What to know before you implement Salesforce Marketing Cloud with Veeva CRM
Connecting Veeva CRM with Salesforce Marketing Cloud can unlock powerful sales insights, especially in the Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences space. Here’s what you need to know before you implement.
Both Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences companies — industries that generate immense amounts of data — continually struggle to appropriately store and use this data. Siloed data comes with the territory, often slowing sales and marketing efforts by creating data duplication or incomplete data.
To unlock the potential of these data stores, Salesforce and Veeva both can be very successful in their scope. When joined together, Veeva CRM and Salesforce Marketing Cloud can drive new ways of creating actionable sales insights through existing data. Combined, these technologies can provide automated insights to the sales teams, while taking on traditional email service provider duties. This dual technology approach can provide incredible value and scale to your Marketing and Sales Enablement teams.
However, implementing SFMC along with any CRM solution can be challenging, particularly in the Pharmaceutical / Life Sciences industry — a unique space within the broader healthcare landscape. Most companies have a mountain of data and teams who conduct analytics and build machine learning algorithms and AI software in order to assess and predict coming changes. Often, as leaders seek to capitalize on the business opportunity, they run into complicating factors common in the industry, like competing stakeholder priorities, data governance hurdles, and change controls.
Here’s what you need to know to find success when implementing an integrated Veeva and SFMC solution. Focus on the following three areas to help establish a strong plan and solid foundation for delivery: Team structure; Technical partnership; and communicating use cases.
Team structure: Build two distinct, dedicated teams — one for PEM, one with a technical focus
A traditional technology implementation team may include a project manager, a technical architect, and then lean heavier on consultants or business analysts to gather requirements and implement changes. This is absolutely the correct way to proceed with a typical CRM system — however, Marketing Cloud is anything but typical.
The unique demands of the industry (heavy documentation, fragmented stakeholders and data) require a dedicated team to focus on functional excellence and stakeholder management. At the same time, the technical gates requires that you create a group totally focused on the implementation. World-class or best-in-class implementations will take this theory to its logical endpoint: you need two distinct teams working in tandem.
The first group follows a traditional Product Engineering Methodology (PEM) approach and includes a project manager and business analysts (numbers dependent on scope). This group can focus on business requirements gathering, documentation and stakeholder management, including communications to the larger company. By focusing effort on communications during rollout, brand or marketing stakeholders can get familiar with the new tool and its functionality months in advance, allowing them to shift investment dollars and take advantage of a fast-responding in-house marketing system.
The second group is the implementation team and leans much more technical. Ideally, this will include a second project manager, a technical architect, and set of developers (numbers dependent on scope). It’s crucial that the technical team focuses an appropriate amount of time to understanding the Veeva CRM system. A strong partnership between the Veeva CRM team and the SFMC team will assist in data flow, deployment timing, and functionality rollout. In many situations, the Veeva CRM system has been in place for years, and carries with it technical details, timings, and processes that can be leveraged (or tripped over) by the SFMC implementation team. Understanding that the two tools perform vastly different functions and require different domain expertise but leverage the same data is extremely important to underscore at the outset of the project.
This structure minimizes the risk that one side of the coin (functional or technical) will overwhelm a portion of the group, causing them to rush to solve whatever new problem inevitably crops up and loses momentum or focus on the goals at hand.
Technical partnership: Build your partnership early-on to see its advantages throughout your implementation
More often than not, Veeva CRM will contain PII or PHI and will use some sort of encryption (preferably Salesforce Shield). This doesn’t pose any issues for the Connector and data flow, but it should force a conversation with the SFMC team around encryption.
Developing a strong relationship with Salesforce as a technical partner early-on can allow for quick resolution to these questions. It’s important to remember that the Salesforce team can only provide an encrypted instance prior to build — once data is in the system, the costs to become encrypted increase drastically. Within the first few days, it’s important to validate any assumptions around security — no encryption in the SFMC may cause issues with a data compliance team, while Field Level Encryption will provide a different set of challenges entirely.
Communicating use cases: Focus on real-time insights for your sales team
Use cases when the two systems are connected will come fast and furious since the tool can be used for near-real time communication with sales reps in the field. Any time a sales insight needs to be given to a rep, SFMC becomes a prime candidate to facilitate the communications. On top of the traditional targeted mass marketing capabilities that SFMC offers, this makes the tool especially effective in this industry.
It won’t come as a shock to any seasoned SFMC administrator that providing data to sales reps within Veeva CRM will often utilize the Custom Object feature on the Journey Canvas. In any scenario with a connected CRM, the feature can be used to create or update records. With a connected Veeva CRM system, SFMC can be used to inject suggestions, alerts, or data into the timeline. Using the tool as a pipeline from your Data & Analytics teams (including machine learning, AI & Next Best Suggestion engines) directly to the field rep’s phone is a massive conduit for real-time success.
When building out use cases, it’s important to remember to comply with the data requirements the Veeva administrator has implemented for any data creation in the system. Any SQL or filter resulting in an entry data extension for the journey needs to contain all the fields (in the correct field typing) that the Veeva system is looking for — without this, errors can be hard to diagnose without turning on an audit trail for the API Connecting User.
… And you’re cleared for liftoff.
The potential scope of what Salesforce Marketing Cloud can provide to an organization using Veeva CRM is massive. If you provide regular status updates and live demos to the marketing, technical, and sales teams, you will quickly credentialize the tool and ensure stakeholder engagement.
And, at that point, the only potential negative consequence is that the use cases will come quickly once these teams realize how much value the tool can bring to them!
Slalom Customer Insight is created by industry leaders and practitioners from Slalom, a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation.
