Closing the Loop for the Pharmaceutical Sales Cycle



Overview

Country: Canada

Industry: Life Sciences—Pharmaceuticals

Customer Profile

GlaxoSmithKline Inc. (GSK) is a research-based pharmaceutical company with a history of delivering industry-leading medicines and vaccines. GSK Canada employs over 1,800 people.

Business Situation

GSK’s pharmaceutical sales representatives needed a better way to engage with customers. GSK wanted help closing the loop on their sales and marketing processes.

Solution

With Tablet PCs running Microsoft® Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, sales representatives can easily create customized presentations on the road, driving integration with customer relationship management (CRM) strategy to improve sales.

Benefits

■ Improved marketing practices

■ Mobile workstation for field staff

■ Communication and collaboration

■ Single location for organized resources

■ Efficient presentation of sales materials

■ Enhanced feedback loop

| | |“What’s impressive for me is the feedback we’re getting from physicians, our customers, who are saying, ‘This is the way I want information to be presented to me.’”

Savino Di Pasquale, Chief Information Officer, GlaxoSmithKline Canada

| |

| | | |GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Canada markets its industry-leading products to physicians across the country, |

| | | |helping them stay informed on the latest pharmaceutical developments to better serve patients. GSK |

| | | |has chosen the Tablet PC running Microsoft® Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 to help its highly |

| | | |mobile sales force better access resources and engage more effectively with its critical customer |

| | | |base. In addition, using the Tablet PC in concert with customer relationship management (CRM) |

| | | |solutions and industry-specific applications has helped GSK drive improvements across its sales and |

| | | |marketing processes. |

| | | | |

| | | | |

| | | | |

Situation

|“Once a rep completes a sales conversation, |

|the data...can come to marketing for us to |

|understand.... That can happen on a |

|continuous basis, which can give us the |

|ability and flexibility to change and |

|evolve...at the pace of our environment.” |

|Patrick Des Biens, Group Product Manager for |

|Diabetes, GlaxoSmithKline Canada |

As one of Canada’s leading research-based pharmaceutical companies, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Canada is committed to improving the quality of life for patients by enabling them to do more, feel better, and live longer. GSK’s portfolio of industry-leading medicines and vaccines spans a wide range of therapeutic areas, from gastrointestinal to central nervous system and respiratory. However, GSK Canada competes in an extremely competitive environment driven by constant change. One of the ways GSK looks to address its evolving challenges is by equipping pharmaceutical sales representatives with the right technology and resources to meet their needs in the field.

The company’s sales representatives, who travel across Canada educating physicians on the efficacy of GSK medicines, must be able to create an informative and compelling dialogue with doctors in a very small amount of time. Unfortunately, having all the resources necessary for such an in-depth yet brief presentation on hand was often cumbersome, and a lack of information and materials could lessen the impact of an engagement with a physician. Patrick Des Biens, Group Product Manager for Diabetes at GSK Canada, describes a typical scenario: “If you get a question from your customer, you say, ‘Wait a minute,’ then you take the ‘big dive’ into your detail bag, hoping you actually pick out the right piece of information that will help support the answer.”

Beyond the need for an organizational solution that would work in a mobile environment, GSK Canada wanted to create a “closed loop” for its sales and marketing operations. Such a solution would take advantage of GSK’s robust customer relationship management (CRM) strategy when initiating and developing the sales relationship. In addition, it would then provide feedback on the effectiveness of processes and resources to help improve future endeavors across the sales and marketing teams.

Solution

GlaxoSmithKline Canada initially approached its technology challenges with a two-tiered solution involving traditional laptop computers and PDAs, despite the integration and support complexities presented by such a deployment. Then, GSK Canada’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) Savino Di Pasquale attended a Microsoft event during which software vendor and Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Proscape Technologies demonstrated how its applications, running on a Tablet PC with the Microsoft Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 operating system, could benefit pharmaceutical companies. “I immediately embarked on a pilot to bring Proscape and the Tablet PC to life, to see how we could free up sales reps’ time, make them more productive, more impactful, and really have a richer dialogue in the physician’s office when we were talking about our medicines,” says Di Pasquale.

GSK Canada chose the HP 1100 Tablet PC because of its power, its affordability, and its flexibility to work in a slate mode during presentations. And with the versatility of the Tablet PC, sales representatives are able to work in more ways than ever before. “The real advantage is you can actually pick up a stylus and write right on the screen,” says Mike Cels, Vice President of Sales for GSK. “Everybody’s different: some people like a keyboard, some people like to write, some people like to talk. The Tablet gives you the ability to do any or all three.”

