[00:02]
CRM is really nothing more than a way to deliver insights to these customer facing groups and how to arm them with information and insights that they can then use because they’re the closest one to your customers at the end of the day. The sales force is the largest group of employees and often times the loudest and so they really have to be strong in their direction for the future because it will impact that whole group of people.

[00:29]
If you’re going to redo the central nervous system of your commercial organization, you have an opportunity to wire it now with some of these things in mind that you’ve been trying to rewire in the past. You can see it as a painful change from status quo or an opportunity to rethink your future and that leadership narrative on what this change means is really powerful. Really powerful.

[01:00]
Hi there. I’m Lecia Bushak, Pharma Editor at MM+M. I’m super excited to bring you today’s sponsored conversation with Deloitte. Here with me today is Dave Rosner, Deloitte Life Sciences customer engagement leader and Kate White Walters, Deloitte customer engagement strategy leader. And today we’ll be discussing customer relationship management trends and future strategies in life sciences. Dave and Kate will delve into the current state of the industry and discuss the future of customer engagement for pharma companies.

[01:29]
They’ll explain what leaders should be considering today, and the key impacts that will come from these decisions in the months and years to come. This is the MM+M Agency 100 Strategies for Success podcast with Deloitte. Dave and Kate, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having us. Ah, thanks for having us. I’d like to start out by just setting the stage a bit to understand the CRM transformation in life sciences.

[01:54]
I understand that there’s a big moment coming up, the ending of the Viva and Salesforce partnership. which has a lot of implications for biopharma companies and will require them to re-evaluate their CRM approaches. Could you provide some context around that partnership ending and what it means for the industry and how pharma companies are preparing for that transformation that’s expected to happen? On one level, it’s a software change. Be been Salesforce, you know, Salesforce is investing in new product.

[02:24]
Beva is moving away from Salesforce as a partner. So that’s happened. And that’s a software implication. And then, you can take it to the next level, which is, well, with IQVIA also divesting their software product or selling it to IP2 Salesforce, basically, you take a step back and every pharma company in the world has to do something with their CRM platform in the next four to five years. And that’s a big implication operationally.

[02:51]
If you look at a typical pharma company, thousands, in some cases, tens of thousands of reps around the world, 50, 100 countries sitting in front of all the the decision makers that are in the buying process of your 10 to 60 to 70 billion dollar business. And this piece of software that is used by all those people operationally is at the center of that.

[03:16]
And the other element of this is that is the central nervous system of your whole commercial operations. It touches everything. It touches how you do you know field alignments and how you deploy people. It touches medical, touches market access, it touches touches, you know, patient services and field nurses, touches all your digital channels. So just operationally speaking, it’s a it’s a big change.

[03:39]
Um, the other way to look at it is this is something that you’re going to live with for at least 10 years and most companies will do this by the end of the decade. So we’re talking about a decision you’re making to support and enable how you engage with all your customers around the world from 2030 to 2040. This is This is literally a decision that needs to last to 2040 for most companies.

[04:04]
So from a strategic customer engagement perspective, it’s a big deal and you’re going to want a future proof. Now, there are choices. There are some companies that are doubling down on their current strategy. They know where they’re going. And for them, this is a moment they do not want to transform. This is a moment for them to make an operational change that’s necessary and they’re going to move forward. There are other companies that are saying, “This is a moment.

[04:31]
If we’re going to do this, let’s rethink how we’re going to do this. Let’s really future-proof 2030 to 2040, and then what does that mean?” And then the software comes after that. And one is not right or wrong, it’s simply a choice. And you know, there’s different companies at different stages or you know, in their growth and their positioning and their portfolio, and they’re going to make those choices.

[04:52]
But this is as equally a big operational impact and change for the industry as it is a moment for some companies to really rethink how do they engage with their customers and what does this mean going forward for 2030 to 2040. Yeah, you often times say that it’s going to this is going to be a costly choice regardless of which way you go.

