1. The imperative of integrated customer
engagement planning
It’s never been more important to deliver a seamless
customer experience — and in today’s era, this requires
teams to plan, design, execute, and track customer
journeys across physical and digital channels, at scale.
Over the past five years, competition has become fiercer,
markets are increasingly complex, and healthcare
professionals (HCPs) continue to demand engagement
on their terms. In this context, being able to orchestrate
business-driven, customer-centric journeys is a
strategic imperative.
Biopharma companies have most of the pieces in
place but often struggle to connect their systems, data,
processes, and people. Without these key enablers,
it is not feasible to offer customers personalized,
informative, and impactful experiences in a scalable way.
Integrated customer engagement planning will lead to
enhanced business results, as well as other leadingindicator benefits:
- Improved CX through the execution of one
holistic customer engagement plan - Better HCP activation and conversion
- More granular measurement of journeys,
their impact, and what works (and what doesn’t) - Higher-quality data to enable AI
- Empowered field teams to deliver personalized
experiences - Improved field user experience (UX) through
one easy, integrated solution - Greater RoI from technology investments
2. Overcoming existing barriers
Biopharma companies continue to invest heavily in
improving how they go to market and engage with
HCPs. This comes in many forms: optimizing channel
usage, investing in modular content, enhancing content
effectiveness, capturing better HCP insights to drive
greater personalization of content and messaging,
and automation to increase responsiveness. However,
despite best efforts, there are three significant barriers
to overcome [Figure 1].
True customer journey orchestration will remain
out of reach unless these challenges are addressed
directly and holistically. Each issue can be overcome
with a new end-to-end approach, supported by the
right technology, processes, skills, behaviors, and
performance measures. Equally, finding the right
balance between human intelligence and technology
will be critical, so that journeys can be adapted
to customer needs. It all starts with a fresh lens
on where investment, focus, and effort are being
directed today.
Focus investment in the right places
Traditionally, marketing teams in biopharma lead
the design of customer-centric journeys, while sales
drives field activity through a cycle planning process to
ensure top prospects are regularly seen. This approach
usually means that a single customer plan doesn’t
exist, which results in sales, marketing, and medical
functions operating in relative isolation.
For instance, sales focuses on personal, field-led
channels and marketing on digital channels
(such as web/portal, mass email, and social),
while increasingly relying on marketing automation
to enable personalization. Add medical into the mix,
which follows yet another process, and the result is
fragmented journeys that fail to deliver impact.
To reassess your current approach, we recommend
asking yourself the following questions:
- What proportion of your overall customer
touchpoints is driven by marketing automation? - How many HCPs regularly visit your portal/web
and are they identifiable? - Does mass email have more or less impact than
field-led email? - Does activity attainment or touchpoint and
message delivery drive field planning? - How many suggestions/NBAs are sent to field
teams and how many do they act upon?
In our experience, most biopharma companies tend to
answer a) Less than 10%, b) Very few, c) Less impact,
d) Activity attainment, and e) Lots, but few are actioned.
It is normal for sales and marketing to focus on
planning for only those channels within their remit
but doing so leaves significant value on the table.
In Figure 2, Veeva analysis indicates that most of
the engagement volume a biopharma company has
with its HCPs can be classified as ‘Personal planned’
(the orange box). Veeva Pulse data shows there are
600m+ personal interactions with HCPs annually.
While marketing automation and NBA have important
roles to play, they are typically lower in volume
(for now) and delivered via less impactful channels
(than personal, for example). It is essential to get the
most out of personal interactions, as they can have a
higher impact.
Biopharma companies can drive significant business
value and improve the customer experience by finding
a better balance of investment across this matrix,
including introducing marketing-led journeys to
personal-planned engagement. The data generated
can greatly improve the effectiveness of marketing
automation and NBA, but a lot of valuable insight
is left untapped today (see ‘The journey to
AI-driven orchestration’).
3. Rethinking the blueprint for execution
To realize the full potential of customer journey
orchestration, biopharma companies need a new
approach that challenges traditional ways of working,
silos, and mindsets [Figure 3]. Although a significant
change, it is more evolution than revolution. To unlock
this opportunity, the current process needs an infusion
of targeted solutions, each of which helps address
historical barriers.
4. A new approach to customer journey orchestration
Naturally, technology is a critical enabler in this
future model, but it is insufficient on its own. There
are five steps to overcoming muscle memory and
embedding this new approach, which span adapting
your processes and ways of working; introducing new
performance measures; and evolving the skills and
mindsets of sales, marketing, and medical [Figure 4].
STEP 1
Create the strategic customer
engagement framework
Start with a strategic customer engagement
framework that spans sales, marketing, and medical.
This framework should guide how these teams
design journeys for each customer segment, based
on progress up a ladder of adoption or influence.
For each stage of the journey, define a series of
objectives, messages, and content that should guide
the field to engage in a personalized way reflecting
both brand strategy and HCP needs.
Having a common framework is essential to align
field-led journeys with marketing campaigns and
automation journeys. For simplicity and execution
efficiency, avoid the trap of trying to plan one integrated
journey across field and digital. Field planning is
different: complex and costly, it will be inefficient to try
and design sub-journeys that are automatically
triggered for field teams to execute. An approach that
provides end-to-end visibility, while leaving some
discretion to highly skilled and knowledgeable field
teams, will be more effective. Over time, as data quality
improves, AI may be able to orchestrate more of the
journey, but this is a long way off today.
A common framework ensures consistency across
field-led and marketing automation journeys while
avoiding the complexity, sophistication, and cost of
designing one journey for all stakeholders.
