Corporations

Corporations use Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG) to seize opportunities more quickly and confidently than their competitors by tapping the revolutionary power of a managed marketplace for expertise.

Current clients:

Gerson Lehrman Group currently serves more than fifty leading corporations. Firms as small as $100m in revenue, up to Fortune 500 companies, use our services in diverse sectors of the economy, including pharmaceutical and medical devices; software and technology; industrial; financial; and consumer. Within our corporate clients, we most typically serve the corporate development, strategy / marketing, product development, and business development functions.

How GLG helps:

Using Gerson Lehrman Group's unique model, corporate clients receive fast-turnaround, high-quality, cost-effective, custom, and proprietary written reports. Clients also use our service to obtain telephone consultations, in-person meetings, seminars, and travel programs. We particularly excel at projects that address focused, tough issues faced by senior executives.

Corporate Development, M&A, and Licensing Executives – These executives use GLG throughout their process, from better triage of new opportunities, to faster assessment of "step-out" acquisitions, to more objective diligence of specific acquisition targets. GLG's expert network can quickly and confidentially assess the assumptions behind management teams' presentations and investment bankers' offering memoranda. GLG assembles robust panels of experts around target companies, including customers, former executives, former regulators, niche consultants, and academics familiar with key technologies and economic issues. Panels of as few as ten subject-matter experts, and as many as 90, are assembled within days; custom reports are delivered within weeks.
Strategy & Marketing Executives – Marketing and strategy professionals use GLG to gain granular, customized, "beyond-the-headlines" reports on rapidly evolving markets. Subject-matter experts in the network comment on the technological, economic, regulatory, and behavioral trends in the most obscure parts of the value chain and the most obscure regions in the world. Strategy experts in the GLG network interview these experts and deliver cost-effective, custom reports within weeks.
Product Development Executives – Product development executives use GLG to gain insights on purchaser and thought-leader behavior not available through traditional market research. GLG's deep relationships with subject-matter experts allow GLG to build highly specific panels of buyers and thought-leaders, and supplement those panels with retired executives and specialized marketing consultants. Furthermore, the GLG platform enables product development executives to survey these populations in a double-blind approach to ensure candid insights and protect against appearances of impropriety.
Business Development and Sales Executives - Sales and business development executives know that the worst thing that they can do is waste their targets' time. Too many sales executives prepare for pitches and prepare account strategies with imperfect information about the actual business issues facing their target clients. To address this problem, GLG provides highly-targeted education services to help sales professionals understand the individual accounts and executives they are pitching. Primarily by telephone, GLG's clients speak with niche industry consultants, specialized academics and trade journalists, former executives, customers, and resellers in their target's industries.

Unique advantages:

Gerson Lehrman Group helps corporate executives find suitable experts for their research efforts; appropriately engage experts through a variety of methods; and manage the use and ongoing relationship with experts, all within a carefully structured and rules-based environment.

Find:

GLG's organization of 250+ Research Professionals use proprietary tools to identify, contact and evangelize the benefits of the GLG Councils to thousands of professionals from around the world each month. Corporate executives with urgent requirements can request accelerated recruiting of particular expert populations or individuals.
Once enrolled in the GLG Councils, experts are categorized within unique taxonomies, with dynamic questionnaires canvassing their experience with and knowledge of niche subjects. This continuous profiling helps GLG clients access targeted experts, even on short notice.
GLG assesses Council Member quality through a proprietary GLG CouncilRank^SM algorithm. By enabling over ten thousand consulting transactions each month, GLG has rich data on the demonstrated value of experts.

Engage:

Corporations do not have time to manage contracts and negotiate consulting fees for dozens of independent experts and consulting firms. GLG puts industry-standard contracting protocols in place before every interaction. Pre-set consulting rates and integrated payment procedures reduce strain on clients' finance departments.
Corporate executives also vary widely on how they want to engage professionals. While licensing executives may desire a series of phone consultations, strategy executives may need a custom written report, and product development executives may need a fast-turnaround buyer survey. Executives use all these tools and others (including in-person meetings, seminars, and travel programs) to tap the expertise resident in the GLG Councils.

Manage:

GLG provides easy-to-use Web-based software for corporate employees to share, comment upon, and search the expert contacts acquired. This eliminates the need to update personal address books and immediately improves the ease of communication between colleagues, while enabling them to build their lists of contacts as enterprise-wide assets.
Compliance staff can easily block, screen, or monitor consultations using GLG's unique Oversight Dashboard technology.
For accounting staff seeking to allocate research costs to specific individuals, ideas, and P&Ls, GLG provides tools to track usage and manage spending.