[05:15]
Uh it’s going to take a lot of your team’s time time to actually make this migration, whether it’s sticking with Viva or going to Salesforce or another provider. Um and you also know that you’re going to have, as Dave said, around 10 years of impact for this. You have to ensure that you’re taking this as an opportunity to to think about how you want to do that because the cost and the time, the operational risk, like those are going to be there regardless of the choice that you make. And so, how do you want to make the most out of this opportunity.

[05:44]
And as pharma companies are faced with all of these new choices, as you just mentioned, what are some of the things that they need to keep in mind when deciding which CRM platform is best suited for them? I mean, I think we we oftentimes start with thinking about where is your organization going. Um so every organization is faced with kind of as Dave said, it’s it’s a 10-year choice. So for pharma companies, you you know what your pipeline looks like and you’ve an idea of what your portfolio might look like in the future. future.

[06:13]
So starting to think about, you know, where is your revenue coming from? Who are your customers? And what are some of your business constraints? You know, if you’re launching a major drug this year, you may say now is not the time we need to wait till at least next year. Or you may say we have to get this done prior to a new launch, but it’s really doubling down on thinking about where your business is going so that you ensure that you’re thinking about that in light of these choices.

[06:36]
Yeah, I think in the beginning when this first started to appear, we got a lot of, “Hey, come and talk to us about like Viva versus Salesforce and, this feature versus and we said, that’s really not the right question. What is your customer engagement model going to be for your top brands? The 80% brands that are going to represent 80% of the revenue for your company. And what do those models look like? And it’s very specific to to some companies.

[07:02]
So some companies might have what we call more of a retail specialty growth, right? And where they’re selling more specialty drugs that require more onboarding and reimbursements support and has a heavy consumer-oriented engagement and pitch. And that looks very different in terms of you need to have a customer engagement model that includes field reps, FRMs, potentially nurses, and a heavy connection with patient services in the US and then outside the US it might look a little differently.

[07:31]
There’s other companies that have big portfolio of brands that are more towards end of exclusivity and they’re trying to do more with less. And that’s more of a classic digital share of voice not through field reps and field people but through other channels and that looks different. And then there’s everything in between if you’re a rare disease company or orphan drug company, you’re really looking at how do I engage with patients more?

[07:58]
What does that look like? It’s a heavy scientific message, engagement between medical and commercial is important. So all these models are the things that would tell us, well, this one might point you in one direction from a software platform technology, operational choice versus the other, answer those questions first and make sure you get alignment within the company that that’s the direction you want to use to drive forward with a self-serve choice.

[08:25]
I imagine that AI might also play a role in this larger CRM evolution. How do you expect AI will change the landscape of customer engagement moving forward? Yeah, I think the I sort of pause when you ask that question because the future of of AI in customer engagement is is kind of exponential as I think the future of AI is anywhere.

[08:50]
So when we think about the future of AI and customer engagement, there is an opportunity to truly engage with customers on kind of like what we call an end of one level, which is who specifically are you talking to and what do they need to hear in order to think about their their journey through this either you know prescribing process or buying process or even you know we think about RM is actually sometimes the customer is the sales rep. So, they’re the ones that that are using this technology.

[09:19]
So, what do they need to do to be able to do their job? And how do they wake up in the morning and have the best guidance on, how should I spend my day? What’s the highest and best use of my time? They started talking about like products that are going digital first. But we often times think that they’re often times will still be a sales rep involved.

[09:38]
And so, how does that sales rep then add to the digital channels? and use their time in the best possible way, not just, you know, kind of repeating the same message over and over, but using AI in order to guide their their direction and a lot of that will be fed into uh their CRM tool. So that CRM tool will serve up the best use of their time and how to build on the right messaging.

[09:59]
Yeah, we’re definitely I mean there’s a lot of energy towards AI, of course, and now Agentic is sort of this next wave of focus and attention, I would say, or or discussion. There’s definitely going to be AI used in engaging with whether it’s physicians or patients or other stakeholders. And then you’re definitely going to have AI just productivity for employees or field users.

