From utility to growth driver: Pharma’s next-gen CRM

Pharma's CRMs need to be smart, dynamic systems that deliver personalized experiences, boost engagement and drive growth. This is what every other industry demands, so why doesn’t pharma?
 

A recent EPG Health study of more than 240 industry business leaders found that 4 out of 10 businesses give their CRM a failing grade for serving up quality insights. Eighty percent say they’re disappointed with the quality of the healthcare provider (HCP) engagement related to their CRM use.
 

Still, pharma companies spend an estimated $4.4 billion on CRMs today. And that number is expected to rise to more than $6.6 billion by 2033.
 

The sheer breadth of investment, contrasted with gaps in what the industry needs, is significant. It’s time for a radical rethink.

Pharma has undoubtedly made progress in equipping field reps with CRM-powered insights and field suggestions. However, the reality is that many reps aren't fully using these tools. When insights do flow to reps, it’s too often a one-way push dominated by headquarters data, which can lack rich customer context.
 

Still, it’s not just about the insights and suggestions, which are useful only in some contexts. The broader concern is about how CRMs support the overall customer experience.
 

These systems struggle to effectively coordinate the activities of the full array of customer-facing roles that exist to deliver the customer experience. This is particularly evident in the lack of tailored engagement and insights tools for specific roles within the customer-facing organization.
 

To address the issue, companies try to bolt new functionality onto the hull of existing CRM platforms, ballooning both capital and operating expenditures in the process. Too often, these give rise to bloated systems that fall short of expectations for customers, reps and other customer-facing roles alike. 

The biggest reason to rethink the CRM now is the same reason that the industry is questioning why they have commercial models with such large SG&A budgets focused on field reps and brand marketing.
 

Industry leaders see how doctors are becoming harder and harder to reach with existing methods. Just half are fully accessible according to ZS research. Among those that are fully accessible, 63% say the content they receive from pharma reps isn’t valuable. Given the anticipated rise in new product launches, the pharmaceutical industry will need to adopt a new approach.
 

A new modern commercial model, which emphasizes connected data, customer-centric strategies and more purposeful use of sales reps will demand even more from CRM systems.
 

This new model requires seamless orchestration across all customer-facing roles, better connectivity across push-and-pull digital channels and alignment across sales and marketing. And pressures to shift toward this model are happening while CRM platform companies are working to reinvigorate their own foundational platforms.
 

Taken together, these market factors are forcing a choice. Leaders should seize the opportunity to transform CRM systems into powerful strategic assets. Otherwise, they’re investing in maintaining the status quo through costly CRM migrations with limited strategic benefit.

We believe that the next-generation CRM will look different. Instead of one monolithic system, it will be a flexible ecosystem that continually harnesses the latest advancements in AI and orchestration. It will rest on three principles:

• Contextuality: From one-dimensional recommendations based on incomplete customer profiles to deep contextual insights that are relevant to the customer experience. In the next-generation CRM, context is personalized, and it grows before, during and after every touch point.
• Connectedness: From functionally siloed CRM systems to a connected data ecosystem that fully enables customer-facing roles to apply contextual knowledge at every stage of the customer journey.
• Continuity: From stale data and static workflows that create a disconnected customer experience to convenient, dynamic workflows that allow for continuity of service throughout the customer journey.

To transform CRM from the humdrum workflow utility it is today into an engine of competitive advantage, it will need to do three things today’s CRMs can’t:
 

No. 1: Deliver deep contextual insights. When a sales rep visits a doctor, it’s memorialized in a CRM system. The same happens when he or she writes a prescription. Today’s CRM is great at recording the “what” of customer behavior.

Given that doctors are complex individuals whose motivations are much deeper, tomorrow’s CRM must be able to understand the “why” behind the “what”—the reason they act. For instance, a decline in new prescriptions might indicate concerns about a product’s safety or simply reflect the doctor’s heavy workload. Personal experiences, such as caring for a family member, could influence a doctor's preference for products with lower patient costs.
 

Seeking these “whys” helps us know what to do to help customers along their own idiosyncratic journeys. The main principle here is to shift the role of the CRM toward context. It should gather and share relevant contextual insights based on continual feedback from everyone who interacts with customers. And it should surface relevant insights at the right time for every customer-facing role and every HQ function.
 

