CHANGE MANAGEMENT: BEST PRACTICES FOR THE SUCCESS OF YOUR PHARMA CRM PROJECT

When you work for a pharmaceutical company, a sense of innovation and a taste for a challenge are your drivers. However, despite their excellent state of mind, your employees will always remain, to a certain extent, resistant to the changes you drive. If you launch a CRM project in your company, some team members may put the brakes on it. Fortunately, with a few good practices, you will be able to lead this change successfully. 

1. Anticipate fears to treat them better 

If you choose a specific CRM solution for the health and wellness industry, its implementation will be quick and easy. However, this new tool might change the sales and marketing processes, which can cause different types of fears among your employees: 

  • fear of the unknown, of stepping out of their comfort zone 

  • fear of being downgraded, having an account or task taken away, being replaced by a colleague or artificial intelligence, and ultimately becoming useless 

  • fear of technology, of not mastering the IT tool, of making mistakes that will have a big impact, such as inadvertently offer commercial discounts. 

These fears are factors of change resistance. It is, therefore, better to treat them as soon as the first symptoms appear by explaining to all your employees: 

  • that they will be trained in the new CRM tool and the new processes, taking the necessary time 

  • that their working conditions will improve and that they will become more autonomous 

  • that the chosen CRM solution is not just for IT specialists or geeks; it is very easy to use and will save them time

2. Show all employees the benefits that CRM will provide them  

Before taking your teams on the "how" question, it is best to answer the "why" question: why implement CRM in your pharmaceutical company? The answer is simple: so that everyone wins in their daily activity and everyone wins overall. 

Thanks to CRM, each employee will serve their customers better because they will deeper understand their interactions with its business lines. Each CRM user will be able to make sure, for example, to respect each customer category, to apply the good discounts to the right customers... Sales representatives will be able to focus on their core business: sales! 

They will no longer have to fill out 40 Excel tables every evening to send out their slips. They will be able to place orders in just a few clicks and only a few seconds. They will save much time, they will be able to increase their sales and their day will be over when they go home in the evening. 

In a second step, you can then address the question of "how" by organizing demos of the tool for all your employees - and not just for sales teams. Showing them the screens and functionalities of the CRM in concrete terms will reassure them and unite them around a shared project. 

3. Set up an organization around CRM

According to Gartner's analyst firm, more than half of all CRM projects fail to deliver the expected results. The main reason for these failures is the inability to get employees to adopt the solution. You must not take this problem lightly, and you need to take your time to study it correctly. 

In the health and well-being industry, implementing a Pharma CRM impacts many people: from the general manager to pharmaceutical representatives and medical representatives, through the directors of regions and zones, the marketing, call centers, and customer service teams. Therefore, it is preferable to set up a transversal organization around CRM, with dedicated CRM referents. In particular, it is better to appoint a full-time CRM manager with an analytical marketing type profile. Then, you can choose privileged contacts positioned at different "nodes" of the organization: a person in charge of the administration of purchase orders, a person in charge of the logistics part, a person in charge of the centralization feedback ... One thing is sure: you will have to anticipate the necessary resources and their workload 

4. Get support from the right CRM solutions vendor

To reduce resistance to change, optimize your CRM's deployment and utilization, take the time to choose the right solution for your needs. In particular, to secure your project, it is recommended to work with an editor specialized in pharmaceutical sales and retails, who knows your business and its specificities. He will help you more effectively in the management of change and training of your teams. 

The right CRM solution provider is also the one who makes sure that your technical management does not stand in the project's way. He will integrate your IT project managers very early in the project, identify the technical issues, and validate the solutions with them. 

Finally, your CRM Pharma partner must look beyond the simple integration of its tool. He should help you see further, reinvent your customer journey, relentlessly improve your teams' daily lives, and initiate a deep digital transformation over the long term.