Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for David Herron · Perceptive · United States · August 2026
Imaging and randomization are chosen inside a protocol, months before anyone signs anything, and usually by people who are not the people who sign. That makes this a market with two buyers in every account and a narrow window between them. This map is the US sponsor side of that decision: where the studies sit, who signs inside each segment, and roughly how many companies are there. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Clinical-stage biotech
The largest count and the least covered. These companies outsource almost everything, have no vendor management function to slow a decision, and pick partners at the point the protocol is written. They are also the hardest group to see coming, because a company running its first study looks like a research company until the day the trial posts.
Who signs: VP of clinical operations, chief medical officer, head of clinical development, director of outsourcing, and the CEO at the smallest ones.
5,000 to 6,000
US employers registered in biotechnology research and development; the clinical-stage layer inside that is a subset, and the smallest companies carry no payroll plan at all
Pharmaceutical companies, mid-size and large
Where the decision is split by design. Science chooses the method, sourcing chooses the supplier, and a preferred supplier list can close the segment for years at a time. Long to enter and durable once entered, which argues for reaching the therapeutic area before the sourcing cycle rather than after it.
Who signs: senior director of clinical outsourcing, category manager for clinical services, therapeutic area head, imaging or biomarker lead, VP of data management.
1,800 to 2,300
US pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing employers; the enterprise layer that runs global programs is a few hundred of them
Medical device and diagnostics sponsors
The segment most often left off a sponsor list, because these companies do not describe themselves as drug developers. They still run studies with imaging endpoints, they still need randomization and supply handled, and their trials are smaller and faster, which makes them a good fit for a first engagement.
Who signs: VP of clinical affairs, director of clinical research, regulatory affairs lead, chief medical officer.
4,500 to 5,500
US device, diagnostics and instrument employers; the layer running imaging-endpoint studies is a fraction of it and is not separately coded
Contract research and clinical service partners
A channel as much as a competitor. Full-service providers subcontract specialist imaging and randomization work constantly, and one partnership seat can carry many studies without a single sponsor conversation. Different language, different sales motion, and rarely worked as a named segment.
Who signs: head of alliances or partnerships, vendor management lead, project delivery director, business development lead for a therapeutic area.
900 to 1,400
US contract research employers with payroll; the specialist and mid-size layer is where subcontracting is most common
Sponsors before their first study
Worth being straight about a limit: this group is not enumerated anywhere. A company does not appear as a sponsor in any public register until a trial is posted, by which point the vendors are already chosen. They are identified one at a time from funding, hiring and regulatory activity, which is mechanical work rather than clever work, and it is why the segment stays open.
Who signs: founder or CEO, chief scientific officer, the first head of clinical operations, and the board member who has done it before.
No public register
reached by signal and by name, one company at a time; the difficulty is the reason it stays underworked

Where the openings are

1
The vendor is chosen at protocol design and locked at study startup. That is a moment, not a season. Waiting for the request to arrive means arriving after the method was already written down by somebody else. Those moments are visible from outside, in filings, postings, funding and hiring, if somebody is watching the whole market rather than only the accounts already in a book.
2
Two buyers, one account, and they do not talk to each other. The science seat cares about method, sites and read quality. The outsourcing seat cares about supplier terms and risk. A channel that reaches only one of them loses studies it had already won on the science, and the fix is coverage of both seats by name rather than a better pitch to either.
3
The largest count is the smallest sponsor. Emerging companies outnumber the enterprise layer many times over, buy the whole package rather than a line item, and decide in weeks. They are also the group least reached by conference-led selling, because they send one person to one meeting a year and it is rarely the person who signs.
4
From the outside this reads as a coverage problem rather than a credibility one. In this category the science and the track record are rarely the obstacle. What is usually missing is the machinery that reaches several thousand named clinical operations, medical and outsourcing leaders on a schedule, records what came back, and keeps the list current as those people move. That is the part we build, and we hand it over when it works.
Built from public registries, counts banded deliberately. The base is federal filing data covering US employers that file a benefit plan, current to the 2024 filing year. Owner-only and pre-payroll companies are not published in it, sector codes are self-reported, and a company may sit under a code that does not describe what it is developing. Sponsors before a first posted study are not enumerated anywhere public and are described here rather than counted.
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