A major pharmaceutical company was facing difficulties in making Veeva CRM and Analytics solutions locally adopted by Sales Reps.
Context
First intention was to reduce IT costs by replacing heterogeneous ETMS by a unique CRM solution across 20+ countries. This top-down multi-year project raised significant risks from the beginning : “affiliates can’t agree to common design; lack of end user involvement; gets too complex to deliver; don’t understand pace of change; participants in design meeting don’t have authority to make decisions; end users not prepared for change or trained; adoption risk…”
Obviously, after rolling out the new CRM solution in affiliates, the level of satisfaction was low. Local businesses wanted regional IT teams to improve the quality of services and time to value for improvements, whereas IT wanted businesses to adapt their ways of working and fully adopt Veeva CRM as well as Analytical Reports developed in Spotfire and Microstrategy.
Mission
The mission started with a discovery reports and after less than one month interviewing regional and local stakeholders a first report raised key issues:
- An regional project implied to involve local teams from the beginning ; business and IT team must interact together.
- Veeva CRM was underused. Application should provide businesses with more added-value.
- Data must be reliable ; Sales Reps cannot trust a system where data are wrong, obsolete or missing.
- Tools should move as fast as business needs and market evolve ; a clear distinction must exist between Important and Urgent requests.
Results
A plan of actions was proposed to the client, approved by high-level stakeholders and followed during a year, to switch from a “low adoption” to a “high adoption” of Veeva CRM.
This success was measured through qualitative indicators (satisfaction surveys filled by local business teams) and quantitative indicators (amount of records and data completion in Veeva).
Here are some recommendations given to business teams:
1/ Inventory the functional coverage of the CRM application. Objective is to ensure Veeva CRM meets business local requirements, easily identify gaps and train users on all capabilities.
2/ Empower ambassadors to gather local needs and evangelize Veeva CRM best practices. They should have power, influence and local business impact.
3/ Determine which functionalities or procedures must be common to all affiliates, and which could be specific. Objective is to preserve an harmonized application across countries. It can provide guidelines too.
4/ Agree on a roadmap of new features to be implemented within or around Veeva CRM. Objective is to give visibility (value proposal) on how the CRM application will become richer in terms of capabilities, data and IS integration.
Here are some recommendations given to IT teams:
1/ Empty service requests backlog and data quality issues. Objective is to remove the burden and make a new start.
2/ Put in place an organization able to deal with change requests in project or mini-project mode. Objective is to deliver new capabilities quickly and safely, on a monthly basis.
3/ Set forth a service model based on agreed service levels. Objective is to provide a higher quality of services and visibility on resolution delays.
4/ Simplify the methodology (lean) to avoid inappropriate procedures, documentations and loss of time. Objective is to focus on solutions delivered to business teams.