer-to-peer works. This is why companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually managing speaker’s bureaus. Managing your bureau with impact is crucial for conducting successful speaker programs.
Here’s a quick rundown from our webinar concerning the key points and questions you’ll encounter while building a speaker’s bureau.
Speakers vs. KOLs
Is there a difference between speakers and KOLs? Although we are all probably guilty of using the terms interchangeably, there is a distinct difference. It’s the “O” and “L” that marks this distinction. These people are opinion leaders for a reason. Often they’re people with influence over treatment protocols or disease state treatments. They typically try to work with others from a managed care perspective.
With KOLs, there’s more of a indirect sales effort going on. You know these people are probably members of key associations. They most likely have leadership positions within their therapeutic area. On top of that, many KOLs are also advisory board members for those associations or maybe for your company.
Speakers, on the other hand, do what can be thought of as more direct peer to peer selling. This means your company will give them some approved content, whether it be a key selling message or slide decks. Speakers are ones you’ve got to look at concerning their skill sets. They have good presentation skills, but can they handle interactive components like live polling and Q&A? These are skills to consider.
Identifying the Right KOLs
Identifying the right speakers and getting them into your organization is not always easy. Sometimes the person you really need to be working with is someone you haven’t established a relationship with. To mitigate this, Tim Dembinski of Pfizer Injectables consults third-parties to discover who’s out there. From here, he creates an initial list before his internal teams help vet that initial list, resulting in a robust and balanced speaker’s bureau.
“Depending on where your product is in its life-cycle, those three buckets of field sales, medical and scientific affairs and clinical may take on more importance to how you decide who you want on your speaker’s bureau,” Dembinski said.
Perhaps you have a new indication and you need a KOL who can speak to and explain the science behind it. In that case you’re going to rely on the feedback from your clinical and R&D team. On the other hand, if the information you wish to communicate is more community based, then your field sales and medical affairs teams are going to be much more familiar with who’s going to be a better fit.
Right-Sizing Your Bureau
Essentially there are two ways to build a speaker’s bureau. You can work with an existing bureau or build a new one from the ground up. What is best for your organization depends on a few different factors. It’s necessary to work with your compliance department as there may be certain strategies that can or cannot be done depending on your organization’s compliance team.
From the ground up you have the advantage of being able to build relationships with your speakers from the beginning. Typically in this scenario there’s a new product being launched, bringing with it a fresh sense of eagerness and excitement. New faces among your bureau, bringing with them new perspectives and insights, are an organic, natural part of the new product launch process.
“Over time, the years you spend with those folks, how the product grows and the market develops and how patients are helped with proper use of your product and the information you’re sharing, it is very satisfying,” Dembinski said.
At this stage the question that soon gets asked is “how many?” The answer depends on your peer-to-peer budget and how many speakers you can keep active. You may want 100 speakers, but when you look at your budget, is there enough to keep 100 speakers active? Certain companies require a set amount of speaking engagements for each speaker or that speaker must be removed from the bureau. Therefore, this question must be asked early. Nothing is more difficult than having too many speakers and never utilizing them, which leads to frustration for all parties involved. Continue to scrub your bureau regularly. Look at who is effective and who may need to be replaced.
When inheriting an existing bureau, these same considerations of budget and effectiveness need to be made.
“When I took over the diabetes bureau at Takeda we had over 1150 speakers,” V2V president Dan Rehal said. “I had an ROI analysis done. We had 90% of speakers providing no benefit to the organization whatsoever.”
As a result, the bureau shrunk from over 1100 speakers down to just 400, a massive shift. Doing so allowed for the creation of a more effective plan to utilize the speakers who were effective and providing benefit.
Difference in Training Impact
Once you’ve got your bureau to the ideal size, there are things that need to be done to take that bureau to the next level. In this day and age there are 3 core training strategies: On-Demand, Live In-Person training and Virtual Live training.
From a budgetary standpoint, On-Demand is the least expensive. Virtual training is the next step up and live in-person training will be the most expensive. But which is the most cost-effective?
All three can be effective in the right scenario and each will probably be used by almost any brand in some capacity. Live training holds a lot of value when building a new speaker’s bureau. You’re building new relationships and that live, face-to-face interaction to share the content is invaluable.
Typically, virtual is used a supplement throughout the year. Perhaps you have a new indication and from a budget standpoint it doesn’t make sense to bring everybody back together for a live in-person training. Virtual is a great option in that scenario as it still offers a lot of interactivity and live engagement in a much more convenient setting for your speakers, but at the cost of that face to face interaction.
Obviously, On-Demand allows for people to complete the training at their own time, but you lose a lot of the organic interaction that you get in a live setting.
