Sanofi Pasteur MSD Improves Sales Health with ... - Salesforce.com

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Sanofi Pasteur MSD Improves Sales Health
with Salesforce SFA and Force.com Builder
Using Salesforce, we have a single, companywide view
of all the parties involved in the purchase of our vaccines.
Our sales teams are more productive in their day-to-day
activities, they have instant access to product information,
and they can efficiently manage activities and workflow.
— Phil Lang
Field Operations Manager
Industry
Healthcare
Geographies
The United Kingdom
Challenges
:: Inflexible and shallow functionality
in existing, proprietary healthcare
CRM system
:: Reliance on email for sharing and
reviewing customer information
from fragmented databases
:: Lack of common, central system
for viewing sales opportunities,
proposals, and other customer
information
:: Minimal management insight into
sales performance
:: No integration between CRM and
back-office systems and databases,
including SAP
Solution
Deployment of Salesforce SFA to
60 healthcare sales professionals
in the United Kingdom to create a
single, comprehensive view of GPs,
practice nurses, and other healthcare
professionals, customized with Force.
com Builder and seamlessly integrated
with SAP and healthcare databases via
the Force.com Web Services API.
Results
:: Complete implementation,
customization, and integration in
only three months without requiring
an up-front technology investment
:: Increased sales effectiveness
and productivity
:: Better, more consistent customer
service
:: Sales process improvements and
better insight into critical sales issues
and pipeline
Vaccines have the power to make life-threatening diseases a thing of the past. To deliver its range
of vaccines for diseases like whooping cough, cholera, and polio as cost-effectively as possible,
Sanofi Pasteur MSD, the UK-based specialist vaccines business of sanofi-aventis Group, needed to
overcome its reliance on an outdated internal technology—its local, on-premises, pharmaceuticalindustry
CRM system. To increase sales effectiveness and efficiency, Sanofi Pasteur MSD
deployed, customized, and integrated salesforce.com’s flagship sales force automation (SFA)
application, Salesforce SFA, in only three months to create a single, comprehensive view of
thousands of general practitioners (GPs), practice nurses, and other healthcare professionals in the
United Kingdom. With assistance from Binley’s, a healthcare solutions provider, Sanofi Pasteur
MSD now has one view of the customer, sales productivity is increasing, the sales teams are more
effective than ever, and sales data has reached unprecedented levels of reliability and availability.
Sanofi Pasteur MSD is a joint venture of Sanofi Pasteur and Merck & Co. Combining innovation
and expertise, Sanofi Pasteur MSD is the only company in Europe dedicated exclusively to
vaccines. It draws on the research expertise of Sanofi Pasteur and Merck, together with their
teams throughout the world, to focus on the development of new vaccines for Europe that aim to
extend protection to other diseases and perfect existing vaccines to improve the acceptability and
tolerability of vaccination.
The sales management system Sanofi Pasteur MSD was using to manage relationships with
thousands of U.K. GPs and other healthcare professionals needed an injection of health. “Our
vision was to create a single, consolidated view of all of our healthcare audiences, using a costeffective,
adaptive, and user-friendly system,” says Phil Lang, field operations manager at Sanofi
Pasteur MSD.
“Using the previous system, we were experiencing more and more data exchange issues. For
example, whenever we wanted to share sales data and other database information, we zipped
up the files and sent them to the next person. They would change the data, rezip it, and email
it back to us. In our dynamic healthcare business, we needed to replace this with a real-time,
comprehensive customer view,” he adds.
Good Medicine for Sales
Lang and his team had been aware of on-demand CRM solutions for some time but decided to
wait until all of the company’s remote users could quickly and easily access data by using highspeed
lines. “Today, when you think about CRM, you immediately think of salesforce.com.
The SFA solution offers unprecedented sales functionality, integrates seamlessly with our SAP
back-office systems, and is very easy to deploy and use. Our decision to use Salesforce was also
influenced by the high number of other pharmaceutical companies that are now using it. That
broad customer base gave us the reassurance that we had made the right decision,” Lang says.

The single greatest
advantage of using a
hosted CRM system
such as Salesforce
is the ability to
cost-effectively track,
record, and measure
each and every
customer relationship.
— Phil Lang
Field Operations Manager
Sanofi Pasteur MSD has deployed salesforce.com’s flagship Salesforce SFA application to introduce
a unified, multichannel view of GPs and other healthcare customers throughout the U.K. More than
60 sales representatives use the hosted, collaborative sales system to manage almost every aspect of
the day-to-day sales relationship—scheduling appointments, reviewing the historical relationship
prior to meeting a GP or practice nurse, understanding existing service inquiries, gathering and
analyzing market intelligence information, and profiling groups of customers.
Territory managers use the system to easily define, administer, analyze, and change sales territories
to match the sales organization, among many other tasks. They also use it to analyze sales pipelines,
improve sales processes, and enhance their insight into critical sales issues.
Through salesforce.com’s Force.com Web Services API, Salesforce SFA integrates seamlessly with
two critical systems. The first is Sanofi Pasteur MSD’s SAP back-office order management system.
Lang and his team set up an automated nightly feed from the SAP system to Salesforce, which
means that sales data is always up to date and continuously available. When sales representatives
need to order advance products, such as flu vaccines that need to be ordered months ahead of
use, they simply click the Order tab in Salesforce (created with AppExchange Builder), which
is in reality a direct link to the SAP order system. These orders are then automatically uploaded
simultaneously to the SAP system and Salesforce. Salesforce is also integrated with a range of
Binley’s healthcare databases. These provide the sales team with an instant, near-real-time record
of all U.K. GP practices, healthcare interest groups, and other healthcare specialists—resulting in
enhanced marketing and sales effectiveness.
Measure Each and Every Customer Relationship
“The single greatest advantage of a hosted CRM system such as Salesforce is the ability to costeffectively
track, record, and measure each and every customer relationship,” says Lang. “Using
Salesforce, we have a single, companywide view of all the parties involved in the purchase of our
vaccines. Moreover, our sales teams are more productive in their day-to-day activities, they have
instant access to all the product information, and they can efficiently manage activities and workflow.
Nothing is missed. At the same time, our data availability has also increased.”
Previously, when the sales representatives were in the field, they were out of touch with their
data. With Force.com Connect Offline, they are continually in touch—even without an Internet
connection. Lang was impressed with the results. “The great thing about Connect Offline is that
the salespeople can readily take their account, contact, and opportunity information with them and
keep working on critical customer and deal information—all via the easy-to-use, browser-based
Salesforce interface. When they’re back in the office or connected to the Internet, Offline Edition
automatically updates records with unprecedented ease and convenience, so the latest information is
always on hand.”
Using Salesforce SFA, Sanofi Pasteur MSD’s customer relationships have never looked so healthy.
For More Information
Contact your account executive to
learn how we can help you accelerate
your CRM success.
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