Periods of rapid growth can leave life sciences, healthcare, and pharma companies feeling like they are building a plane while already in flight. In the midst of managing changing operational and IT demands, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) often gets pushed down the list of priorities and/or left for non-technical Sales staff to “fend for themselves”.
CRM is about so much more than internal organization. What many companies may overlook is the critical role that CRM plays in driving growth: well-managed CRM systems have been shown to improve conversion by 300% and shorten sales cycles by 24%. Unfortunately, the processes that were adequate in the earliest days of your business can become a hindrance as you pick up speed.
Spreadsheets, email chains, and localized customizations and workarounds become dysfunctional in the face of rapid expansion and acquisition. All too often, life sciences companies reach an inflection point in business and don’t realize that their legacy CRM system is creating friction until they are already suffering the consequences.
Even if you aren’t feeling the squeeze at your current stage of growth, failure to upgrade from manual lead tracking before you outgrow it can harm your reputation as well as your bottom line.
The Business Impact of Inadequate CRM
How do you know if your existing process or system for customer relationship management is holding back your growth? Let’s explore some of the most common signals.
Lost Leads
One of the primary functions of a well-maintained CRM system is lead management. Life sciences companies that rely on manual lead tracking tend to realize that their system has become untenable when potential customers start to slip through the cracks.
The ability to quickly deliver quotes, respond to questions, and disposition leads is a win-win for your business and future clients. Prospects are very attuned to your company’s responsiveness during the discovery process. If team members aren’t able to quickly identify the status of a lead and move forward, competitors may swoop in, or opportunities may lose viability as the customer’s business context changes over time.
Inefficiencies
The complexity of business development and sales in life sciences can make sales cycles unavoidably lengthy. Working out of spreadsheets and piecemeal solutions will unnecessarily exacerbate this reality.
When commercial organizations lack efficient mechanisms for sales management — capturing leads, managing sales progress, tracking follow-ups, and reporting status — the sales team’s capacity can quickly get diluted by administrative tasks. That dilution can dramatically impact commercial performance and limit growth.
Lack of Pipeline Transparency
High-performing CRM systems and processes allow businesses to track and monitor granular aspects of the customer journey. If you don’t understand how and why your leads are progressing down the sales funnel (or why they aren’t), it is impossible to identify areas of opportunity and make optimizations.
Poor insight into your sales pipeline leaves decision makers unable to determine how to generate more leads and where to focus marketing resources. It can also make accurate forecasting a near-impossibility, leading to long-range budgeting and staffing issues.
Bad Data
The data surfaced by CRM software is replete with useful product and marketing insights for teams that know how to use it. Businesses that are attempting to operate out of spreadsheets or dealing with siloed data will find it challenging to access a full data picture.
This is especially true for organizations that have experienced growth through mergers and acquisitions. Developing a trusted, unified view of commercial performance across products, service lines, therapeutic areas, and business functions is critical to understanding how effectively a newly-integrated organization is capturing its full market potential. Reliable customer insights are key for building out actionable growth strategies, but incomplete and inconsistent data can easily undermine the effectiveness of the entire commercial function.
Get a CRM Partner, Not a Service Provider
Life sciences and healthcare companies who decide to transition to more scalable CRM solutions often start out working directly with the technology provider. Many CRM providers offer free or low-cost entry tiers with very limited access to necessary features. Implementation support is cookie-cutter and only available to users who choose to make a broad investment in services they may or may not need. Many rapidly-growing companies do not have internal resources that are highly skilled in optimizing the use of enterprise-grade systems like Salesforce.
At CREO, our certified CRM experts are also life sciences industry experts. With an implementation and maintenance process that puts your operational needs ahead of technology, we are focused on sourcing right-size CRM solutions and providing lifetime support.
Business-First CRM Solutions
CRM optimization projects require great software, but they should not be seen only as technology projects. Before making decisions on IT systems and features, it’s important to take time to understand the intended future state of commercial operations.
CREO begins the search for the optimal CRM platform by first understanding your unique go-to-market strategy, goals, and obstacles. As life sciences insiders, we are uniquely capable of choosing and customizing tools to specific use cases to ensure that you see the greatest possible value as quickly as possible.
Built to Scale
A key part of optimizing the use of any CRM solution is knowing what features and capabilities to leverage during your organization’s growth journey. Under-invest in CRM, and you will incur additional costs to change later. Over-invest in CRM, and you will be paying for capabilities you don’t need and adding unnecessary complexity for your users.
The business value derived from CRM is not usually correlated with how many software functions are being used. CRM optimization is about ensuring that the business processes and system features are a) in total alignment, and b) designed to grow as your business grows.
Trusted Data and Insights
If an organization cannot depend on the data, reports, and business insights associated with their CRM processes and system, the business cannot grow effectively. Failures of “data trust” are some of the largest barriers facing organizations that want to be more data driven, and CRM data is one of the most critical data sources to leverage.
As a true partner, we take an active role in helping your organization collect and analyze the data generated by your CRM system. Whether your business needs assistance identifying and actioning on insights or support with data quality and governance best practices, our life sciences expertise allows us to see the full potential in your CRM data.
Ongoing CRM Partnership
Optimization of CRM solutions like Salesforce is not a process; it is a continuous journey. As life sciences organizations grow, their commercial needs change. New sales teams, geographies, customer segments, sales volume, products, services, and many other factors mean that periodic fine-tuning is needed.
CREO’s relationship-based model extends beyond initial implementation, offering support with ongoing improvements, education, onboarding, and system maintenance at your level of need. Our CRM solutions are designed to be implemented only once but customized to future use cases indefinitely, so we remain available to help your team make optimal use of your CRM system across acquisitions and growth phases.
Get Scalable CRM for Seamless Growth
Putting scalable CRM solutions in place before your legacy system becomes obsolete will prevent your business from grinding to a halt just as it should be accelerating. Build a future-proof CRM system today, and you will prevent lost leads, misspent resources, and scattered data, clearing the path for seamless, sustained growth.
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George Woods is a Senior Manager, Digital Transformation at CREO. George is an accomplished IT professional with over 20 years of experience leading IT transformation projects and teams. He has held key roles at IBM, Lenovo, Managed Maintenance, Inc., and insightsoftware, developing and managing global IT solutions and leading business transformation initiatives.
George’s primary areas of focus are Global Enterprise CRM & ERP Systems Implementation, Mergers & Acquisitions Integration, and Customer Support & Service Delivery Process Management. Learn more about George.
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CREO is the preferred consultancy to the world’s most promising companies that seek to improve human health. CREO serves growing life sciences, healthcare, and private equity portfolio companies across the U.S. and international markets. The company’s expertise and knowledge in strategy, M&A, commercialization, digital transformation, cybersecurity, analytics, and quality & regulatory compliance help organizations improve today’s business performance and develop tomorrow’s clinical innovations. Founded in 2015, CREO is headquartered in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. Join us and together let’s make a meaningful difference. Visit CREO at www.creoconsulting.com.
