The Pitfalls of Disconnected Events Management Planning

The days of one-to-one customer engagement are long gone. Now multiple individuals from life sciences commercial teams interact with the same customers, often using different communication channels. This leads to increased complexity in tracking and managing the quantity and level of interactions.

Events are an important channel of engagement that can often be overlooked. But, even within life sciences organizations the term “event” means different things depending on your role. On the commercial side, there are speaker programs, consulting, training, symposia and more. On the medical side, events range from investigator meetings to advisory boards and committees.

Each event type has a different purpose and a separate budget. But there is frequent event crossover for participants, creating compelling reasons for a complete view of all events across your enterprise. Here are a few:

The most serious consequence of an incomplete view of your customer across events is the threat of non-compliance with regulatory requirements. Risks such as non-adherence to a Corporate Integrity Agreement, exceeding expert’s internal spending cap and inaccurate transparency reporting cannot be taken lightly.

Some pharmaceutical companies customize and cobble together a variety of internal systems in an attempt to match the workflow of each unique event type. Others leverage their logistics partners’ proprietary software, but they weren’t originally designed with customer data management in mind. While this might works to some degree for an event type or two, these methods are very time–consuming, expensive and results in multiple applications with limited utility that don’t share data with each other.

The answer is a single system for all event types that delivers better visibility with greater compliance—and is built with commercial life sciences organizations in mind. To achieve a complete view of your customers across all interactions, the application should be pre-integrated with your customer relationship management (CRM) software so that it functions as an extension of CRM. To support the planning, management and execution of events, the solution should also be open so that it can be used to collaborate with logistics partners.

Veeva CRM Events Management is the solution Veeva customers have been asking for—a single solution to execute better events with greater compliance. By capturing customer data for every event, you can achieve what was once impossible—total visibility of your speakers, attendees and events across all geographies.