4 Considerations for a Streamlined Events Management Solution

Speaker programs are crucial for providing education and building momentum. And healthcare professionals (HCPs) agree—in a recent survey, 61% said they want more events in their channel mix with biopharma.

But from an IT leadership perspective, I know that events can be challenging due to the large number of components that must work together to manage an event from planning to closeout. Maintaining a consistent view of event data across these disparate components creates inefficiencies that slow down event execution and make them more costly for the business.

When our business team decided to find a solution to simplify how Mirati plans our events, I ensured that IT was an active stakeholder in the project. In just a few short weeks, we were able to go live with Veeva CRM Events Management and shape it to meet our needs for a more efficient events management process.

Here are four recommendations for streamlining your events execution.

1. Establish a single source of truth for event data

Budget reporting was a significant pain point that my team experienced with our previous events system. We relied heavily on spreadsheets to track everything, which posed challenges. Sales leadership lacked a clear view of budget allocations, making it difficult to determine how much money was actually being spent.

Additionally, there were no consistent rules when using spreadsheets; events teams would manage their data differently for each event type. This situation made planning expenses and compliance reporting hard since we often had to manually collate metrics across individual spreadsheets when we needed aggregate totals.

One of the benefits of CRM Events Management is that it can accommodate all different types of events—conferences, tradeshows, speaker programs, virtual events, and more—with the same data model. It also supports the field from the inception of an event all the way to closeout so that we can combine all our event data into one single repository where all the same data types are organized the same way.

The specialized Budget object in the solution allows the field to mark their expenses and helps us track budget rollups more accurately. Now, we can trace where our money is being spent with one simple report we share with all event stakeholders.

2. Build a complete view of the customer

Disparate data sources also made it time-consuming to pull the event data into reports that track the customer journey across channels. Often, we had to manually pull the data together before we could glean insights from it, and as with all other data sources, our events data needed its own data integration to get to our data warehouse.

However, after moving to CRM Events Management, our event data is stored directly in the Veeva CRM database. That means our field teams can see an HCP’s event attendance in the same place as their alerts, notifications, calls, and emails. We can also use the same integration we currently have for Veeva CRM to feed the data into our data store, cutting down on the custom code we must maintain.

This has increased visibility between the medical and sales teams so that our medical science liaisons can better time and tailor their scientific discussions to take advantage of sales and marketing-led events.

CRM Events Management has also brought us closer to a 360-degree view of our HCPs across all channels. Our next step is to incorporate events into our next best action engine so that we can suggest personalized follow-up actions for the field after an HCP has attended an event.

3. Use an integrated event services team

When the Veeva team told us that they had their own in-house services team—which was already integrated with CRM Events Management—I knew it was another chance to consolidate our processes further.

Veeva Digital Events (VDE) got set up as soon as we implemented CRM Events Management. Their backend system is already connected to Veeva CRM, so the field could work directly with VDE coordinators from their iPad without custom portals, integrations, or extra technology fees.

Another added benefit is that VDE coordinators are experts in using CRM Events Management. Coordinators will often assist our field teams whenever they have questions about the software, significantly improving the field user experience and helping us reduce training overhead.

Finally, the coordinators act as the first contact for our field. Because they interact directly with our reps, they are well-positioned to collect feedback and share what’s working well and what could be better. These insights are integral for our internal Mirati teams so that we can improve our events management processes.

4. Create a “one-stop shop” user experience

The most significant change CRM Events Management has made for our sales teams is that they can now run their events from the same device they use to interact with HCPs in other channels.

The motion to start an event and start a call is almost the same in Veeva CRM. Marketing-led events, such as conferences, also flow automatically into users’ account interaction history, helping them see an end-to-end view of their HCPs’ brand journey.

Also, field teams have access to insights from their CRM MyInsights visualizations, which surface the most relevant information about each HCP’s engagement history to help the field decide on the right moment to send an event invite. Integrations to Veeva Vault PromoMats and Veeva Vault MedComms, along with Veeva CRM Approved Email, facilitate the usage of content in the events lifecycle.

These connections with the rest of Veeva Commercial Cloud help us get the highest returns out of our IT investment while creating a smoother user experience for our field teams.

More efficient events, more time for strategy

After over a decade working with various life sciences IT solutions, I know it’s a sign of a fantastic solution when you can support an entire field force with just two people.

Right now, a team of two is enough to run our entire events operation with CRM Events Management. Moreover, these two people still have the bandwidth to work on our other solutions across the rest of the commercial space.

CRM Events Management has made us more efficient, which gives us more time to take on more strategic projects, like figuring out where artificial intelligence fits into our model or building an omnichannel view of the customer. It’s also given us the foundation to elevate our thinking about events, taking them from ad hoc opportunities to a strategic channel that works in concert with the rest of our HCP engagement model.

See CRM Events Management in action throughout the event lifecycle.