Veeva Commercial Summit, Europe: Delivering Next-Generation Commercial

Dec 15, 2023 | Chris Moore

Access continues to be a barrier in Europe: about half of healthcare professionals (HCPs) will not meet at all with the biopharma industry, and of those that do most limit meetings to three or fewer companies. Veeva Pulse data shows that field teams that routinely engage customers with the most relevant content and channels, including compliant two-way chat, improve their chances of being heard.

Connected technology, data, and services will lead to a more efficient pathway from trial to treatment. These capabilities together can help address the demands of a complex, iterative journey where different stakeholders are often the same person: investigator and scientific expert, trial subject and patient, key opinion leader and prescriber. Here are some highlights from the event.

1. Europe’s biggest gathering of commercial and medical leaders

More than 1,200 biopharma attendees representing 150+ companies and 47 countries joined Veeva Commercial Summit in Madrid. Over 140 sessions took place across two days and four Zones: CRM Suite, Link, OpenData, Vault PromoMats and Vault Medical. Attendees exchanged ideas on delivering next-generation commercial for sales, medical, clinical, marketing, and market access.

2. Vault CRM migration and new commercial innovations

During the opening keynote, GSK and Bayer explained their decisions to move to Vault CRM globally (see below for more details). Veeva’s Executive Vice President for Commercial Strategy Paul Shawah announced upcoming commercial innovations in Marketing Automation and Patient CRM that will transform campaign management and patient journeys for the sector. And Kilian Weiss, general manager of Data Cloud, outlined Veeva’s vision for a modern data platform in life sciences. Embedding data in workflows will transform the user experience and enable customers to build AI applications within days.

We later provided a demo of Service Center (embedded in Vault CRM), which introduces call center capabilities for inside sales and hybrid reps.

Kieron Scrutton (GSK) and Alexander Alex (Bayer) explain why their companies are moving
to Vault CRM globally at Veeva Commercial Summit, Europe.

During the closing keynote, an expert panel gave the industry their collective prescription for better engagement with HCPs and KOLs. Teresa Alonso Gordoa, Vital Hevia, and Maja Beilmann-Schramm of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, observed that interactions with biopharma companies are essential but also inconsistent. To maximize the value, engagement needs to be educational, personalized, and two-way.

3. Better connectivity from trial to treatment

More than 50 customer speakers exchanged best practices with their peers on topics ranging from field team excellence to finding and engaging the right experts, deep data, and content supply chain management. Highlights included:

Kieron Scrutton (senior vice president of commercial and medical, digital and technology at GSK) and Alexander Alex (head of CRM and engagement channels at Bayer AG) explained why GSK and Bayer are moving to Vault CRM globally. During the keynote, Scrutton observed that pharma CRM is a solved problem thanks to Veeva but not a commodity, while Alex underlined the importance of the Vault platform across R&D and commercial. Bayer also confirmed that it is adopting Veeva OpenData globally.
Alan McDougall, senior vice president and head of medical affairs for Europe, Canada, and Israel, shared how Astellas is standardizing its engagement approach with the scientific community. With medical science liaisons (MSLs) now working from a single source of customer intelligence, Astellas is better able to understand and shape the medical landscape when entering new therapeutic areas (such as macular degeneration) and delivering treatments in other highly competitive areas, including gastric cancer.
Ian Cornish, associate director of data platforms, described how Astellas has simplified data management while gaining a holistic view of HCPs globally with Veeva OpenData and Veeva Network. Now benefiting from a solid data foundation in 29 of 48 planned markets, Astellas has consolidated eight legacy solutions to one customer database and reduced data change request (DCR) resolution from five days to five hours. Governance has also significantly improved.
Alejandra Betancourt of Novo Nordisk and Nybie Philipsen of Ferring Pharmaceuticals are both Veeva Heroes and focused on the building blocks of content excellence. Both companies are leading transformation, enabling their teams to scale content production and gain more meaningful content insights while embracing a culture of innovation.

4. Veeva Heroes: Celebrating commercial leaders and innovators

Each year, Veeva honors customers who, along with their teams, have advanced digital transformation in our industry. These Veeva Heroes have pushed the boundaries to improve processes and deliver business impact for their organizations. We celebrated and thanked Veeva Heroes from ADVANZ PHARMA, Alexion, AstraZeneca Rare Disease, Astellas, Boehringer Ingelheim, Ferring Pharmaceuticals, Lundbeck, and Novo Nordisk.

5. Latest Veeva Pulse insights

We also announced insights from the latest Veeva Pulse Field Trends Report. An estimated 70% of drugs in the pipeline are potential first-in-class novel treatments. As patient populations become smaller and treatments more precise, HCPs need on-demand access to resources rather than waiting on scheduled visits.

The latest Pulse results show that providing HCPs with inbound channels (like compliant chat) more than doubles digital engagement. When offered compliant chat, HCPs will initiate conversations 30% of the time, and reps will respond on average within five minutes.

Watch keynotes on demand from Veeva Commercial Summit, Europe.