Enable Agile and Impactful Digital Engagements with Veeva Align

This video provides an in-depth exploration of how Veeva Align enables life sciences commercial teams to achieve greater agility and execute impactful digital engagement strategies. The core context is the recognized need for flexibility within the pharmaceutical industry to respond rapidly to daily changes in the field and adapt to healthcare professionals' (HCPs) evolving channel preferences. The video highlights a critical industry challenge: 90% of pharma executives lack confidence that their current operating models can effectively manage this rate of change. Veeva Align is presented as the solution that optimizes sales planning, ensuring commercial teams can adopt a more agile approach to territory and channel alignments.

The platform is designed to eliminate complex and often non-compliant manual processes that typically slow down field execution. For sales managers, Veeva Align provides crucial real-time field insights and complete visibility into territories, including key accounts, product assignments, and representative deployment. A significant feature is the ability to model different alignment scenarios, allowing managers to instantly view the potential impact on sales plans before implementation. Furthermore, the built-in roster management capability streamlines the onboarding process, enabling newly hired representatives to be deployed to the field in just a few clicks, drastically improving speed-to-market.

For commercial operations teams, the platform focuses on reducing back-end administrative burdens. Natively integrated with Veeva CRM, Veeva Align utilizes rule-based targeting to automate territory and account alignments. This automation replaces tedious, error-prone work with multiple spreadsheets, allowing commercial operations to push updates to the entire field force with a single click. This efficiency gain frees up teams to focus on more meaningful business activities, such as instantly creating and viewing multi-channel cycle plans.

Finally, the video addresses the persistent challenge of sales and marketing misalignment, noting that only one-third of life sciences companies report visibility across these two functions. Veeva Align resolves this by giving multi-channel marketing teams greater visibility into field feedback and alignments based on segmentation data. By integrating insights from the field, marketing can refine channel activities, ensuring that sales representatives interact with the right customers, using the appropriate channels, and at the optimal time, thereby maximizing the return on digital engagement investments and driving coordinated commercial execution.

Key Takeaways:

• Addressing the Agility Gap: A significant majority (90%) of pharmaceutical executives lack confidence in their current operating models' ability to manage the necessary rate of change, underscoring the urgent industry need for agile sales planning tools like Veeva Align.
• Optimization of Sales Planning: Veeva Align directly optimizes sales planning, territory alignments, and channel activity definitions, moving commercial teams away from static, rigid models toward a more flexible, responsive approach.
• Elimination of Non-Compliant Processes: The platform replaces complex, manual processes—specifically the reliance on multiple spreadsheets for territory and roster management—which are often non-compliant and prone to errors, enhancing operational integrity.
• Real-Time Scenario Modeling: Sales managers gain the critical ability to model various alignment scenarios and immediately view the projected impact on sales plans, enabling data-driven decision-making before deploying changes to the field.
• Accelerated Roster Management: The built-in roster management feature dramatically accelerates the deployment of new representatives, ensuring newly onboarded personnel can be assigned and active in the field quickly, minimizing lost time.
• Automation via Rule-Based Targeting: Commercial operations benefit from rule-based targeting, which automates the alignment process, reducing administrative overhead and ensuring consistency across the organization.
• Single-Click Field Deployment: Updates to the entire field force, including territory and roster changes, can be executed with a single click, providing unprecedented speed and control compared to manual distribution methods.
• Instant Multi-Channel Cycle Planning: Commercial operations teams can instantly create and view multi-channel cycle plans, allowing them to shift focus from data manipulation to strategic planning and execution.
• Enhanced Sales and Marketing Visibility: The platform improves alignment between sales and marketing, addressing the statistic that only one-third of companies currently have visibility into each other's activities, fostering a unified commercial strategy.
• Data-Driven Channel Refinement: Marketing teams leverage field feedback and segmentation data insights provided by Align to refine channel activities, ensuring that digital and physical engagements are highly targeted and timely.
• Native CRM Integration: The native integration with Veeva CRM is fundamental, ensuring seamless data flow between the core customer relationship management system and the alignment planning tool, maximizing data accuracy and operational efficiency.

Key Concepts:

• Veeva Align: A specialized Veeva Systems product designed to optimize sales planning, territory management, and commercial alignment for life sciences companies.
• Rule-Based Targeting: An automated system within Veeva Align that uses predefined business rules and segmentation data to determine optimal territory and account assignments, ensuring consistency and compliance.
• Multi-Channel Cycle Plans: Strategic plans that define the sequence and type of interactions (digital, in-person, email, etc.) a commercial team will execute with specific HCPs over a defined period.
• Roster Management: The process of managing the assignment, deployment, and status of field representatives, streamlined by Veeva Align to ensure rapid onboarding and accurate territory coverage.

Tools/Resources Mentioned:

• Veeva Align
• Veeva CRM