MDS Pharma Services Unifies Seven Lines of Business on Salesforce CRM, Revolutionizes Its Approach to Selling

Challenge

• MDS Pharma Services is a global contract research organization that provides high-quality, on-time services to meet the drug discovery and development needs of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. It needed an on-demand CRM application to unify sales operations and deliver increased visibility into performance and operational metrics.
• The MDS business unit’s seven lines of business lacked a common sales process, data, or culture. 
• MDS Pharma Services wanted a customizable cloud-computing application that would easily integrate with its Oracle E-Business Suite of applications.

Solution

• MDS Pharma Services chose Salesforce CRM over Siebel OnDemand to increase its pipeline visibility, improve sales forecasting, and capitalize on its ease of use.
• In 6 months, MDS Pharma Services rolled out Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition for 238 users with Microsoft Outlook integration across the U.S., Asia, Australia, the Americas, and Europe. 
• With help from Boomi, MDS Pharma Services integrated Salesforce CRM with Oracle to sync financial information to each of its seven lines of business.
• To enforce user adoption, upper management requires staff to create reports in Salesforce CRM.
• With Cognos Now! from the AppExchange marketplace, MDS Pharma Services accesses and analyzes financial data from its Oracle E-Business Suite of applications.
• Dashboards are utilized to analyze sales opportunities, accounts, leads, and campaigns; custom alerts notify users when a goal has been reached.
• A custom Projects tab allows users to check the status of ongoing scientific studies instantly rather than waiting days for an email response.
• MDS Pharma Services is in the process of implementing Salesforce CRM Marketing’s Web-to-lead capabilities.

Results

• Salesforce CRM has revolutionized the way MDS Pharma Services approaches selling.
• With all seven sales groups on Salesforce CRM, MDS Pharma Services has hired an SVP to direct global business development efforts.
• The business held its first off-site global sales and training meeting to teach reps strategic account selling, cross-selling, and pre-call planning—something that would have been impossible without Salesforce CRM.
• Tracking user compliance and operational metrics through Salesforce CRM gives management a better understanding of its overall performance.
• Integration with Oracle Projects avoids the productivity loss that could result from manually checking the status of scientific studies.