Eli Lilly’s Field Reps: Armed with Data
By
Michael Endler, Informationweek.com
http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/executive-insights-and-innovation/eli-lillys-field-reps-armed-with-data-/d/d-id/1141542
Eli Lilly’s Field Reps: Armed with Data
The article I read discussed pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly’s inside approach to sales force management. Back in 2011, Eli Lilly, whose 138 year old history boasts the first company to manufacture penicillin and Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, had its field reps use multiple sales force automation products. The set up they used required its reps to log call comments at the end of the day, rather than during or immediately after meetings. The results, as you can imagine, were fractured notes, useless or otherwise missing information that would be vital to creating a customer specific sales approach. Further frustrating reps was the system Eli Lilly enforced, where different countries used different customer management systems, which created communication and integration problems across the business, as well as unnecessary and pointless busy work compounding the information. Reps, as well, had problems in the field. The tablet-style Windows XP PCs they used when meeting with doctors were slow and clunky and created an unprofessional atmosphere for sales reps.
Lilly executives turned to Veeva System’s cloud-based, mobile-friendly CRM product built on Salesforce.com. The improved technology allowed reps to plan calls, record and report on conversations, and analyze trends. The new mobile app created a smoother, more fluent sales force management approach to better serve their customers.
The article pertains to sales force management because it discusses how an old, respected pharmaceutical company was able to make the necessary technological adjustments to better understand and serve their particular clients. They recognized a failure in their own business model where...