How Expert Calls Work in Consulting Projects

Expert calls in consulting are structured, 30-to-60-minute, one-on-one telephone or video consultations between a consultant and a subject matter expert. They offer experience-based, first-hand information such as industry trends, competitor intelligence, or technical information, which are complementary to the desk research and collected information and can help to validate other hypotheses. They are organised by expert networks (intermediaries like Nexus Expert Research, GLG, AlphaSights, or Third Bridge) where they source, vet, and schedule specialists within 24-48 hours.

In the fast-moving business environment of today, it is well known that “the quality of decision depends on the quality of intelligence behind it.” Whether you are a VC doing a Series B, a PE fund doing due diligence, or a strategy team looking to gauge market entry, however, secondary research alone rarely becomes the solution to filling the void of knowledge. That is precisely where expert calls in consulting come in, giving decision-makers direct, real-time access to practitioners who have lived the problem you are trying to solve.

The worldwide expert network industry was worth around $3 billion in 2025 and continues to grow by 12-16% a year, where consulting firms account for almost 46% of all invocations. Yet many decision-makers still do not fully understand how this process works, or how to derive maximum value from this process. This guide explains everything from the definition to the step-by-step process, to use cases, compliance rules, and best practices for the year 2026.

What Are Expert Calls? A Clear Definition

What are expert calls? At their most fundamental level, they are private, structured conversations between a client (usually a consultant, analyst, or investor) and a vetted specialist – a former executive from a company, an industry veteran, a thinker from another industry, a former regulator, or an expert operator of some sort. These expert consultation calls are facilitated by an expert network, which acts as the matchmaking intermediary managing sourcing, compliance, scheduling, and payment.

Unlike desk research or analyst reports, expert calls provide primary and experience-based insight that is not found in any search engine. They deliver granular and context-rich intelligence that insiders call “not Google-able,” that informs truly informed strategy. A 60-minute phone call with a former operations director at a target company can provide more actionable intelligence than can three weeks of secondary research.

Why Consulting Firms Rely on Expert Network Calls

Top-tier strategy firms and institutional investors have relied on expert network consulting calls for decades for one simple reason: insight is a competitive advantage. In conferring a recommendation, sometimes the difference between a strong recommendation and a great one can be reduced to whether the team spoke to the right person prior to writing the deck.

There are four core reasons consulting firms make primary research expert calls a standard part of every engagement:

• Speed: Vetted specialists are connected within 24-48 hours, much faster than recruiting advisors or commissioning formal studies.
• Specificity: Calls can be scoped to a very precise knowledge gap, from a specific SKU margin to a regional regulation, rather than discussing very general topics.
• Credibility: First-hand knowledge of practitioners who have real experience operating in the day-to-day adds weight to analytical frameworks developed and client presentations.
• Triangulation: Multiple expertise calls from multiple vantage point suppliers, competition, and customers help validate or challenge findings as prerequisites for becoming a recommendation.

The Expert Call Process: From Brief to Insight

Understanding how expert calls work starts with understanding the six-stage process that governs every engagement. This expert call process is designed for both speed and precision:

1. Statement of the Knowledge Gap: The consulting team identifies the things they don’t know and can’t find out in secondary research. The question posed for framing the research: “What will be the decision that this research will inform?” Strong briefs have the end in mind, at the beginning.
2. Submit a Research Brief: The team presents a brief to an expert network, indicating the type of expert required (role, seniority, company type, and geography), the key research questions, and the timeline. The more specific the brief, the better, as the quality of the match tends to increase.
3. Expert Managed Sourcing and Compliance Screening: The network’s search aspect will search its database, which is often assisted by artificial intelligence tools, and screen candidates for their relevance, conflicts of interest, and eligibility for compliance. For every single expert recruited, typically 10-20 candidates are evaluated by the networks to create the appropriate short list.
4. Client Selection: The client looks through curated profiles with bios, relevant experience summaries, and pre-screened responses. The consultant picks 2-3 experts to work on calls, often with a strategically broad landscape, then a specific hypothesis testing sequence.
5. Scheduling and Logistics: The network handles all of the scheduling, non-disclosure agreements, disclosure of compliance, and platform setup. Calls are normally confirmed within 24-48 hours of the first request.
6. The Call: The consultant leads the discussion with the help of a pre-prepared discussion guide. Best-practice structure: 5-minute warmup and MNPI disclaimer, 40-45 minutes of targeted questions from 3-4 key themes, and 5-minute wrap-up ending with: “What should I be asking that I haven’t?”
7. Synthesis: Notes are recorded in the note-taking instantly after the call. Insights are cross-referenced by other calls and research within the company. The results feed back into the process to update the frameworks of analysis and provide inputs to the client for delivery.

