Improving Events Management ROI for Better Pharma Marketing

For small-to-medium life sciences companies, events are often the primary means for engaging face-to-face with key thought leaders. But as a pharmaceutical marketer in a growing company, taking advantage of those critical opportunities was an uphill battle. A convoluted events management process managed in a multi-page Excel spreadsheet, unclear communication, and transparency challenges meant delays. As a result, our team was scrambling to meet deadlines and incurring greater costs – including increased fees for late registrations, which ate into our budgets. It’s a common pitfall for marketers: less time to prepare for events, and more process inefficiencies.

We needed to evolve our events program to become a true driver of our business. And to enable this change, we required a simple way to manage some of our core processes:

* Managing budgets – we required a visual, intuitive way to see program spend against budgeted cost, and then bring that information into our expense management system
* Alignment – easy accessibility to event details for all stakeholders would enable better coordination
* Control – with built-in processes for managing key event types per organizational policy
* Measurement – ensuring accountability with dashboarding and reporting

By eliminating manual event management processes and centralizing all activity on a single solution designed for life sciences, we gained visibility and control. Within two months, we went from tracking 3 to a core set of 10 event types, and we can easily report and see results against them.

Today, we’re able to collaborate more effectively with our logistics providers, develop event-related content more quickly, and gain efficiencies across the event management process. As a result of this increased transparency, we were able to reduce our marketing spend by 15%. And critically, we are seeing a six-month event lead-time that enables us to plan our program strategy more strategically. And those results have been truly significant to our overall marketing strategy.

From beginning to end, all event information is captured in our CRM system and combined with customer profiles, giving us visibility into the impact of our messaging, as well as aggregate spend. For our reps, gaining immediate insight into event details in their workflow helps them maximize the opportunity to meet face-to-face with core stakeholders.

Across the myriad of moving pieces that comprise a scientific events program, the key to success is maintaining alignment – not only across teams and partners but also with customers. Looking to the future, we’re excited by the potential of events to serve as a driver of customer experience, as we continue to track HCP event data over time. To learn more about our journey, please take a look at how we designed our new event management process and our key takeaways from implementing a new approach to a growing organization.