What are market development services?
Market development services in life sciences are the data, analytics, and engagement support services that help a pharmaceutical, biotech, or medical device company identify, understand, and engage the clinicians, researchers, institutions, and payers who influence adoption of a therapy. SteepRock delivers them as results as a service: an AI native platform that brings publicly available, proprietary, licensed third party, and client data into one intelligence environment, and a team that turns that data into the target lists, engagement plans, analyses, and reports a client's teams act on.
They sit between clinical development and commercial execution. Regulatory approval establishes that a therapy can be prescribed. Market development establishes that the right experts understand it, discuss it, and are positioned to shape how it is used. Medical affairs and commercial teams share that work, with market access, field, and R&D teams drawing on the same intelligence.
SteepRock has provided market development services to more than 400 life science companies since 2001. Every SteepRock statement of work carries the same heading, Market Development Services Include, and under that heading sit the software, the data, and the people a client is contracting for.
Why this is not a CRM
A CRM is a system of record for field activity. It holds what a representative or MSL did, when, and with whom. That is useful, and most of our clients run one. Market development services answer a different question: who should be engaged in the first place, and what has changed since the last conversation. That answer comes from data a CRM does not hold, and it comes before the field activity a CRM records.
SteepRock does not compete CRM to CRM and does not ask clients to replace their field execution system. We work alongside it as the intelligence, key expert, grants, compliance, and analysis layer. Many clients load their CRM call records into SteepRock so that engagement planning can draw on their own history together with everything happening outside the company.
What SteepRock’s market development services include
KOL & DOL Identification and Profiling
Disease agnostic identification of key opinion leaders, digital opinion leaders, rising investigators, and institutional decision makers, profiled across publications, clinical trials, congress activity, claims, referral networks, Open Payments, and social and digital media.
Congress and Publication Intelligence
Session level analysis of major congresses (ASCO, ESMO, ASH, AAN, DDW, ATS and others) and the scientific literature: who is presenting, what they are saying, and how the evidence and the conversation are shifting in your therapeutic area.
Speaker and Advisory Board Qualification
Data driven selection of speakers, moderators, and advisors, matching expertise, audience reach, and network position to the program's objective, so budget goes to the people who will move the market.
HCP Sentiment and Belief Mapping
Structured assessment of where experts stand on the beliefs that drive adoption, including mechanism, efficacy, safety, sequencing, and patient selection, mapped against your strategic imperatives and tracked over time.
Territory and Account Stakeholder Analytics
Speaker to HCP connection mapping, referral network analysis, and account level influence ranking delivered by territory, so field medical and sales teams know who to reach and through whom.
Who uses market development services
Medical Affairs and MSL teams build scientific exchange plans, prioritize field engagement, and demonstrate the impact of medical activity on expert understanding.
Commercial and Brand teams plan launches, select peer-to-peer programs, and align promotional strategy with where the expert community stands.
Market Access identify the clinical voices and institutions that carry weight with payers, guideline committees, and pathway developers.
Field Sales and Key Account Management understand referral flows and influence networks at the territory and account level.
Clinical Development and R&D identify qualified investigators and sites and understand the expert landscape before a program enters the clinic.
Business Development and Corporate Affairs map the expert and institutional landscape around an asset or a company under evaluation.
The data the services are built on
SteepRock compiles and maintains professional activity data on healthcare professionals and organizations across every disease area. The sources include peer reviewed publications, clinical trial registries, grants, treatment guidelines, congress presentations and continuing education activity, digital and social media presence, and Open Payments records.
When a client contracts for them, the sources extend to de-identified patient claims for the United States, refreshed at least four times a year, shared de-identified patient referral networks by indication, prescription and payer data, and enhanced data on healthcare professionals and organizations outside the United States. Clients can add their own data, from CRM interactions to internal research, so that analysis runs across everything they know.
Third party data is loaded as received from the provider. Outputs reference the underlying source records so that a user can see where a result came from and open the record itself.
How market development services are delivered
SteepRock's services run on the SteepRock platform, which means every deliverable is refreshable and available to your team in the system after the project ends. The platform is a set of SaaS products that work on the same data, delivered through one interface with unlimited users under an enterprise license.
SteepRock Embedded Intelligence
The unified AI service that operates across every contracted data domain as a single intelligence environment. Authorized users pose questions and requests in natural language and receive cross domain results assembled at once from publications, trials, grants, guidelines, congress activity, digital presence, claims, and the client's own records, then turn those results into summaries, charts, and leadership ready documents. It provides closed loop generative AI analysis, automated insights, and engagement planning.
The service follows a standing written rulebook that applies to every question: no invented values, claims labeled as fact or inference, and gaps declared when the data does not support an answer. Each client works in its own private, access controlled workspace, and SteepRock does not use client data to train, validate, or test any AI model. Embedded Intelligence is in production with clients today.
OLA
®
Opinion Leader Analytics, is the healthcare big data search engine beneath it. OLA identifies and profiles KOLs, DOLs, HCPs, HCOs, systems of care, and payers, and it is where the source data lives. Referral network data adds indication level referral patterns. Ex-US data extends coverage beyond the United States. The OLA API lets a client's own data warehouse query OLA directly.
OLMS™
The Opinion Leader Management System, the first of its kind when SteepRock introduced it, is the compliant system of record for the client's relationships. It gives medical affairs and commercial teams a 360 degree view of every expert, organization, and account, combining external activity with the client's advisory boards, research collaborations, speaker programs, and field interactions, under role based permissions that keep medical and commercial activity properly separated. Embedded Intelligence is delivered through OLMS.
Engagement Capture for Holistic Observations, records, transcribes, and analyzes field medical interactions into structured, searchable engagement records in OLMS.
