Sanofi Pasteur MSD Takes Sales Effectiveness to New Heights with Salesforce CRM Salesand Force.com

Full Case Study

Vaccines have the power to make life-threatening diseases a thing of the past. To deliver its range of vaccines for diseases like whooping cough, cholera, and polio as cost-effectively as possible, Sanofi Pasteur MSD, the UK-based specialist vaccines business of sanofi-aventis Group, needed to overcome its reliance on an outdated internal technology—its local, on-premises, pharmaceutical-industry CRM system. To increase sales effectiveness and efficiency, Sanofi Pasteur MSD deployed, customized, and integrated salesforce.com's flagship sales force automation (Salesforce CRM Sales) application, Salesforce CRM Sales, in only three months to create a single, comprehensive view of thousands of general practitioners (GPs), practice nurses, and other healthcare professionals in the United Kingdom. With assistance from Binley's, a healthcare solutions provider, Sanofi Pasteur MSD now has one view of the customer, sales productivity is increasing, the sales teams are more effective than ever, and sales data has reached unprecedented levels of reliability and availability.

Sanofi Pasteur MSD is a joint venture of Sanofi Pasteur and Merck & Co. Combining innovation and expertise, Sanofi Pasteur MSD is the only company in Europe dedicated exclusively to vaccines. It draws on the research expertise of Sanofi Pasteur and Merck, together with their teams throughout the world, to focus on the development of new vaccines for Europe that aim to extend protection to other diseases and perfect existing vaccines to improve the acceptability and tolerability of vaccination.

The sales management system Sanofi Pasteur MSD was using to manage relationships with thousands of U.K. GPs and other healthcare professionals needed an injection of health. "Our vision was to create a single, consolidated view of all of our healthcare audiences, using a cost-effective, adaptive, and user-friendly system," says Phil Lang, field operations manager at Sanofi Pasteur MSD.

"Using the previous system, we were experiencing more and more data exchange issues. For example, whenever we wanted to share sales data and other database information, we zipped up the files and sent them to the next person. They would change the data, rezip it, and email it back to us. In our dynamic healthcare business, we needed to replace this with a real-time, comprehensive customer view," he adds.

Good Medicine for Sales

Lang and his team had been aware of on-demand CRM solutions for some time but decided to wait until all of the company's remote users could quickly and easily access data by using high-speed lines. "Today, when you think about CRM, you immediately think of salesforce.com. The Salesforce CRM Sales solution offers unprecedented sales functionality, integrates seamlessly with our SAP back-office systems, and is very easy to deploy and use. Our decision to use Salesforce CRM was also influenced by the high number of other pharmaceutical companies that are now using it. That broad customer base gave us the reassurance that we had made the right decision," Lang says.

Sanofi Pasteur MSD has deployed salesforce.com's flagship Salesforce CRM Sales application to introduce a unified, multichannel view of GPs and other healthcare customers throughout the U.K. More than 60 sales representatives use the hosted, collaborative sales system to manage almost every aspect of the day-to-day sales relationship—scheduling appointments, reviewing the historical relationship prior to meeting a GP or practice nurse, understanding existing service inquiries, gathering and analyzing market intelligence information, and profiling groups of customers.

Territory managers use the system to easily define, administer, analyze, and change sales territories to match the sales organization, among many other tasks. They also use it to analyze sales pipelines, improve sales processes, and enhance their insight into critical sales issues.

Through salesforce.com's Force.com API, Salesforce CRM Sales integrates seamlessly with two critical systems. The first is Sanofi Pasteur MSD's SAP back-office order management system. Lang and his team set up an automated nightly feed from the SAP system to Salesforce CRM, which means that sales data is always up to date and continuously available. When sales representatives need to order advance products, such as flu vaccines that need to be ordered months ahead of use, they simply click the Order tab in Salesforce CRM (created with Force.com's builder), which is in reality a direct link to the SAP order system. These orders are then automatically uploaded simultaneously to the SAP system and Salesforce CRM. Salesforce CRM is also integrated with a range of Binley's healthcare databases. These provide the sales team with an instant, near-real-time record of all U.K. GP practices, healthcare interest groups, and other healthcare specialists—resulting in enhanced marketing and sales effectiveness.

Measure Each and Every Customer Relationship

"The single greatest advantage of a hosted CRM system such as Salesforce CRM is the ability to cost-effectively track, record, and measure each and every customer relationship," says Lang. "Using Salesforce CRM, we have a single, companywide view of all the parties involved in the purchase of our vaccines. Moreover, our sales teams are more productive in their day-to-day activities, they have instant access to all the product information, and they can efficiently manage activities and workflow. Nothing is missed. At the same time, our data availability has also increased."

Previously, when the sales representatives were in the field, they were out of touch with their data. With Salesforce CRM's Offline Edition, they are continually in touch—even without an Internet connection. Lang was impressed with the results. "The great thing about Offline Edition is that the salespeople can readily take their account, contact, and opportunity information with them and keep working on critical customer and deal information—all via the easy-to-use, browser-based Salesforce CRM interface. When they're back in the office or connected to the Internet, Offline Edition automatically updates records with unprecedented ease and convenience, so the latest information is always on hand."

Using Salesforce CRM Sales, Sanofi Pasteur MSD's customer relationships have never looked so healthy.

Sanofi Pasteur MSD