All you need to know about the CRM software for pharmaceutical companies
Pharmaceutical companies need to manage and maintain their relationships with a wide customer base, which comprises of chemists, key opinion leaders, and hospitals and healthcare clinics. While doing that, they also need to track their patent expiration dates, pay attention to their drug pricing, and ensure that their products are complying with the health standards and regulations in place.
Keeping tabs on each of these operations can usually become overwhelming, and traditional management methods may not be sufficient for running the business effectively. In the digital age, where people can easily access information about anything and everything from the palm of their hand, it’s no surprise that customers are moving on to companies who can not only provide value to them but also do it in time and at reasonable prices.
To adapt to this radical change, pharmaceutical companies tried to convert the threat into an opportunity – by incorporating the universal access of information within their business. A CRM software service is adept at integrating cloud-based systems with a business framework, and provides a lot of benefits that include, but are not limited to, better customer engagement, medical inventory monitoring, improved time management, maintaining regulatory compliance, and automation tools for reducing sales efforts.
The tools that a CRM management software equips a pharmaceutical company with, comprised of:
Client and Key Opinion Leader (KOL) management
Since pharmaceutical companies have vastly distinct customer segments, collecting and storing data from each of them can be a cumbersome task. Pharmaceutical CRM software eliminates the need of looking through hundreds of spreadsheets to find the relevant data by centralizing all that data into one single repository.
Whenever a sales representative makes contact with a hospital authority or a key opinion leader – a doctor or a physician with wide influence with other medical practitioners – their data is automatically entered, segmented and categorized into the CRM client database. Customer metrics like the sphere of influence, prescription habits, and preferences can also be used to proactively obtain more insight into the physician or health official’s behavior. This lets the representative analyze their customer better and create targeted messages for them in order to drive sales.
Monitoring and Tracking the Sales Team
The sales team of a pharmaceutical company is usually always found on-field, trying to create and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with a large number of leads and prospects. Legacy management systems cannot truly provide accountability to the sales process since they cannot map a sales representative’s movements.
A CRM software service provides location-tracking capabilities to sales managers, which they can use to see exactly where a sales representative is and which customer they are dealing with, all in real-time. The manager can calculate the average sales lead time for every representative and quantify the performance for each of them.
Cloud Computing and Mobile Support for the Sales Team
We know how the sales manager can use CRM tools to monitor the sales performance; however, the life-force of the company is the sales team, and empowering them with powerful CRM support tools can be instrumental in maintaining long-term relationships and boosting sales.
The sales team can access every customer’s information on their mobile, from wherever they are, through the central cloud-based CRM database. This eliminates the need to carry documents and catalogs to sales meetings since everything is now available in the digital medium. CRM software also equips a sales representative to remotely generate orders for drugs or medical equipment from their mobile device. They can also easily track the medical sample inventory for providing trials and promotions.
Automating and Scheduling Customer Follow-ups
Once a sale is made, the sales team can keep a record of the customer contracts and sales in a single CRM interface. By integrating it with the product database, and understanding the product life cycle, the CRM software can automatically schedule general or service follow-ups with the customers. This proactive approach builds transparency and trust with the customer and makes them more likely to maintain a business relationship with the company.
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CRM database helps pharmaceuticals and life science industry to keep track of their clients and help serve them better