[10:25]
But when we look at, especially with Agentic and the opportunity there, we believe based on some early analysis we’re doing, you could reduce the size of a commercial operations, a typical back office for a pharma company 20% to 30%, maybe even more in terms of what’s required to support a current portfolio business.

[10:46]
So you have pharmaceutical companies that are clearly in growth mode, looking ahead, brands are launching, and they need to keep SG&A flat or that’s their ambition. And you know it’s not as sexy as you know enabling AI you know field wrap copilot but being able to grow the top line while keeping SG&A flat through the use of Agentic is a pretty pretty big opportunity. I would say it’s early days but that’s the opportunity.

[11:14]
And you know again it doesn’t get as much focus and attention as the front end the customer and the end user type of AI use cases but where there’s going to be a ton of value is also going to be on the back end. I feel like everyone wants to talk about like how it’ll make your engagement better and it’s more personalized like the way I started. But in reality, when we think about our clients, they spend so much money on their sales operations and just getting that right.

[11:42]
So there is this really significant opportunity to reduce that spend. Yeah, I mean, med legal review, cleaning up data, master data processing, you know, data change requests from the field with a gent. I mean, it also has both of the those things. I mean, if you could accelerate cycles of content faster, not just take money out of the process of MLR and other content, that’s huge too.

[12:03]
I mean, one of the cool things we did find was that we believe regardless of which which solution you pick that your current content, you will likely be able to reuse it in the new tool without having to go through a medical legal review, which will, again, just kind of operationally smooth the process of going from one platform to another. There’s a lot of talk about AI, but what about data and analytics? How will that play into all of this? I agree.

[12:29]
There is a lot around AI and there’s a lot of, you know, but to this day, when you talk to commercial leaders, they still ask the question, how do we deliver better insights? How do we take advantage of data to our benefit?

[12:43]
And pharma companies have invested a lot over the last, I would say, 10 years building capabilities to do lots of analysis and generate a lot of insights and where the opportunity is If again, if you’re going to refresh your CRM, if you’re going to refresh the systems and the things that talk and touch all your customer-facing people, you have an opportunity and it does play in with AI in some ways, but to deliver insights and there are some companies there’s that are thinking about it and I think it’s very innovative.

[13:14]
CRM is really nothing more than a way to deliver insights to these customer-facing groups and how to arm them with information and insights that they can then use because they’re the closest one to your customers at the end of the day. And, you know, yes, CRM is a field productivity tool. You need to use it to, you know, manage sample, collection, and signatures, and and other things.

[13:39]
And yes, management wants to see, you know, who are you calling on and capture institutionalized knowledge of of customers and and all of that. At the end of the day, the most powerful part of CRM is arming these organizations that are they’re closest to the customer with information and insights that they can then use to better position your brands and your products and and also in in some ways, you know.

[14:01]
So data and analytics is also something that maybe the first time this happened 10-15 years ago, it was a little bit of a of a bolt-on. And now there’s an opportunity to think about data and analytics and even classic field reporting, NRX, TRX and how to use that. In a way, when you think about CRM versus launching the CRM platform and software and then adding reports and data on top, it should all be done together. At least that’s the opportunity.

[14:28]
So it sounds like there’s a lot of opportunities here for pharma companies. Um in what other ways will the CRM transition impact customer engagement strategies for pharma companies? There’s some things that have been happening in the industry that I wouldn’t say are new or unheard of. People talk about account-based selling models. People talk about the intersection of personal and non-personal the use of digital channels. So, so none of that is new.

[14:57]
And certainly companies have attacked those things in certain ways. But with the refresh of the software and the platforms that support customer engagement, there’s definitely an opportunity to for those not to be an add-on that they were before just because the how they evolved, not because the platforms couldn’t support it.

[15:17]
There’s this other concept of just teaming that is an opportunity and it seems obvious and I think if you talk to most commercial leaders they would recognize, yeah, we we get it, like medical, field sales, whoever it is in for the model, need to do better collaboration around certain accounts or customers or or large payers.

