The rapid changes in the life sciences industry has put tremendous pressure on sales and marketing teams to drive revenue growth. Pharmaceutical companies are on the lookout for developing new strategies to sustain their businesses. Despite the fact traditional CRM applications have helped sales and marketing teams to become more efficient at reporting,they have not helped boost their sales effectiveness. Oracle CRM On Demand Life Sciences Edition - Pharmaceutical Solution delivers powerful best-practice tools to drive sales performance and consistency. Oracle's solution focuses on the sales rep's productivity as well as the reporting side. Michel van Woudenberg, General Manager, CRM On Demand Asia Pacific, Oracle Corporation in an e-mail interview with AD Pradeep Kumar speaks about the benefits of the Oracle CRM On Demand Life Sciences Edition.
Why did you develop Oracle CRM On Demand Life Sciences Edition for the pharma industry?
The life sciences industry is changing rapidly. Specifically, within in the pharma industry, the era of blockbuster drugs is over, with product launches dropping and lots of drug patents expiring. The results are increased competition and margins trending down. This combined effect puts tremendous pressure on sales and marketing teams to drive revenue growth. Pharma sales reps compete for limited time with doctors and physicians to make every interaction count. This is the only time they get to interact with, educate and influence them. Beside sales calls targets and limited face time, there is also the need to meet rigorous reporting requirements.
Pharmaceutical companies want to proactively develop new strategies to sustain their businesses amidst these serious challenges. Although traditional CRM applications have helped these reps become more efficient at reporting, crucially, they have not helped boost their sales effectiveness.
Oracle is already a leader in CRM for the pharma industry with 18 of the top 20 pharma companies using Oracle CRM. Most companies in the US and Europe have rolled out Oracle CRM 'on premise' solution. Many of them have also chosen Oracle CRM On Demand for other markets they operate in like Asia and Latin America, due to the higher flexibility and lower cost of ownership associated with type of deployment. Moreover, local Indian pharmaceutical companies are looking for a cost -effective and flexible way to improve the effectiveness of their sales and marketing teams.
The Oracle CRM On Demand Life Sciences Edition - Pharmaceutical Solution has been developed and designed as a result of significant pharma industry feedback. Working with these pharma companies, Oracle established that very specific capabilities were needed by the industry that were not yet developed. These new features and functionalities were added to help pharma sales reps increase both their reporting and selling effectiveness.
What are the key features and benefits of the solution?
Oracle CRM On Demand Life Sciences Edition - Pharmaceutical Solution delivers powerful best-practice tools to drive sales performance and consistency across organizations. Unlike what other vendors offer, Oracle's solution focuses on the sales rep's productivity as well as the reporting side of the equation.
It is easy to use for high user adoption, deploys quickly with little IT investment and comes with embedded sales-marketing-service best practice and powerful analytics. The best part of our solution is Sales On The Go, a life sciences-specific client that augments Oracle CRM On Demand and works both online and offline. This is the first CRM application actually designed to be both, sales rep facing, as well as physician facing. It also provides personalized eDetailing capabilities that help a rep sell and help organization track their reps' selling activities.
Oracle refers to this as 'Personalized Content Delivery' (PCD), and it is Oracle's 'closed-loop marketing' eDetailing solution that allows sales reps to use digital presentations rather than paper collateral for detailing products. With PCD capabilities, companies can carefully control message delivery for legal and regulatory reasons, while ensuring that field messaging aligns with corporate marketing plans and provides sales reps with a powerful tool to drive sales. In addition, automatic tracking of responses from physicians allows marketing departments to accurately and flexibly evaluate and improve their messaging, thereby 'closing the loop' between sales and marketing.
In a nutshell, the new Oracle CRM On Demand Life Sciences Edition offers:
● Enhanced Sales Planning & Execution
● Deeper Sales Management
● Integrated Closed Loop Marketing
What are unique benefits this solution offers?
Simply put, Oracle CRM On Demand Life Sciences Edition - Pharmaceutical Solution is the industry's first single provider offering that helps pharmaceutical sales reps increase both reporting and selling effectiveness.
Traditionally, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) hosting infrastructures have treated all customers the same regardless of size, working hours and locations, performance and security requirements, country regulations etc. With Oracle CRM On Demand, customers have a choice of different types of tenanting options:
● Multi tenant - In this type of hosting infrastructure, customers share the same physical servers with other organizations. Oracle's customers enjoy the benefits of a completely managed application, hosted out of Oracle's own Tier 4 data center in Austin. This way Oracle ensures the privacy and security of their application and data.
● Single tenant: This is exactly the same CRM On Demand application, managed and upgraded by Oracle. This is a unique offering from Oracle that provides a customer with a private database and application server environment that is physically separated and secured from other customer's environments. It provides the benefits of a dedicated stack combined with the ease-of-use and rapid-time-to-business-value of multi-tenant SaaS. The single tenant option:
● Includes hardware, software, and database infrastructure
● Enables fine-tuning and optimization for better application performance
● Provides flexible time windows for maintenance, upgrades and analytics ETL to suit hours of operations
● Leverages Oracle Grid Computing for cost-effective deployments and superior scalability
● @Customer ('at customer'): @Customer CRM On Demand is exactly the same CRM On Demand SaaS application, managed and upgraded by Oracle but hosted in the customer's own data center. Oracle can offer this to larger, enterprise customers of 2000 users+ if they have data residency issues or other reasons why a locally hosted SaaS application is the way to go for them. This option is also unique in the SaaS market. Other advantages include:
● Enables customers to fulfil data privacy and regulatory requirements
● Enhances operational flexibility for maintenance and upgrade planning
● Excellent TCO as application is co-managed and upgraded by Oracle expertise
How is it going to help pharma companies, particularly those in India? What are your plans to tap the industry in India?
Some of these specific benefits have been detailed in answers to the previous questions. India is one of the fastest growing pharma markets globally, housing several pharmaceutical companies that operate in domestic as well as international markets. They need to adhere to strict regulatory guidelines and also compete with global pharma companies operating in India.
With these challenges, it is important for these companies to make IT investments that can help maximise their ability to interact with, educate and influence doctors to improve sales effectiveness, while being able to effectively do reporting and analyse data. A solution like Oracle CRM On Demand Life Sciences Edition has been designed to help pharma industry sales practitioners address these issues.
As a leading CRM solution provider, Oracle has been actively working with the Indian industry to provide CRM On Demand solutions for businesses. Oracle is already a leader in CRM for the pharma industry with 18 of the top 20 pharma companies using Oracle CRM. Many telecom, manufacturing, financial service and professional IT services organisations in India are users of Oracle's CRM solutions. Oracle CRM On Demand Life Sciences Edition - Pharmaceutical Solution helps further extend Oracle's offerings to life sciences and pharma organisations. In fact, some of Oracle's global pharmaceutical company customers who use Oracle CRM On Demand have significant operations in India.
What will be the pricing mode for the Oracle CRM On Demand Life Sciences Edition in India?
CRM On Demand is priced at Rs 3270 per user per month (approximately US$70) and this includes sales, service, and marketing functionality along with an industry leading reporting and analytics capabilities based on a completely managed and integrated data warehouse, which is unique in the SaaS market place.