If you are selling research tools such as instruments, reagents and software, or providing services such as single cell sequencing, there are 7 ways for you to find academic leads.
Summary:
- NIH grant holders
- Competitor’s customers
- Customers of a relating product
- Customers of an old (or discontinued) technology or product
- Researchers who cited a classic paper
- Collaborators of your existing customers
- Researchers in a field
- How we can help?
1. NIH grant holders
NIH funds ~5,000 projects each month. If you need to find researchers who has money, then you may use NIH Reporter (https://reporter.nih.gov/). It’s a free search engine where you can find NIH-funded projects and the PI’s name. To get the email address of a PI, sometimes you will need to enter RECAPTCHA code. The database contains US based researchers only.
2. Competitor’s customers
If you have a competitor, you may use the competitor’s name (or product name) to search scientific publications. For example, if you are selling a new fNIRS device, you could use “Hitachi ETG4000” as a keyword. This way you can find the product’s customers from the authors of the papers.
We did an experiment and found that the competitor’s customers are twice likely to respond to your email.
3. Customers of a relating product
For example, if you are selling reagents that can be used in Illumina’s sequencers, you may use “Illumina” as a keyword and search scientific publications. Then find the authors from the search results.
4. Customers of an old (or discontinued) technology or product
If your product or service is a “Next Generation XXX”, then you may use the previous technology or product as the keyword and search related publications. For example, if you have NGS products or services, you may use “Sanger sequencing” to find who used this technology before.
5. Researchers who cited a classic paper
Some classic papers of a technology has thousands of citations. The authors of these citations are also related to this technology. If your products happen to be in the field, you may identify a few classic papers, and then find the authors who cited the classic papers.
6. Collaborators of your existing customers
If you already have a number of customers, you can easily expand your customer base by identifying the collaborators of your customers. What you need to do is to search each of your customer’s name in literature databases, then compile the papers and extract the authors.
7. Researchers in a field
You can simply use any keyword related to your product to find relevant researchers. It can be a scientific discipline such as “immunotherapy”, or a technology name such as “magnetic resonance imaging”, or a gene/protein name such as “BRCA1”, or any combinations.
How we can help?
You can use any of the methods above to find leads manually without any cost. However, in reality it is often tedious and time consuming if you need to compile more than 100 such contacts. We can do the work for you. Just send us a list of keywords, we will compile the authors for you in a few days and send you a spreadsheet. We can also compile the new authors periodically. If you are interested, please contact us.