Indian Pharmaceutical enterprises have made rapid growth in the last 10 years. Today 70% of the market share is commanded by 250 companies, out of the total 10,000+ enterprises in the business of API, formulations, generics, bulk drugs etc. Indian MNC’s have won several accolades from Global companies for drug innovation, new molecular formulas and meeting the world’s most stringent regulatory authority, USFDA norms. They had entered into strategic partnerships with Global entities, which resulted in expanding its footprints in developed and emerging markets. After all, USA accounts for 30 per cent of India’s pharmaceutical exports of $ 3 billion, this is growing at 18-20 per cent per annum.”

Today, they stand at crossroads facing a new set of challenges like Government regulations, price control and demand to innovate new drugs to meet doctor/ patient expectations. Sales and marketing are the blood line of any size of pharmaceutical enterprises; sales leaders are facing mounting pressure to improve sales, win new deals and stay ahead of the competition. In the entire eco-system customer relationship management plays a vital role to accelerate Production, drug innovation and operations.

To put behind the age old approach to sales and marketing automation, Salesforce CRM is reengineering sales process automation in the Cloud for numerous pharmaceutical enterprises. For few CIO’s, this is the first swab with a Cloud computing model to achieve tactical customer relationship management objectives. Sales reps play an important role in the sales lifecycle and tracking their each activity will determine future decision making. What happens to the data related to no of field visits, meeting notes and sampling stocks? In the present day sales reps carry a mobile version of Salesforce CRM to maintain data integrity, updating on the move, track all the meeting notes, sampling data and much more. At the higher level of the sales pyramid unifying sales data, tracking region specific sales and visibility was still a challenge with the entire army of sales reps generating tons of sales data on a daily basis. Salesforce’s Cloud CRM unifies region specific sales units across the continents, end to end sales tracking and sales funnel analysis. Enterprises are experiencing the power of Cloud CRM, marking the end of the age old methods for sales reps. Salesforce CRM not only re-engineering sales process automation but redefined the way customers are tracked on social platforms, collaboration within and outside an enterprise and integration with several applications. Enhanced sales, improved profits, winning more deals improves market and brand share of branded drugs. Just think of 1970 Ferrari 365 GTB and the latest Ferrari F12 Berlinetta, which one do you prefer? You always needed a car that takes off 0-100 Km/hr in 3.2 sec on F1 track; similarly you need the speed and nimbleness in sales automation to win the race.

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I have been involved in developing and consequently providing mission critical solutions to various clients across domains. Our organization was designing a web-based CRM solution for a renowned play music school for children. When I dwelled a little to know about the nature of the business this organization runs, I was quite fascinated. It is a play music school for children that also conducts child parent interactive programs. The subtle yet innocent and priceless nature of relationship between a child and a parent, and designing a solution for an organization that thinks 24X7 to come up with ideas to facilitate, reinforce and rejuvenate that relation had a humongous positive impact on my desire to work on this project.

I wanted to share an experience of working on this particular project from my perspective. Leveraging the cloud via Salesforce.com to architect business solutions in itself was a challenge. Client had an immediate business need where forecasting sales data with a limited visibility of sales, marketing, vendor management and financial processes was a challenge. In addition to this there was a lack of transparency in product attendance, franchise performance, vendor management and incentive management processes. We architected a solution that addressed clients current business needs and helped them to adopt Cloud based Salesforce.com CRM.

As a part of implementation we have had 50 plus business entities designed and had relationships maintained across all of them. While designing various reusable queries to extract, transform, load the data and vice versa, we had a subconscious intuition of ensuring a seamless system performance and also maintain the SF Code Coverage. Key business processes were customized using VF pages. Scheme management is a great example that perfectly depicts the complexity of the process for which the solution has been engineered. The dynamic nature of Terms and Conditions getting modified per the scheme that the customer chooses presented me a great challenge while working and huge satisfaction after achieving it.

A day came when the final version of the engineered software was pushed in to production ensuring that the Client’s business processes are aligned, systematized and configured seamlessly in Salesforce.com CRM with a central repository of child and parent database. Many more features were architected pretty smartly abiding by the industry standards, which made the customer happy. Cloud based CRM helped them achieve greater ROI, by saving 40% of the cost over traditional on-premise software.

This is a classic example of how Salesforce.com CRM provides a magnificent, resilient, reliable and a near error free solution to the client.

There was a huge sense of achievement after accomplishing this project and the fact that we had to call it a day for this particular client with the nature of business that has unprecedentedly made me emotional.

Balaji Reddy is heading SFDC Practice at Bodhtree with a skill set on Project Management, Client Engagement and Business Consulting. His key area of expertise in software development is Salesforce.com & Siebel with focus on Sales, Marketing, and Service areas

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