LEO Pharma Launches at Full Speed With Integrated Field Planning

Only 60% of worldwide drug launches met their two-year sales forecast between 2009 and 2017¹, with factors such as oversaturation and hyper- specialization contributing to these numbers. Unfortunately, the pandemic has made things even more complicated, disrupting processes and access to customers and stakeholders.

LEO Pharma, a Danish pharmaceutical company and a global leader in medical dermatology, set high expectations when preparing to launch its blockbuster product. Because it was competing against a top 10 pharma company, LEO Pharma decided to assess its system and processes readiness for a successful launch.

Drivers for consolidation

The company discovered that its commercial operations processes were far from optimized, with 26 different CRM systems across its affiliates, all with different configurations, profiles, and processes. This disparate system landscape did not provide the needed visibility into its local field activities and resources. In addition, it was complex to manage and made it challenging to orchestrate product launch activities across local markets.

LEO Pharma also realized it did not have a good view of customer targets due to its vast territory sizes, averaging around 10,000 accounts per territory.

In addition, organizational and territory changes took months to process, requiring multiple back-and-forths with business units to gather feedback and documents. The process was lengthy, painful, and resulted in outdated and disordered data.

Automating field planning and alignments

To address these process bottlenecks and harmonize its operations, LEO Pharma implemented Veeva CRM globally. It also decided to roll out Veeva Align to ensure flexibility from launch, and to unify all commercial operations processes across markets. Align now automates LEO Pharma’s territory alignments, CRM user management, targeting, and field feedback, providing a single solution for field planning and field force management.

“Veeva Align is our pit stop to manage field force goals, activities, territories, and roster members,” says Helene Slee, Head of Global Digital Customer Engagement Platforms. “Like in a race, we can optimize the very limited amount of time to refuel and change worn tires, to guarantee that our car can operate at full speed.”

Since implementing Align, LEO Pharma has reduced up to 90% of the time for territory alignments, eliminating previous customized solutions that required many manual handoffs.

Veeva Align also has a proven track record of stability. Himanshu, LEO Pharma’s global CRM principal, reports that “For the past three years, Veeva Align has delivered a rock-solid performance with no major issues, escalations, or breakdowns in territory alignments across any country”, ensuring consistent and efficient territory management.

Hear Helene Slee, Head of Global Digital Customer Engagement Platforms talk about how an integrated field planning approach gained efficiencies and successfully enabled digital channels.

“Veeva Align is our pit stop to manage field force goals, activities, territories, and roster members.” — Helene Slee, Head of Global Digital Customer Engagement Platforms

Improving customer experience through digital engagement

LEO Pharma also gained efficiencies by eliminating around 85% of process steps with the native CRM integration. For example, admins can go directly to the system, and field teams can now give feedback via their mobile devices instead of entering information into multiple spreadsheets as they previously did.

Align’s self-service nature enabled LEO Pharma to increase business autonomy over IT and third-party consultants. Salesforce Effectiveness Teams (SFEs) with no coding experience can now create MCCP, roster management, and territory alignments with ease.

“Local SFEs enjoy working with Veeva Align. It gives them the autonomy to design new business rules for territory alignments with no coding experience.” — Himanshu Nhavkar, global CRM principal at LEO Pharma

In addition, LEO Pharma has reduced the number of HCP assignments per territory from 10,000 to only 2,000 with Align’s Dynamic Rules engine. These alignment rules on priority specialties, activity goals, and product metrics help reps focus on critical targets and increase productivity on the field.

Having a simplified landscape allows for faster field force deployment, field feedback, and the processing of territory alignments, giving commercial operations teams a one-stop-shop experience when it comes to organizing their field force.

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¹ Mckinsey, Ready for launch: Reshaping pharma’s strategy in the next normal, December 2020