Because the Tablet PC is at the center of GSK’s presentations to physicians, sales reps are able to keep all of their relevant materials in one place, digitally—eliminating the need for their traditional paper-based collection—and can use the digital pen to easily navigate among their resources, make annotations as needed, and obtain digital signatures. Presentations can be customized for particular physicians by remotely accessing the GSK CRM system and obtaining customer information, sales history, and other relevant material. Once the interaction with the customer is completed, the resulting sales data—including physician feedback and information on the presentation materials used—is fed back into the CRM system. This information can then be used by GSK’s branding and marketing teams to guide the development of customer–facing messaging

and materials, thus closing the loop on the sales cycle and helping improve future sales calls.

The response to the Tablet PC has been extremely positive. Representatives have been able to increase their productivity and efficiency in a highly mobile environment, and are able to approach physicians across Canada with a more engaging sales offering. “What’s impressive for me is the feedback we’re getting from physicians, our customers, who are saying, ‘This is the way I want information to be presented to me,’” says Di Pasquale.

Benefits

Wherever, Whenever Connections

“Because our salespeople are on the road, they’re home-based so they have very little time in an office. They are basically in their car, or they’re in a customer’s site, whether that’s a hospital or a physician’s office,” says Cels.

For a mobile pharmaceutical sales force like GSK’s representatives, who visit physicians across Canada, the Tablet PC is a workstation on the road, from which they can access their vital CRM data and other tailored information, create customer presentations, and reorder products.

Enhanced Customer Experience

Because the Tablet PC is a superior organizational tool, pharmaceutical sales professionals can rely on it for all of the resources they need—from documents to spreadsheets to videos and more—at a single location. The Tablet PC improves sales interactions with physician customers by providing sales representatives with a full array of polished presentation tools and relevant resources at hand. “This technology allows the rep to go right to the answer, because it’s right there at their fingertips. The beauty of this tool is to actually make the call a lot more efficient by over-delivering on a customer’s expectations,” says Des Biens.

Sales and Marketing Applications

The Tablet PC runs applications such as Proscape’s Optix, which support the full pharmaceutical sales cycle— from accessing CRM-based contact information to obtaining an electronic signature and providing feedback for improved processes. “Once a rep completes a sales conversation, the data from the call that just took place is actually re-entered in CRM for the rep. The data is aggregated and can come back to marketing for us to understand how the strategy is being implemented, which communication tactics are actually working in the marketplace, what the physician’s feedback to these communication tactics is, and what we should be thinking about in terms of correcting. That can happen on a continuous basis, which can give us the ability and flexibility to change and evolve—and react accordingly—at the pace of our environment,” says Des Biens.

With the versatility, power, and mobility of the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition–based Tablet PC running targeted applications such as those from Proscape, GlaxoSmithKline Canada’s sales force has the tools it needs to engage with its physician customers on a whole new level and, in turn, gain a competitive advantage for GSK in a rapidly changing industry.

“I think it’s pretty clear that this technology has the opportunity to redefine the landscape in how pharmaceutical sales representatives educate physicians on medications. I think this is going to change the game,” says Di Pasquale.

Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition

Microsoft Windows Tablet PC Edition provides a more versatile computing experience, enabling you to use your PC in more places and more ways.

For more information about Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, go to:

windowsxp/tabletpc

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GlaxoSmithKline has given its sales representatives HP1100 Tablet PCs running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition—a solution that allows reps to interact with customers digitally.

| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Windows Tablet PC Edition

■ Microsoft Office XP

■ Microsoft Services

■ Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003

■ Microsoft Windows Server"!

■ Microsoft SQL Serveicrosoft Windows Tablet PC Edition

■ Microsoft Office XP

■ Microsoft Services

■ Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003

■ Microsoft Windows Server™

■ Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000

|Hardware

■ HP 1100 Tablet PCs

Partner

■ Proscape

| |

© 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Visual Studio, Windows, the Windows logo, and Windows Server are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published February 2006 | | |

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary.

For more information about Proscape products and services, call (215) 441-0300 or visit the Web site at:



For more information about GlaxoSmithKline Canada products and services, call (905) 819-3363 or visit the Web site at:

gsk.ca

Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition

Customer Solution Case Study

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