Plan and Execute Field-Led Customer Journeys
In today’s era, integrated customer engagement planning is a strategic imperative. Access to healthcare professionals (HCPs) dropped to 45% over the last 18 months, while annual drug approvals increased by nearly 50% in 2023. Amid fierce competition and increased market complexity, biopharmas need to offer customers scalable, personalized experiences.
Companies are coordinating touchpoints across sales, marketing, and medical to make the most of limited HCP time.
Addressing common barriers to connected engagement
Veeva Pulse findings show that when sales, marketing, and medical teams work together, they deliver greater value than the sum of their parts. From educating key experts pre-launch and using compliant chat to share content to synchronizing field activity with digital advertising, biopharmas are strengthening engagement and improving outcomes. However, to maximize this opportunity, there are significant barriers to overcome before achieving coordinated engagement.
Fragmented customer engagement planning processes
Traditionally, biopharma sales and marketing teams complete their customer plans in isolation. Marketing teams drive digital channels (such as mass email, social media, web/portal), while sales teams own field-led channels (including personalized emails, face-to-face touchpoints, events) through traditional multichannel cycle plans (MCCP). As there is no single customer plan, the result is fragmented journeys that fail to deliver impact.
If sales and marketing only focus on the channels within their remit, they will leave significant value on the table. Successful customer journey orchestration requires a more strategic approach – one that unifies sales, marketing, and medical engagement and aligns it with the needs and behaviors of HCPs.
Field teams not empowered or set up for success
When designing field-led customer journeys, marketing teams commonly lead, with sales positioned as an execution channel. This model can result in journeys that are overly focused on digital channels, while field activity is left to traditional reach and frequency targets with sporadic next best actions (NBAs) where relevant.
Given the impact of sales on HCP engagement, finding the balance between marketing-led journeys and personal-planned engagement could drive significant business value. Veeva analysis indicates that field-driven, personal touchpoints account for 60% of the typical engagement volume a biopharma has with HCPs, totaling 600m+ interactions annually. Enabling journey planning for field channels helps get the most out of these interactions and limited time with HCPs.
Integrating insights from marketing-led journeys with field-driven interactions would enrich the customer experience. It would also generate valuable data that enhances the effectiveness of tools like marketing automation and NBA. However, much of this valuable insight is left untapped today.
Scalable AI use cases yet to be defined
Technology is a critical enabler in customer journey execution, and digital channels increasingly lean on marketing automation for personalization. While the interest in and use of automation and AI tools grows, the reality is that AI will take many years to mature and deliver value. In the meantime, it’s important not to lose sight of operational excellence and get carried away with the hype.
A key challenge facing AI orchestration is the lack of diverse, high-quality data. For example, despite years of investment in automating NBA, many companies can still only offer basic recommendations that have low acceptance rates by field teams. To address this, focus on optimizing core processes and role-specific needs while partnering with the right experts in AI modeling. Then, equip the field team with the right tools, processes, and behaviors to succeed.
A new blueprint for customer journey orchestration
Unlocking the full potential of customer journey orchestration doesn’t require a revolutionary change to how you operate it today – more of an evolution to traditional ways of working that breaks down silos. Although a significant change, the pieces are in place to deliver seamless customer experiences. What’s needed now is a solution that addresses historical barriers and connects systems, data, processes, and people.
5 steps to scalable customer journey execution
- Create the strategic engagement framework
- Build the target field journey in CRM
- Translate journeys into field-level plans
- Enable field planning via a user-friendly navigator ‘cockpit’
- Measure journey progression, analyze and optimize performance
Start with a strategic customer engagement framework that spans sales, marketing, and medical teams to inform customer journey design based on each segment’s progress. Define objectives, messages, and content for each stage, ensuring personalized engagement that aligns with brand strategy and HCP needs.
Avoid the complexity and cost of designing one journey for all stakeholders and instead use a common framework for consistency and end-to-end visibility, while leaving some discretion to field teams.
Once the framework is established, design and codify the journeys into CRM using a visual tool, and tailor it for different products, adoption stages, and HCP segments. Having the framework in CRM enables better data utilization for field planning, journey tracking, and insights. It’s critical to have a unified data model across brands and markets to ensure effectiveness.
Setting up field cycle plans is predominantly a data-driven exercise. But if journeys are already defined, all that data exists in the system. Use data from predefined journeys, along with prioritization criteria and field capacity, to create realistic cycle plans that recommend appropriate actions for each HCP, with field teams contributing their insights before finalizing the plan.
At this stage, journeys are planned at the HCP level and locked into field teams’ cycle plans. Provide field teams with all the insight and direction required to plan and schedule engagement and then execute the journeys. They need a single, go-to place to plan their activity and calls — almost like the navigation cockpit of a plane.
A key benefit of this new approach is being able to measure and analyze customer journeys at a granular level for continuous improvement. Field teams can use a “navigator cockpit” to track individual progress and territory-wide status, so they can tailor each engagement and simplify the next touchpoint with HCPs. Combining data with field feedback enables adoption tracking, triggers marketing automation, and connects marketing journeys seamlessly without additional integration.
Read the full guide and learn how to plan and execute field-led customer journeys.