Top Expert Network Companies to Support Your Business Goals

In a rapidly evolving market climate, investment professionals face a challenging economic landscape. Industry developments and market movements often feel endless, making it difficult to stay at the forefront of your industry.

Staying ahead of market trends requires constant sifting through the ever-expanding supply of available information, as well as finding relevant insights amidst the noise. However, the timeliness and quality of those insights could directly influence your company’s performance and future outlook—which is why it’s so crucial to rely on research tools that provide you the right information at the right time. 

That’s where expert networks come in. 

Expert networks refer to a type of business that connects companies with expert resources or subject-matter experts (ranging from former C-level executives to a company’s customers) to provide valuable and current information, data, or assistance. These first-hand perspectives from industry experts are a critical addition to the secondary research that most professionals rely on to formulate investment strategies, market landscaping, and due diligence.

Leveraging knowledge from first-hand operators in a company or industry, alongside unique experiential insights, will radically transform your market research from reactive to proactive. These critical expert insights allow you to build a more comprehensive view of any company, industry, or trend.

Below we dive into the top expert network companies to support your business goals.

AlphaSense Expert Insights

Staying current on every trend, development, and movement related to your industry requires a tool that separates the noise from the insights you need. However, going through the channels of a traditional expert network can be a time-consuming task—especially for professionals that need to make quick and accurate investment decisions.

AlphaSense’s Expert Insights helps you find millions of valuable insights from industry experts in seconds, without spending valuable time on manually searching for the right expert. With over 10 years of investment in artificial intelligence (AI) development, our AI technology allows you to surface critical insights from over 40,000 expert call transcripts across all industries.

AlphaSense offers fast-tracked Expert Call Services to provide in-depth insights so that investment professionals can outperform competitors without the associated costs. Personalized expert interviews can uncover insights and potential research areas that most investment analysts and fund managers would have never known to look into.

Even when a researcher does know the nuances of a niche space—for instance, when an investment firm seeks to enter a high-potential market—Expert Call Services can still provide the kind of unique perspective that would be impossible to get from any other resource.

The Full Value of Expert Insights

Market researchers can easily access various expert perspectives through our powerful research tools in three effective ways:

• Expert Transcript Library – Dive into over 40,000 expert transcripts and audio in our library to access proprietary insights from former executives, customers, competitors, and channel participants across a range of industries. Leverage on-demand access to our premium insights on thousands of public and private companies to create strategies that lead to fresh insights on new products, market sizes, and sector occurrences.
• Expert Call Services – Our Expert Call Services offering allows you to quickly connect with experts for customized interviews to fill in any research gaps in your investment strategies. Gain access to more than one million pre-qualified expert profiles spanning all industries across the globe with seasoned subject matter experts—such as thought leaders, former executives, customers, partners, and competitors. 
• All-in-One Market Intelligence – AlphaSense aggregates financial and business data (broker research, company documents, news articles, and more) from over 10,000 trusted sources to provide our users with a robust research universe and ensure they never miss a vital piece of information. Our one stop solution for expert insights means you never have to toggle between multiple disparate platforms while conducting your market research.

Combine our suite of Expert Insights with an extensive collection of broker research, earning calls, filings, news reports, and more, all available in AlphaSense to build a comprehensive view of any market, industry, or company.

Powerful AI Technology

Leveraging AlphaSense’s award winning AI capabilities along with Expert Insights allows users to gain tens of millions of data points at the industry, watchlist, and document level to better track market landscape and industry trends, identify disruptive players, and discover competitors’ hidden strategies.

Researchers can save time on research and maximize their research budget with AlphaSense’s powerful AI-search capabilities:

• Smart Summaries – Enables users to glean expert insights in an instant with generative AI (genAI) summaries that capture the gist of any expert call transcript found within the extensive AlphaSense library in seconds.
• Smart Synonyms™ –  Empowers users to expand keyword and thematic searches to deliver the most relevant expert insights by including all synonyms, excluding irrelevant results, and filtering out the noise.
• Sentiment Analysis – Allows users to identify and quantify levels of emotion around specific topics within expert transcripts by using a boolean operator to search for mentions of a specific topic in a positive, negative, or neutral light.
• AI Assistant – Offers users to ask live questions and gain real-time answers with our AI-powered chatbot designed to summarize billions of data points to get you from question to answer faster.
• Enterprise Intelligence – Enables businesses to secure searches, summaries, and follow-up questions across their proprietary internal data and a vast repository of 300M+ premium external documents.

