Helping Professional Services Firms Maximize Client Impact

Fleishman-Hillard

“GLG provided a 360-degree view of the global healthcare policy landscape, enabling Fleishman-Hillard to paint a valuable and objective picture of this environment for a major pharmaceutical manufacturer. GLG delivered highly relevant, actionable insights in a timely manner—so we could deliver the information our client needed to make the most informed business decisions.”

Ana Rita Gonzalez,
Senior Vice President and Partner Fleishman-Hillard Inc.

As one of the world’s leading public relations firms, Fleishman-Hillard Inc. (FH) strives every day to provide unparalleled strategic counsel and service to its clients worldwide. So when a large pharmaceutical manufacturing client began exploring potential global opportunities for the launch of a vaccine, FH diligently went to work. The goal: provide critical insights and valuable counsel to help the client make better informed market-entry decisions.

The right expertise

Vaccines are primarily government-sponsored products. Therefore, to educate the client on how to influence government policy around vaccination programs in its target markets, FH needed to create a thorough assessment of policy-making decisions across six global regions—North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Ana Rita Gonzalez, who runs the healthcare practice for Latin America and the Global Public Health Policy Area, immediately turned to Gerson Lehrman Group® (GLG) for help.

“All great communications strategies must be grounded in a firm understanding of the context, the environment, and the driving forces at play,” says Gonzalez. “Fleishman-Hillard is an expert communications firm, but we needed to find independent experts intimately familiar with the ways in which healthcare policy is made and influenced in our client’s target markets. We found that precise expertise by partnering with GLG. As a result of our overall counsel, the client was well positioned to communicate with and influence healthcare policy makers around the world.”

The GLG Expert Network^SM

GLG manages the world’s leading expert network, helping more than 750 client companies find, engage, and manage^SM experts. When clients need to deepen their understanding of a company, an industry, or a market, they turn to GLG. Quickly, they find and engage relevant, hard-to-find, authoritative experts from the GLG Councils^SM — a membership-based organization of more than 175,000 experts worldwide.

To assess and compare healthcare policy decision-making processes across 13 jurisdictions, GLG secured insights from 22 subject-matter experts through one-on-one consultations and surveys. This expert panel, consisting of leading health officials, practitioners, and academics, included top luminaries such as the President of the Russian Public Health Association and former Health Advisor to the Russian President and Parliament, as well as a former Assistant Secretary of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The right researchers

Once this expert panel was built, GLG retained a Project Specialist on behalf of FH to interview the panelists and synthesize the results into a customized report. GLG Project Specialists are a set of independent experts within the GLG Councils specializing in conducting and synthesizing primary research. The FH-dedicated Project Specialist condensed the expansive research data into a comparative map of the main drivers behind drug and vaccination policies in each market, ranging from the initial forms of policy influence to placing a vaccine on a country’s immunization calendar.

“The Project Specialist brought to bear highly critical interviewing, language, and data synthesis skills. This enabled us to elicit from the GLG Council Members a deep and comprehensive set of insights—and to synthesize and present those insights to my team in a coherent and actionable presentation,” says Gonzalez. “The bottom line benefit: accurate and comprehensive global research and tremendous value for FH’s financial investment.”

Built for speed

As is often the case for consultants, Gonzalez was operating under a tight deadline to present her findings. GLG built the panel of healthcare experts and engaged the Project Specialist in a matter of days. Then, the Project Specialist interviewed the experts, synthesized the results, and delivered the final report to FH in less than four weeks. This speed-to-delivery is only possible because GLG has built the world’s largest marketplace for expertise, allowing GLG to find, engage, and manage expert networks for its clients at unrivaled speed and scale.

Fleishman-Hillard: A true thought leader

In today’s increasingly competitive environment, it is becoming even more important for professional services firms like FH to establish themselves as true thought leaders who can keep clients a step ahead of the information curve. Over the years, FH has built an arsenal of programs and services designed to maintain its thought leadership position in the public relations industry. The global insights on healthcare policy gleaned from this project—and encapsulated in the GLG Custom Report—have become part of the FH institutional knowledge base. The firm leverages the insights and knowledge it developed working with GLG to advise both current and potential clients on global healthcare policy. Gonzalez says this tool helps FH further establish both its ability to deliver value to clients and enhance its position as a true thought leader. In some cases, it has helped FH secure new business.

GLG: a trusted everyday resource

The value GLG brings to FH does not end with this project. While Gonzalez and her team tapped GLG for this in-depth research initiative, GLG regularly works with FH to build ad hoc panels of industry experts who help FH professionals—on demand and around the world—to prepare for new business presentations and enhance client counsel.

The professional services industry is one of GLG’s fastest-growing client segments. GLG works with hundreds of consultants every month, helping them better serve their clients to enable better informed business decisions.

“The bottom line benefit: accurate and comprehensive global research and tremendous value for Fleishman-Hillard’s financial investment.”

Ana Rita Gonzalez,
Senior Vice President and Partner Fleishman-Hillard Inc.