Every week, capable trial sites send long, polished capability decks to a contract research organization (CRO) and hear nothing back.
November 6, 2026
7
min read
By
Julio G. Martinez-Clark, CEO, bioaccess®
The front door is feasibility, not the executive inbox
A cold email to an executive feels direct. It is usually a dead end. Executives do not select sites. Feasibility teams, site-alliance managers, and clinical operations staff select sites, and they work from databases, prior performance records, and structured questionnaires. When a deck lands in an executive inbox, the best outcome is that it gets forwarded to feasibility, stripped of its context, weeks later.
Find the feasibility or site-alliance channel and use it. Most organizations publish a site submission form, a vendor registration portal, or a dedicated feasibility contact. Use that route, even when you also know someone senior. A submission that enters the system becomes searchable. A submission that enters an inbox becomes forgettable.
There is a second reason to respect the front door: it tells the feasibility team how you will behave during a trial. A site that follows the stated process signals that it will also follow a protocol, a monitoring plan, and a query process. A site that tries to go around the process signals the opposite, however strong its facilities may be.
Make the submission indication-specific
A generic deck says your site can run anything. Feasibility teams do not believe that, because no site can run everything well. What they believe is a submission built around one indication and one population, matched to the kind of trials the organization actually runs.
If you want early-phase cardiovascular work, lead with cardiovascular evidence: the number of patients in that population who are actively followed at your site, not the size of your city or your health system. Name the principal investigator (PI) and describe that investigator's trial experience in that indication: phases completed, enrollment delivered, and any experience with first-in-human or first-in-class compounds. Describe the equipment the protocol will actually need, such as electrocardiogram (ECG) capacity, continuous cardiac monitoring, and secure investigational product storage with temperature logging.
Then do the same work separately for a second indication if you genuinely have strength there. Two short, specific submissions outperform one long, general one, because each can be matched against a live feasibility request without the reader having to extract the relevant parts.
The numbers feasibility teams actually trust
Feasibility is a forecasting exercise. The team reading your submission is trying to predict whether your site will enroll on time, and they trust numbers that are narrow, dated, and verifiable.
Give patient counts for the exact population, with the source named. "We searched our electronic medical record for the past twenty-four months and found this many patients who meet the core diagnosis and age criteria" is a usable statement. "We have a large database" is not. Give startup timelines you have actually achieved: days from contract execution to institutional review board (IRB) approval, and days from site activation to first patient screened, drawn from your last few studies. Give enrollment history by study, including where you fell short. A site that reports a miss and explains what changed is more credible than one that claims it has never missed, because experienced feasibility staff know every site has missed.
Keep the claims consistent with what you later put in a questionnaire. If the deck promises one timeline and the questionnaire states another, the team will believe the slower number and discount everything else on the page.
Keep your data current where feasibility teams look
Long before your submission arrives, a feasibility team may already have a picture of your site, drawn from the databases the industry queries during site identification. If that picture is stale, your submission starts from behind: the investigator listed has retired, or the contact address belongs to someone who no longer works there.
Treat those database profiles as part of your capability submission, because functionally they are. Review them at least twice a year. Confirm the named investigators, their specialties, and their trial experience. Confirm contact details for the person who actually handles feasibility requests, and make sure that inbox is monitored daily. Update equipment, certifications, and population strengths when they change, not when a study you want is already being placed. A site that is easy to find and verify gets shortlisted more often than a slightly stronger site that takes a week of detective work to confirm.
Answer questionnaires fast, and answer them precisely
The feasibility questionnaire is where sites are selected, and it is where good sites eliminate themselves. Two failures recur. The first is speed: a questionnaire answered in three weeks arrives after the shortlist has closed, no matter how good the answers are. Build the internal habit of returning a complete questionnaire within a few business days, and state that real turnaround time in your capability submission.
The second failure is precision. Answer the question that was asked, for the population described, using the criteria in the protocol synopsis. If the synopsis requires a specific laboratory threshold or excludes a common comorbidity, your patient estimate must reflect that. Inflated estimates are detected quickly, usually at the site selection visit or in the first month of enrollment, and the cost is not just one lost study. It is a performance record that follows your site into every future feasibility round. A conservative estimate you then exceed is the best advertisement a site can generate.
Where you cannot meet a requirement, say so plainly and state what you can do instead. Honest gaps preserve the relationship; discovered gaps end it.
One tailored page beats a forty-slide deck
Feasibility staff review many sites under time pressure. A forty-slide deck asks them to do the work of finding the five facts that matter. A single tailored page does that work for them. Build that page around the study type you are seeking: indication and population counts, investigator name and relevant experience, startup timeline, key equipment and facilities, enrollment history in comparable trials, and one named contact who answers quickly.
Tailor that page to the phase and indication the recipient is known for. Keep the longer deck as a supporting document for the diligence stage, when someone asks for it. At the radar stage, length reads as uncertainty about what matters.
Follow up with evidence, not with reminders
"Checking in" adds nothing to a file, so it changes nothing in a decision. Follow up when you have new evidence that changes your site's value: a completed study in the indication, with final enrollment against target; a clean audit or inspection result; a new investigator, unit, or piece of equipment that removes a previous limitation; a startup timeline from a recent trial that beats the one you originally quoted.
Each update deserves a short message to the feasibility contact, filed against your existing submission. Over a year, three evidence-based updates build a picture of a site that is active, improving, and easy to work with. That picture is what gets a site called when a study needs a replacement site on a short timeline, which is often how a first award actually happens.
The bottom line
Getting on a CRO's radar is not a marketing problem. It is an operations problem that a site solves by being easy to evaluate: enter through the feasibility channel, submit indication-specific evidence instead of general claims, keep your database profiles current, answer questionnaires quickly and honestly, and follow up only when you have something new to prove. Sites that do this stop depending on whether the right executive opened the right email. They become the answer a feasibility team finds when it goes looking.
Julio G. Martinez-Clark is chief executive officer (CEO) of bioaccess\u00AE, a first-in-human contract research organization running early-phase trials anywhere from Canada down to Argentina, and of Amavita Research Services, a Miami cardiovascular research site he has operated for seven years with zero United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Form 483 inspection findings. He founded Global Trial Accelerators\u2122, a podcast for medtech and biotech founders navigating first-in-human studies.