Improve Event ROI for Better Biopharma Marketing

For emerging and midsized biopharma companies, speaker programs and events are often the primary means for engaging with key thought leaders. But as a pharmaceutical marketer in a growing company, taking advantage of those critical opportunities was an uphill battle. A common pitfall for marketers is less time to focus on event strategy and high-impact content due to process inefficiencies. Convoluted events management processes handled in a multi-page spreadsheet, with unclear communication and transparency challenges meant delays. As a result, our team was scrambling to meet deadlines and incurring unnecessary costs – including increased fees for late registrations, which ate into our budgets.

We needed to evolve our events program to become a true driver of our business. And to enable this change, we required a simple way to manage some of our core processes:

• Budget Management: Intuitive way to see program spending against budgeted costs and pull information into our expense management system
• Alignment: Easy access to event details for better coordination across all stakeholders
• Control: Built-in processes and business rules to enforce organizational policies for key event types
• Measurement: Ensure accountability with dashboards and reporting

With the rollout of Veeva Events Management, we gained visibility and control by eliminating manual processes and centralizing all activity on a single solution designed for life sciences. Within two months, we went from tracking three to a core set of 10 event types, and we can easily report and see results against them.

We now collaborate more effectively with our logistics providers, develop event-related content more quickly, and gain efficiencies across the event management lifecycle. As a result of this increased transparency, we reduced our marketing spend by 15%. We’ve gained a six-month event lead-time that allows us to plan our program strategy more intentionally. These results have been truly significant to our overall marketing strategy.

From beginning to end, all event information is captured in Veeva CRM system and combined with customer profiles, giving us visibility into the impact of our messaging and aggregate spend. For our field reps, gaining immediate insight into event details in their workflow helps them maximize the opportunity to meet face-to-face with core stakeholders.

Across the myriad moving pieces that comprise a scientific events program, the key to success is maintaining alignment – not only across teams and partners but also with customers. Looking to the future, we’re excited by the potential of events to serve as a driver of customer experience as we continue to track HCP event data over time.

To learn more about our journey, please take a look at how we designed our new event management process and our key takeaways from implementing a new approach at a growing organization.