Embodying Customer Success: 2016 Veeva European Commercial Summit Heroes
Everyone talks about company culture. It’s intangible, hard to describe… it’s a feeling. Some companies have a culture that may be more inwardly focused. What I love about Veeva is that we live our company culture loudly and proudly. Anyone who knows Veeva knows we have three core value that drive us: customer success, employee success, and speed. We start every meeting and every presentation with these values.
But with Veeva, it’s more than words on a piece of paper or a slide. We live these values day in and day out. Our company culture is about helping our customers be successful, removing any roadblocks along the way, and ensuring our employees feel good about their job and their company.
But what’s equally unique is the passion and drive our customers demonstrate in their Veeva implementations. To me, this speaks to the strategic value that Veeva delivers to our customers.
It is in the spirit of customers going above and beyond that we named our Veeva heroes at the 2016 Veeva European Commercial Summit. This year we have five heroes from four companies, listed in the order that I announced them during the conference.
Peter Schnack, Global Head Commercial and Marketing Systems, Takeda
Peter is a leader within Takeda, responsible for commercial systems in Takeda’s business units globally. He is the kind of guy who starts the day in one time zone and finishes in another one. Always humble and professional, Peter maintains a positive attitude even under pressure. Peter is a very business-focused leader within an IT organization, which makes him perfectly suited to lead the global roll out of Veeva CRM across the world.
Tom Franke, Program Manager, Boehringer Ingelheim
Through Tom’s leadership, the timeline to roll out Veeva CRM was cut in half by leveraging Veeva as delivered without customization. Tom is someone who listens, speaks thoughtfully, and builds consensus. Equally, Tom isn’t afraid to push back when necessary, which is a good thing both for the customer and for Veeva. He and his team are the driving force behind the successful Veeva program within Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health.
Marcel de Jong, Global Vice President, CRM Futures, and Wayne Crowe, IT Director, Global Customer Engagement, GSK
GSK is both the largest and fastest Veeva CRM rollout and are early adopters for Veeva Align and Veeva Network. As we thought about the hero award, we saw Marcel and Wayne as a double act and we couldn’t split them apart!
Marcel was part of the Veeva program from day one. He created a best practice model of governance, subject matter experts, and captained a well oiled machine to deploy Veeva and the standard reports faster than anyone else in the world. Marcel is a business leader who has probably learned more about IT then he would care to mention or want to admit.
Wayne has been a Veeva supporter since he took the IT program lead role in 2015 bringing with him 27 years of program delivery experience. He has never shied away from tough decisions. Along with Marcel, he challenges both GSK and Veeva to leverage as much as possible with basic configuration. This will enable GSK to take future product updates with speed.
Mette Wagner, Senior Manager Multi-Channel Transformation, large Danish pharmaceutical company
Mette has always been a great change agent within her organization and was instrumental in her company becoming an early adopter on Vault PromoMats and Veeva CRM Multichannel in Europe.
She’s a perfectionist in everything she does. You only need to forget to write the company name properly with capital letters to know she pays attention to detail and is very proud of the company! Consistent with her intensity and passion, I think she has taken more different Veeva Admin courses than anyone else.
We know that it takes a village and that our heroes are supported by great teams. The hero awards are intended to call out what it takes from both Veeva and our customers to preserve, protect and promote customer success.
Now we turn our attention to 2017… who will be this year’s Veeva Commercial heroes? Stay tuned.