E-A-T Your CDMO: What Google Teaches Biotech About Partner Selection

By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma

CDMO search and evaluation are at the core of drug development and manufacturing outsourcing.

A company that has built an empire on returning search and evaluation results of the highest quality might be able to assist you in finding the best partner.

Google makes a case (although they don’t know it) for E-A-Ting your CDMO partners.

Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E-A-T) are part of the “Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines” for Google’s manual reviewers of web pages.

Key here is the vital manual judgment of the quality of the web pages returned to searchers.

Google tries to surface the highest-quality web pages. You, the best CDMOs.

You and Google struggle with effectively implementing and combining automated/objective processes with manual/subjective decision-making.  

Google has advanced algorithms, machine learning, and evolving AI to adjust search results. Outsourced Pharma readers attempt to “spreadsheet” or “matrix” initial analytic analysis when searching and comparing CDMOs.

But both Google and drug sponsors then need to employ human gray matter to check on just how effective those initial activities are.

E-A-T provides “a glimpse of how Google guides the people doing the manual review to judge if the algorithm has done a good job,” explains Wordtracker, a keyword/market research tool for search engine optimization.

“In other words, it uses it to help people decide what good [results] should look like, so it can model the best sets of results.”

The E-A-T Method

According to Google, there are two sides to which the human evaluations of automated search results should focus.

For our purposes, we’ll name them CDMO And Offerings (“content” for Google), and Human Element (“content creators”).

Think services/technologies, capabilities, knowhow, capacity, etc. for the first, and the actual scientists/engineers, project managers, senior management, and the culture for the second.

Combined, superior “content” and great “content creators” should equal a CDMO deserving of modeling your optimal search results.

With those two categories as guideposts, let’s now take on the E-A-T method. Please know that I have liberally adapted the original Google text to make this a wholesale application to our industry’s nomenclature and challenges.  

Expertise

The CDMO And It’s Offering

This is a valuation of the organization itself as a source of the services and products it’s offering customers.

Is there a verifiable track record, or perhaps outside recommendations or even awards (e.g., CMO Leadership Awards) indicating a high proficiency or success for its service/product offering?

Are your specific, sought-after services recognized specialties/competencies of the CDMO, or rather just some items on a long, self-enumerated list of capabilities?

The goal here is to use your manual dexterity (human brainpower) to get from, ‘Yes, they have X capability,’ to ‘Yes, they focus on and excel at X capability.’   

The Human Element

Next is an investigation of the individual “credentials” of the CDMO’s scientists, engineers, project managers and senior management.

For us, of course Ph.D.’s are one credential, but also overall career paths, and specific gained experiences.

Have they presented at conferences and symposia, led or been on project teams dedicated to projects similar to yours?

And for us: How good are they at effectively sharing their expertise with their customers?

Authority

The CDMO And It’s Offering

This resembles Expertise above, but I’d focus here on the idea that an “authority” is often known in the industry as “the place to go to discuss new ideas.”

When your project, business or relationship strategy calls for entertaining new concepts, technologies or models, talking with known quantities is a good starting point.  

Paradoxically perhaps, but “flexibility” often comes from the CDMOs who have longevity – and also understand the realms of reality.

The Human Element

Who are those specific and individual scientists and engineers available to work on your project? What other drug programs have they worked on? This is about credentialing individuals who will take on your project activites.

Are the CDMO’s internal “authorities” – the “A Team” – available for your project, or at least available for consultation along the way?

Trust

The CDMO And It’s Offering

Trust, but verify. And the logical reversal: Trust can only be built through personal verification.

Verification can be via past experiences with the CDMO, or specific members of the CDMO.

Trust might be accrued to your entire organization, or obtained through the experiences of individuals at your company.

Do others in our industry trust the CDMOs on your list? Ask your network; look for authentic testimonials.

We could have included “company culture” in any of the E-A-T categories, but perhaps best included here. Is there a trusting culture at the CDMO?

Do they trust their employees, and perhaps more importantly: Will they trust you?

The Human Element

Personal presentation is verification of an individual’s competency, communication skills, orderliness, sincerity, levity, and honesty.

Perhaps of all metrics, this requires the most manual (human) input into the crosschecking of your preferred list of partners. It can be argued personal trust cannot be determined without actually meeting – getting to know – your potential partner.

However, you can, for example, initially check for statements in the CDMO’s marketing materials – or those that their CEO makes in interviews.

“We are the only CDMO in the world with end-to-end services …” could be the sort of proclamation that raises red flags of skepticism. (see: “We Do Everything” CDMO Pitch Not Pleasing Everybody)

The Rest Is Reputation

None of the above E-A-T discussion is revolutionary.

It does, though, add a new color to one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make:

Which CDMO do I ultimately select?

Applying an E-A-T thought process can help you benchmark your initial CDMO search results. It's a path to access whether your searches are returning optimal results, and if not, a guide to help you adjust your early “automated” evaluations.

Finally, there’s one word I avoided using above – it wasn’t easy to suppress, and I’m sure it came to readers’ minds anyways.

Google treats “reputation” as somehow both a separate, and superimposed category.

Wordtracker isn’t convinced that’s a good strategy, and neither am I.

The website points out that Google “doesn’t stop at E-A-T, but also grades results based on reputation, which is confusingly, in and of itself representative of a high level of E-A-T.”

The Google manual states (I’ve replaced “web page” with “CDMO”):

“Extensive reputation research is important when giving Highest ratings, and is evidence of the E-A-T of the CDMO.”

"A CDMO’s reputation is based on the experience of real users, as well as the opinion of people who are experts in the topic of the CDMO."

And we’ll leave that as additional food for thought.