Core Use Cases for Expert Calls in Consulting Projects

The value of expert calls in consulting projects is best understood through a specific application. Here are five high-impact use cases where expert calls can be a consistent source of outsized return on research investment:

Compliance Rules Every Consultant Needs to Know

Compliance is not an administrative formality; it is a legal and ethical cornerstone of every expert call methodology. The key concept that needs to be understood is Material Non-Public Information or MNPI: Information that is material (impacts investment decision or stock price) and non-public (unavailable to the market). Trading on MNPI constitutes insider trading under US securities law, and inadvertent receipt will make the liability.

Reliable expert networks have a three-layer compliance system:

• Pre-call: Strict vetting of expert, automated conflict of interest check with employer database, required compliance training with annual re-certification for all experts.
• During the call: A standard MNPI disclaimer at the start of all calls (“I do not want to receive material, non-public, or confidential information”), real-time monitoring capabilities, and on-platform call hosting capabilities for end auditability.
• Post-call: Complete audit trails and trade surveillance (can go against discussing securities) and expert quality feedback mechanisms.

The SEC’s April 2022 Risk Alert specifically cited the vulnerabilities of expert networks compliance gaps, such that firms will have to track all the calls taken, notes reviewed, and related trading monitored, even in the absence of any actual insider trading. This makes the choice of a compliance-first expert network partner far from an option.

Best Practices for Effective Expert Consultation Calls

The difference between a good expert interview consulting session and a great one comes down to preparation, discipline during the call, and synthesis quality afterward. Some of the most impactful do’s and don’ts are summarized in the table below:

Leading Expert Networks 2026: What Is The Landscape?

The global expert network industry now includes over 120 networks, up from 38 in 2009, reflecting the surging demand for expert network calls across consulting, private equity, and corporate strategy. The major players include:

• GLG: The longest-experienced, largest expert network in the world, which was in existence first (founded in 1998, with more than 1.2 million profiles and about $550 million in revenue).
• AlphaSights: Known for speed and execution, having 400,000+ experts, and its proprietary AlphaGPT AI tool, and completing expert matching faster than most of its competitors.
• Third Bridge: The leading provider for Private Equity Due Diligence with a proprietary library of 60,000+ expert interview transcripts and a new partnership with the CEO of Anthropic.
• Guidepoint: One of the largest, with expert coverage (1.75 million profiles), with a particular strength in healthcare and life sciences. Guidepoint also includes the new AskGP AI research assistant.
• Dialectica: Two consecutive six-year fastest growing net in Europe, more than 50 proprietary generative AI tools developed for research acceleration.
• Knowledge Ridge: A specialized network of 450,000+ experts and unique depth in emerging markets in the Middle East and South Asia.

Why Nexus Expert Research is the Partner You Were Built to Seriously Decide With

In a market filled with also-rans generalist platforms, Nexus Expert Research comes out of the crowd with the focus on combining the rigour of institutional-grade compliance, with the responsiveness and precision that is actually required by decision-makers at startups, SMEs, and growth stage companies with no $100k upfront credit pack deal demands of the legacy networks.

Where big connections are optimized for volume, Nexus Expert Research is optimized for fit. Every engagement starts with a consultative brief review that ensures that the expert profile requested is specific to the decision being made. Experts are held within 24 hours, institutionalized practices are used for compliance, and the emphasis is always on producing the specific cognate insight that drives projects forward. For VCs, PE funds, management consultancies, and strategic leadership teams seeking a high-trust and agile expert network partner, Nexus Expert Research is the straight go-to.

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