For many healthcare and life sciences organizations, the end of the month, quarter, or even year, means the dreaded scramble to prepare for business reviews. This is when Marketing and Sales are left with the tedious task of updating their collateral, Sales results, and pipelines. While business needs and compliance requirements make these tasks priority, most processes to handle these updates are outdated and inefficient.
Business reviews have the potential to drive substantial value for enterprises and their customers. Business review data provides the basis for Sales teams to discuss projected sales, actual results, quotas, pipelines, and forecasts. Similar data aggregated across multiple platforms provides the basis for Sales management to communicate with executive leadership about projected revenue growth and the resources necessary to meet enterprise goals. For Marketing, business reviews typically mean reviewing, updating, or expiring specific content pieces per compliance and FDA regulations.
The problem is, preparing for business reviews can be an onerous process and a productivity drain. Many organizations are still utilizing manual processes rather than a more automated approach. Under these conditions, business reviews can decrease organizational efficiency with very little potential to deliver real value in terms of revenue or retention.
In organizations that do not have automation systems in place, the update process typically starts with Marketing chasing down all sorts of data updates and the latest information from various sources. Next comes lots of error-prone copying, pasting and re-keying so that the data and information can be combined and formatted properly for different deliverables. When Marketing combines updated text and data in new drafts, they then need to coordinate various reviews and integrate edits from their colleagues.
To simplify this process, healthcare and life sciences organizations need to invest in an automation tool: a sales enablement platform.
A sales enablement platform allows Sales teams to automatically import the latest sales or account performance data from any system and integrate it into approved business review templates. Customized templates capture the metrics that matter most, providing data-rich content for the review that is ready in seconds.
For Marketing, a sales enablement platform increases efficiency, scales marketing efforts, and improves distribution effectiveness. Marketing can produce updated, compliant materials in days instead of weeks. With improved efficiency, they get more time to focus on strategic initiatives, which means better results without increasing headcount. Faster production of compliant materials enables distribution teams to increase the number of customer meetings they can hold. And more time in the field equals sales reps’ increased effectiveness.
This level of automation doesn’t just benefit Sales and Marketing. Many healthcare and life sciences organizations have an array of sources that hold clinical and patient data that sales enablement can facilitate as well. Clinical business reviews need updated, compliant data at all times and sales enablement eases the updating process in just a few clicks.
Healthcare and life sciences organizations that still view their existing processes as good enough should think again. Being slow to market with key materials will catch up to you. To avoid this competitive disadvantage, you need to evaluate new automation systems, and consider how they can help you make an overdue change in your business review process for 2018.
