Cytiva helps improve patient outcomes by delivering the right products at the right time.

We are all patients at some point in our lives – and Cytiva plays a pivotal role in ensuring we have access to the right therapies at the right time. From individual bioreactors to entire laboratory suites, Cytiva provides the products and services that biopharmaceutical companies need to research, develop, and manufacture biologic medicines.

“We are dedicated to improving access to life-changing therapies that transform human health,” said Amanda Halford, Cytiva’s President – Bioprocess. “With Salesforce, we can make a bigger contribution to the future of human health by increasing our efficiency and agility.”

With nearly 300 years of heritage, Cytiva has already made a big contribution to the industry: a majority of the world’s top-selling biologicals are manufactured using the company’s products. Demand for these products soared as the world raced to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this video, Amanda Halford, Cytiva’s President – Bioprocess, explains how the company is using Salesforce to better support its pharmaceutical customers as they strive to advance the development of life-changing therapies.

To ensure it could meet customer and patient demand, Cytiva accelerated its plans for expansion. “We were already growing at a rapid rate, but the pandemic forced us to scale up even faster,” said Conor McKechnie, Cytiva’s Vice President of Marketing. “There are always patients waiting for that next breakthrough in medicine, and we need to help our customers minimise that wait.”

Cytiva’s trailblazing adoption of digital technologies, which began in 2019, made it easier for the company to scale its teams and processes at speed. In the space of 12 months, it hired 2,000 new associates, increasing manufacturing capacity with investments totalling $1.5 billion.

Danaher’s acquisition of Cytiva in early 2020 provided the leadership team with the opportunity to refresh not only the company’s brand but also its digital roadmap. “We wanted to empower our people to make better choices by providing them with better access to digital tools and datasets,” said Halford.

Cytiva’s digital refresh, which involved migrating to Salesforce Lightning Experience and adding a host of extra features, has been a massive success. Customer quotes can be approved more rapidly. Account plans can be updated more easily. Forecasts can be generated more accurately. And customer queries can be answered more effectively.

Thanks to these and other improvements, the internal Net Promoter Score used to rate the effectiveness of the platform by sales teams has increased by 16% among experienced users. “With Salesforce, we can unite our people with a single platform and a single source of the truth,” said Derek O’Sullivan, Vice President Human Resources at Cytiva. “When our people are engaged, they are better able to serve our customers and deliver on our mission.”

From procurement specialists and marketing professionals to field service engineers and support scientists, Salesforce empowers around 20,000 Cytiva associates and partners with smarter workflows. With operations in more than 40 countries, Cytiva has always had to find effective ways to collaborate and innovate across multiple countries and time zones. And this need is now greater than ever.

As a result of the pandemic, Cytiva has adopted a hybrid approach that means many associates will continue to work from home. “Salesforce enables our people to deliver success from anywhere. We might not be together physically, but we’re all connected digitally,” said Henry Wellbelove, Senior Global Project Leader at Cytiva.

Quip has enabled both digital interactions and workflows at Cytiva. Introducing a digitalised approach to account planning has been key to driving richer collaboration and greater customer value. “We don’t want to be reliant on just one person’s relationship or knowledge,” said Silke Fetzer, General Manager for Global Commercial Excellence at Cytiva. “With Quip, we can involve a wider community in account planning, which helps us better understand and meet the needs of our growing customer base.”

Since deploying Quip, Cytiva has tripled the number of account plans that benefit from real-time collaboration. “Our account plans have become living documents instead of just being reviewed quarterly and annually,” said Wellbelove. “Account teams are alerted in real time about any updates, such as a new opportunity or service request, which means they can have more relevant customer conversations.” 

Progressing new opportunities and orders as quickly as possible was critical during the COVID-19 pandemic. To better manage its global pipeline and supply chain, Cytiva created a dedicated dashboard in Sales Cloud. Implemented in a matter of weeks, the dashboard enables Cytiva’s leaders to track opportunities by customer, country, and product and share this information with colleagues in finance and manufacturing.

“With Sales Cloud, we can make better decisions in a shorter time frame,” said Halford. “It helps us respond more rapidly and effectively to the velocity and volume of demand from our customers and ensure the right products are available at the right time.”

