Case study
Building a
Targeted KOL
Engagement Strategy for a Dual-Use Prophylaxis.
At a glance
Our client, a small team within a major pharmaceutical company, was developing a dual-use product: a treatment for X, and a prophylaxis for immunocompromised patients at risk of it.
Prophylaxis was expected to drive most of the product’s long-term value — but that meant engaging physicians well beyond the X community the client already knew, across specialties with their own guidelines and decision-makers, without room to grow the team.
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Client
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Challenge
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Approach
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Network Built
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What Changed
The situation
Our client was developing a product with a dual purpose: a treatment for an infectious disease, X, and a prophylaxis for immunocompromised patients at risk of contracting X.
Prophylactic use was expected to account for the substantial majority of the product’s long-term value.
The client team was already well connected within the X community, with 35 established KOL relationships and encouraging early support for the product. They recognised, however, that successful adoption of prophylaxis would depend on engaging physicians well beyond that community, and asked us to develop a single engagement strategy spanning both treatment and prophylactic indications.
The client had also identified a small number of existing guidelines for the management of X. Securing the product’s place within these, and within the wider guidelines that would shape prophylactic use, mattered both for reaching the right patients and for the product’s commercial success.
The challenge
For the product to succeed, its benefits needed to be recognised across multiple specialties, including by clinicians whose primary focus was not infection prevention.
That meant earning a place in the guidelines that would shape practice across very different clinical communities.
Achieving this within a single specialty is challenging enough. Doing it simultaneously across several specialties, with a small global team and finite engagement capacity, required careful prioritisation. Without that, the client risked spreading effort too thinly to have meaningful influence anywhere. More importantly, patients who would benefit from prophylaxis risked never being offered it simply because the specialists managing their underlying condition were unfamiliar with the option.
Our approach
We started from the guidelines themselves and worked backwards to the communities that produced them.
Rather than looking only at the authors of the latest guideline, we mapped the wider networks behind each one — professional societies, committees and collaborating specialists — to identify who genuinely shaped clinical thinking.
This allowed us to identify the communities most important to the client’s commercial objectives, the individuals with greatest influence within them, and the combination of KOLs that would provide both strategic insight and meaningful influence across each specialty. We then designed a programme of KOL activities and conference engagement that allowed the client to work across multiple specialties without creating an unmanageable workload.
What this meant for the client.
They knew who to work with, and why.
Of the client's existing 35 KOLs, we identified the 17 worth the global brand team's direct focus; the rest were better placed with regional teams.
Alongside these, we identified a further 69 KOLs across the specialties relevant to prophylaxis — bringing the total network to 104, split into a 56-strong priority tier the client could realistically manage directly, and a 48-strong reserve tier for the wider organisation. Every name came with a clear rationale — often several: the specific guidelines, committees, and communities that made them matter.
They knew what activities to run, and why.
Applying our proprietary KOL Engagement Milestone Model to the client's product and development timeline produced a realistic assessment of their current position and an 18-month roadmap of activities appropriate to each stage of development.
The result was a structured engagement programme tailored to the client’s objectives, while grounded in approaches we have seen succeed across multiple pharmaceutical programmes.
They knew which KOLs suited which activities, and why.
We grouped every priority KOL into one of four categories — from infectious disease specialists in X, through to senior opinion leaders in the specialties managing immunocompromised patients — reflecting the distinct role each was best placed to play:
Category
Definition
KOL-A
Infectious disease physicians and KOLs in the management of X itself — leaders in the field of X treatment.
KOL-B
Infectious disease physicians specialising in managing immunosuppressed patients — often shaping specialist prevention guidance for the physicians who manage the underlying condition.
KOL-C
Physicians from the specialty managing the underlying condition (e.g. oncology) with a personal interest in infection management — collaborators with KOL-Bs, and best placed to make the case to their own peers.
KOL-D
Genuine KOLs in management of the underlying condition, without a personal research focus on infection — the most influential voices among their peers, and the ones whose treatment priorities the product needed to speak to.
The result was a structured engagement programme tailored to the client’s objectives, while grounded in approaches we have seen succeed across multiple pharmaceutical programmes.
They knew how to judge whether it was working.
Every activity in the 18-month roadmap — advisory boards, one-to-one meetings, co-developed publications, conference engagement — came with a defined objective, the stakeholder categories it was meant to involve, and a measure of success.
That gave the client a way to assess individual activities, individual KOL relationships, and the overall programme, rather than treating engagement as inherently successful simply because it happened.
They knew who, internally, was responsible for what.
The priority/reserve split gave the client a clear, defensible answer to who should lead engagement with each KOL — the global brand team or regional sales and medical affairs colleagues — removing what could otherwise have been an ongoing, awkward internal debate.
A conference-tracking process did the same for event attendance, giving the client an efficient, ongoing way to plan engagement as new conference programmes were announced, rather than requiring fresh analysis each year.
The Outcome
The client can now do what initially seemed daunting — maintain its strong engagement within the X community while also engaging confidently across the specialties that will determine whether prophylaxis becomes established clinical practice.
More importantly, they no longer have to treat KOL engagement as a series of one-off decisions. They understand the KOL landscape well enough to keep making sound strategic calls as development continues, and they know where finite engagement resources will have the greatest influence on future clinical practice — without re-analysing the question from scratch each time.