Combining AlphaSense’s powerful AI search technology and user-friendly navigation allows you to easily capture insights from thousands of on-demand transcripts and find the information you need faster, so you never have to waste time or money on irrelevant sources.

Industry-Leading Compliance

AlphaSense prioritizes compliance throughout the entire content development process of Expert Insights. Not only is our compliance process established by our Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) with 20+ years of experience, it also follows a robust procedure to verify experts and review each individual transcript before publication.

Our industry-leading compliance mitigates risk of exposure to material non-public information (MNPI) by thoroughly vetting both industry experts and investment analysts conducting interviews for each expert call. Additionally, Expert Insights’s hand-picked team of compliance reviewers have collectively reviewed over 40,000 transcripts in the past two years to provide our clients with confidence about the safety of their research.

AlphaSense’s customizable compliance programs offer tailored solutions to ensure each customized call adheres to company-specific standards and laws, securing operational excellence. These rigorous compliance protocols provided by AlphaSense allow investment professionals to make faster investment decisions with confidence.

Outperform Without the Associated Costs

Traditionally, analysts spend around two hours on expert calls—one hour sourcing and coordinating, and another conducting the call. This not only wastes valuable time but also incurs significant costs, with the industry average price per call being around $1,200. 

Expert networks have become commoditized. However, AlphaSense challenges this model by reducing both time and cost while offering the same level of white glove services and bespoke custom recruiting to gain unique insights at a fraction of the cost.

AlphaSense offers expert consultations through Expert Call Services at a rate 70% lower than traditional methods. This substantial cost reduction can lead to significant savings, directly impacting the bottom line of your research budget, allowing you to maximize your research budget.

To ensure our pricing meets your specific needs, we offer flexible platform subscriptions to accommodate team sizes, content needs, and more, ranging from enterprise packages to per-seat options.

Learn how the price of Expert Insights can keep you ahead of the competition without the associated costs of a traditional expert network.

Inex One

Although Inex One is not an expert network itself, it solves the same service for clients looking to access experts fast and run B2B surveys. Inex One partners with some of the top expert networks across multiple generations that sell their expert services on the platform.

Inex One enables a more efficient market, driving business to high-performing expert networks, away from legacy operators. These firms are often specialists in certain geographies and industries, giving superior service quality to their clients.

During the mid-2010’s, a new generation of expert networks surfaced, often founded by former employees at incumbent networks. These offshoot firms used modern technology either internally built or built on top of Inex One’s operating model, while AlphaSense Expert Insights and Tegus opted for entirely new operating models.

Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG)

Touted as the “insight network for the whole world” by experts, GLG provides access to expert calls in their on-demand knowledge platform, primarily for investors and startup advisors. Their comprehensive expertise database spans almost every geography, industry, and function which allows the company to deliver a range of products, including phone consultations, surveys, live in-person and virtual events, packaged insights and reports, and more.

To date, GLG serves leading technology, life science, and industrial companies, including 40% of the Fortune 100 and seven of the top ten global technology companies; leading investment and financial firms; top professional services firms; and hundreds of nonprofits and social entrepreneurs around the world.

This is primarily due to GLG’s insight discovery which works through a proprietary workflow of three solutions: GLG Direct, GLG Syndicated Insights, and GLG Research.

For entrepreneurs that have adequate time to perform self-service research, one can connect directly with the SMEs via GLG Direct. And for medium or large business owners, GLG Research allows them to outsource all research required for a new venture or unit to GLG. It packages detailed quantitative and qualitative research data from workshops, focus groups, discussion panels, voice-of-customer data, and market research to ensure a well-rounded outlook for consumers. 

Moreover, for small businesses that want to rely on existing GLG content rather than interviewing an SME, you can try the GLG Syndicated Insights, which provides access to GLG’s library of reports, surveys, transcripts, webcasts, etc. 

Third Bridge 

Third Bridge is one of the leading companies in the expert network industry for investment insights and professional consultation or services due to its blended model for knowledge exchange.

Offering an extensive library of high-quality content for business, investments, and consulting purposes, Third Bridge’s extensive collection is regularly curated by experienced and talented executives so that you get the latest data and can make informed business decisions from the most trusted perspectives.

Third Bridges recognizes its shortfalling in its offerings—if you’re facing a unique business problem that has no pre-existing content offering potential solutions, you can take advantage of Third Bridge Forum or Connections.

The Forum is a collection of experts who will dive deep into the project once you opt for Third Bridge’s services. Alternatively, you can speak to an SME directly if you go for the Third Bridge Connections service.  

