From Targeting to Follow-Up: The Complete Congress HCP Journey
About the webinar
Most congress strategies have a gap nobody talks about. You plan the booth. You prepare the reps. You design the invite list from the same segmentation exercise you did 18 months ago.
And then you wonder why the follow-up doesn’t land.
The problem isn’t the strategy. It’s that each step runs in isolation. The targeting list feeds the invitation list, which should feed the follow-up, which should feed the CRM. In practice, every handoff leaks intelligence.
What was discussed
The invite list problem nobody questions
Most congress invite lists trace back to the same source: a segmentation exercise built a year or two ago. Nicholas opened with the obvious question. Why does everyone accept a static list for a market that moves every week?
His answer: targeting shouldn’t care whether an HCP engaged yesterday or six months ago. It should track who’s talking about your indication right now.
The poll results backed him up. Most attendees said they’re still building invite lists from old segmentation, refreshed maybe once a year. A handful said they had no idea how their list gets built at all. Often that means an agency owns it, and even the agency can’t fully explain the method.
What “source-agnostic” targeting actually looks like
Nicholas walked through the booking.com comparison. Search only Hilton, Marriott and Radisson, and you’ll miss half the market. Search every hotel that fits the query, and you get the real picture.
He applies the same logic to HCPs. His platform doesn’t predefine sources. It tracks physicians across LinkedIn posts, hospital websites, blogs, even a GP quoted in a UK newspaper. Anywhere a physician talks publicly about a topic.
The numbers from his German IBD example made the funnel concrete. Start with 23,000 HCPs talking about IBD broadly. Narrow to 20,000 engaging with congress topics specifically. Then 577 actively discussing the congress itself. After the event, 517 still on topic. Then 186 who increased their content, the clearest sign the congress actually moved something.
Nicholas’s number for that final group: 83% commercial relevance, based on feedback from 96 field force teams. His logic is simple. Content signals expertise. Expertise means seeing patients. Seeing patients means prescribing.
Where invite lists quietly fail
Pierre pushed on a question from the audience: does any of this matter for satellite symposia, where most HCPs are already at the congress anyway?
He pointed to something teams rarely check. Companies that map who they invited against who actually showed up often find little overlap. In some cases, 80% of sponsored HCPs never made it to the symposium they were sponsored to attend.
That’s the gap. A broader, signal-based target list doesn’t just improve who gets invited. It changes how you measure whether the congress worked, because you’re comparing against a group that reflects the market, not a list from 18 months ago.
From signal to CRM
Pierre closed the loop on the “after” side. Every touchpoint captured at the congress, a booth scan, a question asked at a symposium, a self-assessment before and after a session, can resolve to HCP identity and sync into Veeva or Salesforce in real time.
That’s what turns “Dr. Rosen visited our booth” into something a rep can act on: what he asked, what he already knew, what gap remains.
Speakers
- Nicholas Rosen - Founder & CEO, Exaris Solutions
- Pierre Metrailler - CEO, Onomi