Workflow products complete the platform. The Grants, Giving and Sponsorships Solution and the Investigator Sponsored Trial Solution manage grants and investigator sponsored studies with the review workflow and external user access those programs require. The HCP Engagement Platform plans and tracks engagements across the product life cycle. The Compliance module cross references engagement, payment, and study history for the people a client works with. The AI Speaker Qualifier identifies, qualifies, and recommends speakers for medical education programs.
Software is half of the service. SteepRock's desk research analysts run opinion leader identification, mapping, and segmentation, build target, digital opinion leader, and speaker lists for launch readiness and the launch period, configure OLMS workflows and dashboards, train users, and, where a client wants it, build curated prompt libraries with expected results and graded output inside the client's Embedded Intelligence workspace. Clients call us with a question and get an answer from someone who knows their therapeutic area and their configuration.
Engagements are scoped by statement of work to a therapeutic area, a set of assets, or a business unit, with the claims sets and referral indications named in the document, and are delivered by a SteepRock team with expertise in the disease area. Outputs range from a single identification project to an always on intelligence function embedded in a franchise. The enterprise license to OLMS includes unlimited authorized users, hosting, support, maintenance, and training, and deployment typically takes weeks from receipt of a purchase order.
Why SteepRock
Since 2001.
SteepRock pioneered the first Opinion Leader Management System one year before the industry adopted the PhRMA Code, and has operated in this category continuously since.
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400+ life science clients
From emerging biotechs to three of the five largest pharmaceutical companies.
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Disease-agnostic, at scale.
One data foundation covers every therapeutic area and geography, so you are not limited to a vendor's prebuilt specialty lists.
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Services and software from one provider.
The people delivering the analysis built the platform it runs on, and the platform stays with you when the project ends.
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Compliance built in.
Role based permissions keep medical and commercial activity separated, the Compliance module cross references engagement, payment, and study history, and every AI output references the source records behind it.
Frequently asked questions
What are market development services in pharma?
Market development services are the analytics and engagement support services that help a pharmaceutical or biotech company identify, understand, and engage the experts, institutions, and payers who influence how a therapy is adopted. They typically include KOL and DOL identification, congress intelligence, speaker and advisor qualification, HCP sentiment mapping, and stakeholder analytics.
How are market development services different from a CRM?
A CRM records what field people did. Market development services determine who should be engaged, why, and what has changed, from data a CRM does not hold. SteepRock works alongside a client's CRM as the intelligence, key expert, grants, compliance, and analysis layer, and does not compete CRM to CRM.
How are market development services different from market research?
Market research measures what a sample of a market thinks at a point in time. Market development services identify the specific individuals and organizations that shape a market and support ongoing engagement with them. The output is a named, prioritized, continuously updated stakeholder landscape, not a survey result.
How are market development services different from a KOL management platform?
A KOL management platform is software for storing and tracking expert relationships. Market development services are the analytical and engagement support work that populates and uses that platform, deciding who matters, why, and what to do about it. SteepRock provides both, on one platform.
What does results as a service mean?
The client contracts for the outcome, not for software seats or analyst hours: the target lists, engagement plans, analyses, and reports its teams need, produced on SteepRock's platform from SteepRock's data and the client's own, and kept current in the system. The software, the data, and the people arrive together under one statement of work.
Which SteepRock products deliver market development services?
Embedded Intelligence, OLA (Opinion Leader Analytics) with referral network, ex-US, and API options, OLMS (Opinion Leader Management System), ECHO, the Grants, Giving and Sponsorships Solution, the Investigator Sponsored Trial Solution, the HCP Engagement Platform, the Compliance module, and the AI Speaker Qualifier, all delivered through one interface under an enterprise license.
What data do market development services draw on?
Publicly available U.S. federal research, grant, and clinical-trial databases
Publicly available regulatory and healthcare-transparency data, including payment and transparency disclosures
Standard healthcare provider identifier and registry data
Licensed, de-identified claims-derived analytics for the applicable therapeutic area(s) and indication(s), including aggregated diagnosis, treatment, and patient-journey metrics
Client-selected and publicly available multimedia, including selected social media content
How does Embedded Intelligence fit into market development services?
Embedded Intelligence is the AI layer that works across every data domain a client has contracted. Authorized users ask questions in natural language and receive cross domain results with references to the source records, then turn them into summaries, charts, documents, and engagement plans. It is in production with clients today.
Is client data used to train AI models?
No. SteepRock does not use client data to train, validate, or test any artificial intelligence model. Each client works in its own private, access controlled workspace.
When in a product's life cycle are market development services used?
From early clinical development through loss of exclusivity. Early use focuses on investigator and expert landscape mapping; launch readiness and launch on speaker, advisor, and DOL engagement; and post launch on sentiment tracking, competitive response, and life cycle management.
Do market development services cover DOLs as well as KOLs?
Yes. SteepRock profiles digital opinion leaders, clinicians and researchers whose influence is exercised through digital and social channels, alongside traditional KOLs, and can show where the two overlap and where they do not.
Are market development services applicable in areas beyond KOL management?
Yes. Grants, sponsorships, and investigator-sponsored trials are market development activities in their own right: each one funds an institution, investigator, or program that shapes how a therapy is studied and understood. SteepRock’s EGS (grants, giving, and sponsorships) and ISTS (investigator-sponsored trial) solutions manage those workflows compliantly, and Embedded Intelligence can be layered on top of either. With Embedded Intelligence, a grants or IIS team can ask which investigators and institutions the company has funded over time, how that funding maps to the KOL landscape in a disease area, where there are gaps between funded research and strategic priorities, and what the collective output of funded programs has been - questions that previously required exporting data from three systems and reconciling and aggregating it by hand. The result is that these programs stop being administrative functions and start becoming part of the larger market development picture.