Third Bridge also recognizes that value chain information is typically fragmented, unqualified, and outdated. Maps solve this problem by visually presenting public and private company value chains in a single view, helping investors fast-track early-stage research within minutes, not days.

With over 1,300 employees across eight offices worldwide, Third Bridge’s global presence allows them to retain the best expert talent, who share in their mission “to democratize the world’s human insights and upend the traditional research model.” 

AlphaSights

Named one of the fastest-growing and most disruptive companies headquartered in Europe by the Financial Times in April 2017, AlphaSights is a premiere expert network company. They’re headquartered in London with offices in New York, Hamburg, Dubai, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Shanghai, Seoul, and Tokyo, with over 600 employees.

Today, AlphaSights is one of the larger expert networks. It became one of the first firms to successfully reduce GLG’s market dominance, growing in tandem with Third Bridge. The bottom line: If you’re searching for industry experts for business data analytics, insights, surveys, and personal experiences, AlphaSights is a trusted industry resource.

The executives at AlphaSights analyze your requirements, perform market research, tally expert profiles, and finally recommend superior profiles that mostly resolve your initial query. 

Its network of experts is suitable for investment bankers, private investment firms, mutual funds, management consulting, corporations, and non-government organizations (NGOs).

Whereas many other expert networks have long offered alternative expertise services (such as transcript libraries, live conferences with experts, etc.), AlphaSights long stuck to its core service, only offering expert calls or meetings.

However, increasingly, the company now offers surveys, insights projects (similar to GLG’s Strategic projects), and a small content library named AlphaView. AlphaView is similar to the Third Bridge Forum content library, although significantly smaller.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do you need an expert network?

Expert networks can provide clients access to various experts with specific, niche perspectives and expertise that cannot be found anywhere else. Rather than spending hours searching for answers to your queries through published research, expert networks can quickly surface the intel you need–whether it be from a consultation with an expert or a content library. More importantly, the best expert networks implement rigorous compliance standards that limit the exchange of information, safeguarding both client and expert from potential risk.

Expert networks also provide a more cost-effective way for investors to access industry insights in a shorter turnaround. Rather than spending countless hours searching for a person to interview, expert transcript libraries streamline the whole process by asking experts the pressing questions industry professionals have in a searchable format. When seeking out an expert network, look for depth of experience, both in the professionals helping you reach your research goals and the network that fuels its insights.

Who uses expert networks?

No longer just a powerful resource for the financial services space, expert calls provide valuable insights and a competitive advantage to top companies’ corporate strategists and competitive intelligence professionals.

Knowledge professionals, from individuals to teams and leaders, across industries and roles, rely on expert networks to enable strategic decision-making. The industries using expert networks the most are: information technology, industrials, media, healthcare, pharmaceutical, biotech, energy, consulting, asset management, hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, investment banking, and sell-side equity research.

How do various industries benefit from expert networks?

​​Major industries leverage expert networks to evaluate market landscapes, understand various perspectives, and scout out trends worthy of investment. From corporate strategy to the MedTech space to the technology sector, professionals utilize expert insights to drive major financial and operational decisions that will impact their present and future performance–and consequently, keep them ahead of the competition.

How do you choose the right expert network for your needs?

If you’re questioning what to look for in an expert network, especially if it will be a long-term engagement, you need to outline your expectations and needs. Then, once you have a clear idea, use these questions below to help you decide what platform will give you the most ROI for your investment:

1. Do they have relevant experts specially vetted for your project or consultation needs?
2. Are their experts rooted in the subject or industry to ensure reliable insights?
3. Do they have a competitive pricing strategy in place?
4. Do they have a quick turnaround time to provide insights when needed?
5. What sort of support are you seeking from an expert network?
6. Do they have the kind of machine learning and AI functionalities that elevate and speed up research processes?

Try AlphaSense Expert Insights for Free

To stay ahead of the competition and perform agile decision-making, investment professionals need a centralized resource for primary investment research like Expert Insights. With AlphaSense Expert Insights, there’s no need to meticulously search global expert networks or spend hours reviewing documents to analyze a competitive landscape. 

Leverage our proprietary AI technology and an extensive library of expert transcripts to glean instant insights on new products, market sizes, and sector occurrences shaping various industries.

Learn how AlphaSense’s Expert Transcript Library can keep you informed on market movements and help you maintain your competitive edge with our infosheet, Critical Areas Missing from Your Research: Expert Transcript Library.

Discover powerful expert insights today. Start your free trial.