Cytiva has unlocked further insights into customer demand through its use of Tableau CRM, Salesforce’s analytics platform. “Tableau CRM brings greater predictability to our business and security to the pharmaceutical supply chain,” said Wellbelove. For example, Cytiva can predict when customers will place orders for certain products, which helps with capacity and financial planning.

It also uses Tableau CRM to match customer orders with open opportunities in Sales Cloud to ensure pipeline forecasts are as accurate as possible. “With Sales Cloud and Tableau CRM, we can see what’s coming not just in the short term but in the next 18 months,” said Halford. “It helps us prioritise which opportunities to progress across thousands of customer accounts.”

To ensure opportunities can be quickly converted into orders, Cytiva has digitised the quotation process for customers. With a growing focus on selling holistic solutions rather than individual products, some quotes can include as many as 80 line items.

With Salesforce CPQ, Cytiva has been able to improve the accuracy and profitability of customer quotes, which has simplified approvals. As a result, it has reduced the time taken to process a quote by an average of 70%. 

Customers can track orders via a portal built on Experience Cloud. Integrated with the Cytiva website, the portal supports the personalisation of customer service on a massive scale. “With Experience Cloud, we can empower our customers to self-serve and provide them with a more relevant and consistent experience,” said Soheil Golestani, Director of Program Management at Cytiva.

Customers can also raise and collaborate on cases, and will eventually be able to check maintenance schedules, book field engineer visits, and view performance metrics for their Cytiva equipment.

Customer service and support is a big focus for Cytiva. It has more than 250 agents around the world as well as 500 field engineers and 30+ support scientists who respond to thousands of requests and queries a year.

Customer cases are tracked centrally in Service Cloud, which simplifies collaboration with other functions, such as supply chain and research and development. “With Service Cloud, we can unify how we capture interactions across different customer support channels,” added Golestani.

To deliver an even better customer experience, Cytiva wants to provide agents with access to installation and maintenance data captured by field engineers. Cytiva manages around 30,000 instruments for its customers and carries out approximately 60,000 service visits per year. “We want the customer experience to be so seamless that it feels like magic,” said McKechnie.

To further optimise sales, service, and procurement workflows, Cytiva has deployed several solutions from the Salesforce AppExchange, including Conga, OwnBackup, WalkMe, and Medallia. “Our Salesforce platform is constantly evolving; it’s really easy to customise, which is essential for a growing organisation with a diverse customer base,” said Wellbelove.

Whether it’s a large multinational group or a small disruptive start-up, Cytiva’s customers have one thing in common: they are all scientists. And that means they are data driven. “Having great relationships with customers is not enough,” said O’Sullivan. “We need to help them make smarter decisions by providing them with rapid access to accurate information.”

As Cytiva’s Salesforce ecosystem continues to expand, it will be able to unlock even more insights for thousands of customers and colleagues around the world. It has already established integrations with its enterprise resource planning platform, website, and service CRM.

“With Salesforce, we can listen and respond to our customers’ needs more effectively,” said Halford. “When you are working towards transforming patients’ lives, it’s essential to keep driving the business forward to achieve greater things.”

Cytiva is no stranger to blazing a trail with digital technologies; it has already harnessed AI and the Internet of Things (IoT) to improve the performance and maintenance of its products. IoT data will eventually be pulled into Salesforce to enable service and sales teams to have even richer customer conversations.

With Tableau CRM, Cytiva will be able to optimise its field service operations by identifying when issues can be fixed remotely and recommending parts to be ordered, which will help to free up time for its engineers. Cytiva also wants to enhance its processes with Einstein Document Reader and to simplify collaboration on new product development with Quip. “Our partnership with Salesforce is not just about deploying new technologies; it’s about unlocking new opportunities,” said O’Sullivan. “It helps us to learn and grow with customers – and the ultimate customer is the patient.”

Supporting the development of new patient therapies will be key as the world continues to respond to COVID-19 and other health challenges. “Our solutions and services bring greater capacity and efficiency to the pharmaceutical supply chain,” said Halford. “With Salesforce, we can better support our customers as they strive to advance the development of life-changing therapies.”