The pharma sector faces unique challenges in regulatory restrictions as well as how it’s allowed to handle marketing and promotional activities. Regulatory reforms, compliance regulations, generic competition, and marketing audit controls are just a few obstacles pharma companies must navigate to reach customers and expand sales territories. Pharma CRM provides this industry with the ability to automate processes, pinpoint marketing efforts, and enhance the effectiveness of sales teams. In this post, we’ll discuss seven of the biggest benefits of CRM for pharmaceuticals companies, in particular, their sales and marketing departments. .
Benefit #1: Automated Processes
CRM automation benefits pharma in numerous ways. Intelligently automated lead assignments help reps respond to and manage leads faster. Automatic scheduling for physician visits, as well as other sales automation tools, simplify the planning and execution of these interactions. Many pharma CRM solutions can instantly calculate the number of possible visits a rep can make, taking their workload and schedule into account, to plan the most efficient sales call appointments. These automations not only streamline the sales process, but also maximize the effectiveness of the sales team overall.
A unified database of products with detailed descriptions of each drug acts as a powerful reference point for reps on the go, enabling them to manage pricing, develop product-segment matrices, and plan better sales calls. Expense reporting tools and integrations make tracking the expenses associated to sales calls more efficient and easier to report on.
Pharma CRM’s automatic data imports deliver useful perspectives on how sales teams are working with distributors and pharmacy networks. What are the results of these interactions? What trends are revealed? How can the team adapt sales and marketing to meet those trends? Preconfigured reports, easily accessed via the CRMs dashboard, are a quick way to analyze the results of sales and marketing efforts. These reports can also be drilled into for even deeper analysis.
Benefit #2: Integration with Industry Databases
Many pharma companies use internally developed (and sometimes quite complex) IT infrastructure within their organization. When data can interchange between existing systems and the CRM, it reveals a robust new potential for data analysis.
Removing data siloes by connecting complimentary systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), HR solutions, and support centers amplifies the benefits the pharma company can receive from its data. Full customer profiles are revealed, there are more data points to analyze and learn from, and automation between the systems keeps teams collaborating at the highest levels.
Benefit #3: Customer Journey Tracking
Customer journey tracking informs where the customer stands according to a set of interactions with your brand, documenting the full experience of that customer. Account and contact management tools in the CRM help teams gauge when a customer is unhappy or, conversely, may be interested in an upsell or cross-sell opportunity. Based on the customer’s interactions and communication history, any rep with access to the CRM can quickly understand where that customer is within their customer journey lifecycle. Armed with that data, they can adapt their communications to be more relevant and proactive to the customer’s needs.
Benefit #4: Mobile CRM
Pharmaceutical reps need the ability to access information on the go. Mobile CRM accessibility is standard in nearly all pharma CRM solutions, enabling these representatives to quickly reference customer histories, keep notes on important discussions, review and log phone calls and emails, and look at recent customer touchpoints both before and after a meeting. With these insights at their fingertips, pharma reps can build better customer relationships and have more productive sales interactions.
Benefit #5: Data Augmentation
Data augmentation (also referred to as data enrichment) enhances data sets by adding information from external and internal resources with minimal effort. The days of manually searching the internet to gather data on a prospect are soon to be gone forever as more and more pharma CRM solutions adopt this capability. Data about prospects can be pulled in from all over the Web with minimal preliminary information, often using only the prospect’s name and email address. From these pieces of information, the CRM can fill in the blanks on the prospect’s social media accounts, their job title, their company’s mentions in the news, and much more.
Data augmentation/enrichment also keeps teams on top of changes happening to their accounts. When a customer implements a new technology or moves office locations, the CRM can uncover that and add it to the CRM account without any manual effort. All these data points feeding into the CRM create robust profiles to inform and improve overall sales intelligence and foster more personalized interactions with customers.
Benefit #6: Targeted Marketing
The pharmaceutical industry, like any other, must promote various products and services to get the attention of their potential customers. CRM helps marketing teams gauge the current market conditions based on customer behavior and buying habits. It also helps teams easily realign markets by territory, product, segmentation categories, or even in response to new regulations.
The insights of the CRM data give marketing the information necessary to segment certain types of customers into logical groups (ex: physicians, clinics, hospitals, HCPs, etc.). Marketers can schedule the ideal time to engage with each group to maximize their marketing efforts and produce better campaign ROI. Functions like automated campaign management keep marketing rolling forward, and integrated data sets help predict emerging trends so marketing can stay one step ahead of the competition.
Benefit #7: Activity Tracking
CRM solutions can capture leads from every touchpoint and aggregate that information in a single location. These data sources can range from sales call transcripts, to website chats, to form submissions and document downloads. The full spectrum of data aggregated by the CRM enables pharma companies not only to capture more information, but also accurately track leads and understand the most effective channels for engaging with them. Activity tracking can help sales teams to move proactively, recognizing early on when a lead is ready to convert by mapping the patterns of behavior that lead to a purchase.
Pharma CRM is a powerful tool for aligning departments, revealing deeper data patterns, and streamlining the sales process. If you need help with CRM for pharma, we can perform a free discovery call to help you. By gathering information on the goals of your organization and the processes you already have in place, we can recommend the best fitting solution for your needs. Visit our Pharma page for more information.