Life Science Lead Generation with Advanced PubMed Affiliation Searches
As a sales professional, continually moving opportunities through your funnel is critical to on-going success. Ensuring that you engage with new leads helps to prevent periods of little to no sales as you move opportunities throughout the sales cycle.
For those in the life sciences industry, many of these lead generation activities come in the form of webinars, poster presentations, conference talks, white papers, and overall word-of-mouth. These are some of the best life science lead generation sources simply because you have the audience already engaged.
If you’re part of a larger organization, you have the benefit of being a mainstay throughout a researcher’s workflow. For example for the larger providers (Thermo, Sigma, etc.), many researchers may already be familiar with what you have to offer, and your lead generation activities may rely more so on building relationships on the ground - learning who the new lab managers are, connecting with new researchers, etc.
But what do you do if you’re brand-new to the industry? Your marketing department should already be focused on driving interest, but alongside these activities how can you maximize your coverage in a new territory to effectively build pipeline quickly so you can get to closing faster? You may already have a few contacts in the region or an install database to work with, but it doesn’t hurt to start generating interest with completely fresh leads on your own too.
The NCBI PubMed Database
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) PubMed database is a publicly available online tool comprised of over 30 million publications from researchers around the world. The information is freely available for searching exactly who’s performing what research, what types of methods are being employed, and who’s collaborating with whom. Among the scientific content, it also includes pertinent information on each author, their affiliations, and even who to contact for inquiries.
One area where you can start to generate life science lead info is by performing advanced PubMed searches.
Since this information is readily available for free, life science professionals can quickly gather information on a specific topic. The journal in which the publication was released, the publication date, all authors involved, their affiliations, and all info comprising the scientific content are included (abstract, materials and methods, introduction, results, and conclusions). Some articles are even provided as free for download from PubMed for the entire citation, so you can gather information on what techniques are being used.
The Search PubMed Advanced API
For specific author information, rather than having to open each publication link individually, our Search Pubmed tool enables life science sales and marketing professionals to quickly search PubMed affiliation info for contact information (name, affiliation, and email). By simply searching an area of interest (e.g. “alzheimers”, “RNA sequencing”, etc.), our tool connects with the database and performs an advanced PubMed affiliation search to pull out the relevant citations to help you gather life science lead lists quickly. Here’s an example:
Another way to take advantage of our Search PubMed tool is to look up an individual university or affiliation. This enables individuals to quickly gather life sciences lead lists specific to a region or territory. Simply searching “Harvard” or “Alabama” for instance narrows your search down to a more specific region of interest. From there, it’s a matter of simply exporting out and collecting the relevant emails.
The email provided may not be from the contact whose university you searched for specifically, but likely he or she will be included as one of the authors involved in the study. If you’re referencing the exact publication in your email, it may still be worthwhile to reach out to the out-of-territory corresponding author. If they’re interested, he or she may put you in touch with the local contact in your region cited in the publication.
Advanced Searches Directly on PubMed
On the PubMed website itself, additional advanced search capabilities can be utilized by entering key identifiers or filters. For example, by placing “[AD]” next to your search query, you can target your search to include specifically the university or institute you’re interested in. This allows users to gain more advanced searching capabilities to sift through the millions of publications available on PubMed.
These searches can also be built directly on the PubMed Advanced Search Builder page. There are dozens of different filters one can use to further narrow down your search (e.g. author, publication date, journal, location, title, etc.). You can also combine multiple filters for even narrower search criteria.
For more information on how to mine more specific content straight from PubMed, see Advanced Searches on the PubMed Database to learn the syntax and identifiers to search the database more effectively. You can use the advanced PubMed search, but once you’ve grown used to the syntax, it’s easy to combine them directly on the PubMed front page.
The Search PubMed tool provided here is merely one way to gather additional contact information and lead lists for the life sciences industry. In the end, the contacts generated would still be considered relatively “cold”, but any process or tool which helps to provide more efficiency in your daily activities can only help.