No. 2: Enable cross-functional, integrated views of the customer. Today’s CRM is largely split into separate workflows and in some cases separate CRMs altogether for each customer-facing role. In most cases, marketing, account management, reimbursement and medical liaison teams typically use their own CRM, each with varying levels of effectiveness and usage with no connectivity whatsoever.

This design impedes cross-functional planning and integration and misrepresents the customer journey as a series of disconnected points, rather than a continuum.
 

The next-generation CRM will need to link across these touch points to help everyone in customer-facing roles visualize the customer journey and generate tailored content and message recommendations.
 

To achieve this, the CRM will use a blend of automation, generative AI and classical AI techniques focused on encoding knowledge about the customer journey. These AI solutions will concentrate on planning, execution and measuring effectiveness. AI will also support the creation of personalized messages.
 

No. 3: Provide an immersive experience for ease and continuity. The next-gen CRM will offer a more immersive user experience with clean designs, personalized settings, AI assistants (co-pilots) and real-time data verification (two-way pulsing).
 

Within the platform's boundaries, simplified and intuitive interfaces will minimize distractions and improve engagement. These interfaces may not just be within a singular platform, but part of a purposefully designed experience focused on personalization and continuity of service.
 

AI-powered contextual help will guide users through tasks, reducing the need for extensive training. Users will be able to customize their dashboards to focus on the most important information, streamlining their workflows.
 

Moreover, the CRM could be set up to provide tailored views based on user roles. For example, medical science liaisons could visualize the scientific learning journey for each customer. At the same time, key account managers might see account planning summaries, including value proposition playbooks, SWOT analyses, stakeholder assessments, influence networks and more.

Practically, development teams will be shifting pharma’s CRMs from rigid, monolithic platforms to an ecosystem of modules comprising three complementary layers:

Evolve the existing system of record toward connected data. This is where pharma has concentrated investment in the current ecosystem, master data management tools and more. This foundation won’t go away, but it will need to evolve with generative AI to provide the deep, contextual insights needed to feed systems of intelligence and engagement (see below). Think of a context stream data product for CRM that is constantly listening, curating, pulsing and exposing contextual insights across the customer-facing roles.
 

Industrialize intelligence for workflow-level activity. The next-gen CRM will include a composable suite of intelligence applications that not only provide insights but also enable seamless orchestration across digital and customer-facing roles. Think natural language processing that pairs rep-surfaced HCP pain points with hidden patterns to generate real-time insights. Or voice-to-text apps that can compliantly summarize customer-facing calls across different roles and be used across the broader ecosystem.
 

Augment the experience for higher engagement. Field reps and other CRM users don’t need more places to look for insights—they need a system that helps them leverage what they already have.
 

Think about democratized calendaring features that show when customers interact with anyone in the company. Or seamless, compliant call transcripts that everyone can access. Or totally new experiences, like real-time, AI-based personalized coaching for reps. Think automated workflows and next-best action triggers across adjacent customer-facing roles.

Overhauling a system as entrenched as CRM isn’t an endeavor to be taken lightly. Companies that decide to break away from the status quo will need to develop a future-state vision for their CRM, align it to their go-to-market blueprint and then build cross-functional alignment to deliver against the vision.
 

Here’s how to start:

• Develop a vision and blueprint for your CRM evolution. The vision should be big, bold and ambitious, but execution must be agile and incremental.
• Define the near and long-term processes and use cases needed to execute the vision and populate the ecosystem. Then prioritize key investments to build these capabilities. A CRM incubation lab can help determine the value and expected ROI of key innovations.
• Instill a product mindset to ensure technology and capabilities are reusable across functions and geographies. A focus on innovation in a few priority markets where teams can learn, then enable global scale can allow for rapid and widespread implementation. 
• Develop a plan for how you will continuously create and capture value generated by your engagement ecosystem.
• Select a group of CRM super users to pressure test next-gen CRM ideas, test drive CRM use cases and serve as internal champions and ambassadors.

Are you ready to start leveraging AI and automation to transform your CRM into a customer engagement engine and true source of competitive advantage? For a deep dive on various aspects mentioned in this article, watch our webinar or reach out to get started.