Turning fragmented data into a go-to-market plan
There’s a moment in every product strategy sprint when you realize the science alone isn’t enough. You might have credible mechanisms, decent data, even a sense of unmet need. But the market doesn’t just follow the evidence. It follows influence.
This was the crux of a recent project: helping a commercial team shape the next move for an over-the-counter anti-infective supplement. Not by sifting through hundreds of publications or running a basic social scrape, but by answering one critical question: who actually drives belief in this space, and what do they care about right now?
The missing layer in most go-to-market plans
We started with a lot of data. Digital mentions, clinician commentary, emerging publication trends. On their own, none of them said what to do next. They were raw ingredients. What gave them power was the way we layered them.
We didn’t just pull out themes from the literature. We matched them to narratives in digital and professional spaces. Then we overlaid those narratives with the actual people shaping them, not just based on citations or reach, but on relevance.
A KOL with 50 papers is not useful if none of those are aligned to your mechanism. A health influencer with high visibility isn’t helpful if their content contradicts your claims. The goal was not to chase prestige, but to find alignment between what you want to say, who can say it, and what the community is already listening for.
Mapping credibility, not just conversation
We built a dynamic map linking key product-relevant themes to expert voices, filtered through both scientific credibility and digital presence. It gave the team an immediate sense of where trust already existed and where it could be built.
For example, a handful of microbiome researchers were already laying the groundwork for adjunct indications that the client hadn’t considered. Not only were they publishing regularly, they were participating in cross-sector webinars, commenting on industry reports, and tagging relevant patient communities. Quietly but consistently, they were shaping the conversation.
This is the kind of insight you miss if you treat science and strategy as separate tracks. But when you thread them together, the path forward becomes clearer.
Why this matters more than ever
As more teams explore adjacent indications or try to reposition existing assets, the temptation is to treat literature, market data, and social listening as separate exercises. But the real insight happens at the intersection.
Too many go-to-market plans are built in silos: evidence here, messaging there, stakeholder engagement somewhere downstream. What this project reinforced is that these layers only work when you stitch them together. The message, the messenger, and the market need to be aligned from the start.
That is not just good comms. That is smart product strategy.
Building influence into the foundation
This wasn’t a branding exercise or an abstract opportunity assessment. It was about finding the people who could carry the weight of a new claim and showing the team how to engage with them credibly. We gave them a map of voices, not just data points, and a way to stay close to those signals as they evolved.
We still update that map quarterly. Not because the client asked, but because influence shifts. And the only way to keep your strategy credible is to stay in tune with the people who shape it.
If your expansion plan doesn’t include that layer, it’s probably not as strong as you think.