[15:37]
But They haven’t really industrialized that as a concept and fine-tuned it to the way that they probably can if they start from fresh. And again, that’s independent of the Viva versus Salesforce, either way. But if you’re going to redo the central nervous system of your commercial organization, you have an opportunity to wire it now with some of these things in mind that you’ve been been trying to rewire, you know, in the past.

[16:06]
I think the the point that you made about teaming and collaboration is really key. We’ve been talking about this forever in the industry and just how you coordinate on those things. I do think there’s a pretty significant opportunity as you said when you’re rewiring to say that that collaboration and coordination is at the center of how you want to rewire your organization.

[16:29]
A lot of our clients and a lot of the industry until now has done that work kind of patching together solutions outside side of their CRM solution. So we’ve seen, you know, most people have a solve for that, but it’s a bit cobbled together and it’s not sort of the like native answer. So there’s an opportunity as you rethink this to make that be the core of your solution and to take everything you’ve cobbled together and be able to solve for it in one piece.

[16:58]
Another really important aspect of this is preparing for holistic organizational change. What are some of the critical components of managing that the transition and how can pharma companies ensure successful adoption of it? Well, I I think some of this goes back to how much you’re going to really change and how much potentially AI and and those disruptive things are going to play into your transformation.

[17:27]
If you’re going to do what you’re doing today and you’re just going to upgrade and do more you’re going to improve upon what you have today, the organizational change obviously is not going to be as great. And companies are well prepared to do incremental change in organizational shifts.

[17:44]
There are some companies that are using this moment to really rethink their model, either how they organize around the customer or how they either go to market or internally how they’re going to support and operate. And those things, especially when you start talking about letting AI and maybe in some cases data and other things come into play in ways that don’t today.

[18:08]
It’s going to look very different and many of our clients are starting to think about what does that change look like? Who do I need to hire? Do I need new competencies? Do we need to shift resources around? What does this look like? We’ve seen a lot of organizations where across the organization different parties have different incentives.

[18:29]
So you have, this is a significant change and it’s going to it’s going to cost the amount of money that a significant change is going to cost and so you have a CFO or someone in your finance organization that is really concerned with the cost and how it’s going to be allocated and how to reduce the cost. You have sales leaders who are really excited about the future and what this change might be able to turn on for them. You have, you know, operations leaders who are trying to fix the basics and make sure that address and the system is right.

[18:59]
And so what we’ve seen is that making that choice on the the scope of this change is really key, but also aligning across the organization on what does that mean for us? And how do you kind of address the the concerns that various parties have as they tackle this large organizational change. This question reminds me a little bit of the anecdote that we use. So when we’ve started to work with some of the larger companies that are moving forward earlier, right? Because they have a longer lead time.

[19:29]
The dynamic we see is people who are operating in the way they operate today are very focused on the pain points they have today. And and they’re taking that and they’re they’re using that to project, well, this is what I need in the future.

[19:46]
So, oh, how do I you know today managing you know I don’t know you know vacant territories or you know somebody go you know how do I do that or you know oh every time we do a realignment it’s so painful I need the software to do it better.

[20:00]
And getting out of the what is my pain point today and how do I you know fix my my current problems to, I need to future proof our organization for 2030 to 2040 and getting out of the mindset of solving today’s pain points or making incremental improvements today is something that we have seen a lot of people struggle with. Yeah, it’s a harder question than I think we initially thought it was going to be.

[20:30]
It feels like it’s fairly easy to define the scope of this and and kind of figure out your path forward, but getting yourself outside of your now and into your 10 years from now, uh isn’t is is easier to set them done, I guess. Yeah. And it takes, you know, sounds cheesy. It It kind of takes courage because if you’re going to make a big bet, we’re going to go in this direction.

[20:54]
I’m going to use AI to change something that we’ve been doing and it’s been working for 20 years, but we think it will make an impact. I mean, to the hard work is going after those opportunities and, you know, it takes some courage to do. So it’s that that end of itself is hard.