STEP 2
Build the journey in CRM
Once the framework is ready, it’s easier to design and
codify the journeys into CRM using a user-friendly
visual tool (e.g., a custom Veeva configuration), and
tailor for different products, adoption ladder stages,
and HCP segments. This addresses the recurring
problem that most marketing outputs stay in
PowerPoint (or similar formats) and lack influence
over field activity.
If the framework is in CRM, the underlying data can
be utilized to guide and optimize field planning. It
becomes easier to track journeys and significantly
enriches the available insights. For this to be feasible,
it’s critical to have one common data model across all
brands and markets to account for different ways of
working and difficulties in measuring effectiveness.
STEP 3
Translate journeys into field-level plans
Effective digital engagement acknowledges that field
teams have finite capacity, factors in prioritization,
and facilitates advanced planning so daily and weekly
schedules can be created. For example, commercial
field teams in the U.K. might only be able to see a
particular HCP three times per year. It’s critical to factor
these types of real-world constraints into individual
HCP journey plans.
Setting up field cycle plans is predominantly a datadriven exercise. But if journeys are already defined,
all that data exists in the system. This data can be
leveraged and supplemented with some prioritization
criteria and field capacity data to simplify the cycle
planning process. The output is a realistic plan for a
field team member for their territory going into the
next cycle, which recommends the appropriate journey
for each HCP based on where they are in the adoption
ladder, their value segment, and the next step of the
journey. Field teams need an opportunity to provide
feedback on this process and include their qualitative
knowledge, before locking in a plan that they are
comfortable with and is ready for execution.
STEP 4
Enable field planning via a user-friendly
navigator ‘cockpit’
At this stage, journeys are planned at the HCP level and
locked into field teams’ cycle plans. Provide field teams
with all the insight and direction required to plan and
schedule engagement, and then execute the journeys.
They need a single, go-to place to plan their activity
and calls — almost like the navigation cockpit of a
plane. For complete visibility, it is important that nonfield-driven interactions are also surfaced on the HCP
timeline. Suggestions/NBAs can then trigger field-led
marketing activity.
STEP 5
Measure and analyze
A key benefit of this new approach is the ability to
measure and analyze journeys at a granular level so
that you can continuously optimize the customer
experience. Field teams can use the navigator
‘cockpit’ to track individual customer journey progress
and access territory views on journey status and
progression. This enables tailored engagement, both
within and between cycles. Field teams find it easier to
pick up the next touchpoint with an HCP when journeys
are tracked automatically in this way.
Introducing more robustness and objectivity when
measuring ladders of adoption could result in more
impactful measurement. Data captured from these
activities can be combined with field feedback and
other data sources to track customers’ level of
adoption, ensuring a clearer lens on their status than
relying on self-reporting alone. Finally, data captured
can also be used to trigger marketing automation,
which ensures marketing journeys are joined up
without the need for integration.
5. Making it happen
It’s time to accelerate the transition to this new model.
Execution is what matters most, requiring a shift from
strategy and capability building to scalable execution
and value realization. Fortunately, most biopharma
companies have 90% of the pieces in place to enable
this today, but it is time to translate the vision and
strategy into practice, get the organizational blueprint
right, and then drive lasting change.
The roadmap to customer journey orchestration
leadership [Figure 5] needs a clear direction and set
of accelerators to mobilize (Phase 0), followed by
embedding the right foundations (Phase 1), before
accelerating to market leadership (Phase 2). With
the right dedicated focus and leadership alignment,
biopharma companies can be up and running within
four to six months.
By combining marketing’s omnichannel engagement
expertise, sales’ experience with field management and
capacity planning, and field’s unique customer insight,
biopharma companies can capture significant value
from their omnichannel engagement. This will provide
a more personalized experience for their customers —
and deliver tangible in-year business value.
Key Takeaways
10 DESIGN PRINCIPLES OF JOURNEY ORCHESTRATION EXCELLENCE
- Shift the focus to touchpoints, messages, and content – Rather than channel activity
- Don’t be too prescriptive – Trust and empower your field force to know their customers and take the lead on
- Use marketing automation and NBA as accelerators – Balance investment in these areas and use them to help accelerate journey progression with relevant actions
- Improve robustness of ladder of adoption measurement – Moving beyond self-reporting ensures that the right messages are delivered to the right customers at the right time
- Plan for cycles, not events – Cycles are well understood by the field while events can be integrated within the planning cadence
- Enable customer prioritization within journeys – Align with sales on segmentation to be used with journeys and leave personas to guide content choice
- Factor in capacity – Even the perfect engagement plan will be ignored by field teams if it’s not realistic within their existing sales cycle
- Enhance the field team experience – Providing visibility is insufficient without considering the UX design of your solution
- Systematically measure journeys – Shift journeys from PowerPoint and design them based on data within CRM
- Make it scalable and cost-effective – The most advanced approach will have limited impact if isolated to a few brands or markets
delivering a personalized experience
Learn how the Vault CRM Suite unifies sales, marketing, medical, and service on a single life sciences-specific platform to drive more effective HCP engagement.
Authors
Aaron Bean
VP, Business Consulting Lead, Europe
aaron.bean@veeva.com
Gareth Allott
Principal, Business Consulting
sam.prince@veeva.com
Sam Prince
Senior Consultant, Business Consulting
sam.prince@veeva.com
About Veeva Business Consulting
Veeva Business Consulting combines commercial and medical expertise with Veeva’s proprietary data and technology to deliver better business-focused solutions for our customers. Our team of experts offers a suite of advisory offerings, including launch readiness, digital acceleration, and content optimization, all supported through unique HCP insights and analytics.
To learn more, visit veeva.com/business-consulting.