One size doesn’t fit all In the life sciences CRM sector

According to industry analyst Datamonitor, investments by life sciences companies in CRM products will continue to increase as much as 20 percent by 2005. A well-implemented CRM strategy can help maximise drug awareness, increase brand equity, and accelerate the revenue success of a drug.  As such, it’s little wonder that such rapid growth in the CRM sector is forecast.

Now, it has become common practice for life sciences companies to implement CRM systems.

However, too many CRM vendors are offering ‘one size fits all’ solutions, and in a highly specialised and diverse sector like life sciences, this approach is failing customers. Not everybody drives the same make and model of car — for good reason — and life sciences companies are beginning to realise that the same should apply to CRM. Flexible CRM implementations can be deployed quickly and easily into established business processes and systems whereas off- the-shelf solutions, which promise much, can be difficult to implement, conflict with existing business practices, and prove expensive to support and develop.

“The CRM market has been bedevilled by implementations that have consistently under-performed on promises made,” wrote Michael Thompson of Butler Group.  This is because many systems cannot provide an exact fit to a business’s CRM cycle.  Also, they are rarely flexible enough to evolve and adapt to changes within the business, its products, and customer base.

Traditionally, ‘best practice’ applications have seen vendors design software based on their own views of a particular industry or market. This implies that all companies within that industry will use the same business processes and, therefore, need the same tools to support them. However, this is not how it works in the real world.

“You can’t back strategies and best practice into software”, says Richard Hewson, Managing Director of research company Hewson Group. “Buying CRM technology to do that, thinking it’ll do the job for you, is a mistake.”

The CRM systems that succeed are the ones developed around single unified technology platforms that life sciences companies can take and adapt to fit their individual sales and marketing requirements. These solutions integrate all points of customer interaction including sales, marketing, customer support applications and the Web. They help create an integrated view so that companies can accurately identify and differentiate their customers’ needs, define strategies to enhance relationships based on those needs, and thereby maximise customer lifetime value.

Off- the-shelf software is satisfactory only if you are a company with a single issue that requires a single fix. In contrast, life sciences companies need to make sure their sales and marketing tactics are targeted to best match the individual preferences of prescribers and related customers both in terms of contact and selling and also the analysis of campaigns. There is also legislative compliance to consider as current laws and regulations in Europe prohibit the direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs.  This means that life sciences companies must place a heavy reliance on face-to-face meetings with physicians to promote their drugs. All of these factors need to be carefully and closely managed.

The recognition of the benefits offered by CRM technologies represents a shift in thinking from life sciences sales and marketing professionals. Previously, customers were viewed from the perspective of specific products and historical snapshots. Now, life sciences companies are recognising the value in evolving away from a product-oriented mindset to a more customer-centric vision that enables them to fully understand their diverse audience segments, and assess and leverage the lifetime value of each physician relationship. CRM solutions are vital in making this switch, as the research firm Gartner Group agrees, citing “a highly flexible solution” as necessary in the life sciences market where small to mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) are set to invest heavily in CRM over   the next few years. Again though, the solutions have to be focused on the specific customer requirements and issues unique to the individual company.

CRM is a cycle of continuous improvement, not point-in-time problem solving. To gain from their sales and marketing investments, life sciences companies need to be able to target the right prospects, with the right products at the right time, through the right channel. There is a need to turn operational and market data into actionable information.  This is not a static process. Customers, products, legislation and market trends are constantly changing and CRM solutions need to have the flexibility to cope with this. Good CRM implementations start with a vision and strategic planning, lead on to operational CRM and then to analytical CRM. This analysis feeds back into vision and strategy, and the cycle goes on.

Choosing the right CRM solution is vital. If the application can keep pace with these business changes, the right results ensue and the company will thrive. But the solution cannot be prescriptive. It must provide a framework that each company can use to support the business processes unique to their products, customers, and markets.