[21:12]
And and I think this comes back to what we’ve been talking about with our clients, which is this is definitely an area where you need top top-down alignment, and the more leadership can agree amongst themselves, what are we trying to achieve with this?

[21:29]
And then cascade that down to the organization before the organization starts to spin on, and we see this like, at some companies you have a Viva camp, you have a Salesforce camp, and and one group wants to do multichannel and the other group is saying, “Oh, it’s all about making the rep better.” And when the organization doesn’t have a clear directive from above. This is what we’re trying to achieve from a business perspective, a customer engagement perspective, or whatever it is.

[21:58]
The organization can get a little wrapped around the axle and it can be somewhat disruptive. So when we’ve seen this go well and it’s early days, is when leadership really has a clear view of what they’re trying to achieve by this and then they can cascade that down to the organization. Yeah. You talked about the courage it takes. I think that’s so accurate. I mean we’ve seen with a lot of our clients starting to think about the number of people this change will impact and just thinking about like for most organizations, this is their largest body of employees.

[22:28]
The sales force is the largest group of employees and often times the loudest. And so they really have to be strong in their direction for the future because it will impact that whole group of people and you can see it as a painful change from status quo or an opportunity to rethink your future and that leadership narrative on what this change means is really powerful.

[22:52]
On that note, looking ahead to the future, what trends are you looking out for that you think life sciences leaders should be aware of as they navigate these new CRM strategies and customer engagement? Well, there’s a lot of customer engagement strategies and it’s very TA brand portfolio specific. But clearly, what we would again, I mentioned it before, consumer-oriented specialty, right? GLP-1 is a great category to talk talk about for that, but there’s others.

[23:22]
Patients are going to be taking a larger role in their buying decisions and sometimes out of pocket decisions. And in those cases, not only does it mean engaging and selling to them directly, and in some cases there’s models where you’re also dispensing to them and distributing to them directly, but you also have helping them through reimbursement. So that’s just one example. As Dave said, it’s very based on therapeutic area.

[23:50]
but the consumerization of healthcare is not going to stop. We often times talk to our clients about the way they engage with their HCPs as well as with their patients is a little bit stuck in history. But their patients and their healthcare providers are also engaging with Amazon and have expectations on, you know, retail that is best in class anywhere.

[24:16]
They don’t differentiate between, well, oh, uh Pharmaceutical company can’t do X, Y, or Z. They want this to be easy and they want to be able to get the information they need and the products they need when they need it. And so, you know, the expectations of of customers has changed really, really rapidly. And often times the way that Life Sciences clients have been able to engage with them hasn’t changed at that same speed. So there is a pretty significant opportunity to think about how do you want to meet that title wave.

[24:45]
Yeah, I think cell and gene is another area where, you know, less consumer summarized, but definitely heavy patient involvement.

[24:53]
It’s also a complex therapy and a delivery of the therapy that in some cases mix providers and a for this centers and MedTech companies all collaborating around delivery of a very complex, very expensive therapy for a patient and that that requires something completely different a mass market blockbuster primary care drug.

[25:17]
Yeah, they’re like personalized therapies kind of end of one therapies like cell and gene or even just kind of the getting more personalized and in rare diseases, but then on the other end, the blockbuster drugs, the mass market GLP-1s and other kind of products that we’ve seen tread that same path. Those live at opposite ends of the the customer engagement spectrum in terms of what is required and the support that’s needed.

[25:44]
Um and oftentimes they live at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of that collaboration that’s required to deliver on it. Those complex therapies do require kind of an entire organization to come to support that patient or or healthcare provider to get on that treatment. Dave and Kate, thank you so much for providing your insight lights on customer relationship management and the big transformational change that Pharma will see in the coming years and how leaders can view this as an opportunity.

[26:11]
That was Dave Rossner, Deloitte Life Sciences customer engagement leader and Kate White Walters, Deloitte customer engagement strategy leader. Kate and Dave, thanks so much for joining. Thanks. Thanks for having us. If you’d like to learn more, see the link below in our description. Thanks again for listening. Come back soon for another one. Take care.

[26:32]
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