Four Tips to Maximize Your Remote Engagements

Mar 26, 2020 | Carol Jacobson

In the past few weeks, there has been a ten-fold increase in the number of remote HCP engagements conducted through Veeva CRM Engage Meeting and a four-fold increase in rep-triggered email using Veeva CRM Approved Email.

We have developed guidelines and best practices to help you engage better.

1) Use Approved Email for Meeting Invitations and Follow-Up

Approved Email lets you send personalized and compliant emails to HCPs. All activity is tracked, so you can set goals and measure progress regularly. Establish short-term goals for the first few weeks to monitor adoption. Then strive towards future goals that maximize efficiency and ROI.

Practical tips:

• Keep email invites short and to the point
• Get early buy-in from MLR to streamline emails
• Include a calendar invite or other content using .ics file attachments
• Include easy-to-use instructions for joining and app install
• Send a reminder ahead of your meeting
• Don’t forget about follow-up emails

2) Best Practices for Digital Meetings

• Set appropriate expectations with a meeting goal and an agenda focused on topics that will drive towards your goal.
• Design your content and topics for discussion to fit the meeting duration. Assume participants will join a minute or two late.
• Always allow adequate time for questions.
• Involve the entire audience. Ask questions, promote interaction, and encourage collaboration from all parties.

Think of your home page as the virtual waiting room. Here are tips to make it more welcoming:

• Make the page functional and inviting.
• Include your photo, name, phone, and email address.
• Avoid promotional messaging.
• Use the company brand to drive consistency across teams.

Ensure your environment is professional:

• Have tidy surroundings and a neutral or non-distracting background. Consider using virtual backgrounds. Ensure that no proprietary or confidential information is on display.
• Ensure quality lighting and sound. Consider a noise-canceling headset with a high-quality microphone that eliminates background noise.
• Learn how to make digital eye contact by looking directly at your device’s camera as much as possible. It’s also best to minimize hand gestures.

3) Develop Content Efficiently

Virtual meetings last 15 to 30 minutes, significantly longer than typical face-to-face interactions. You’ll need to be prepared with enough content, in the appropriate format, to effectively convey your message while also staying compliant.

It’s important to create, review, approve, and distribute content quickly. Veeva Vault PromoMats lets you easily convert your approved materials into new content for use in CRM Engage Meeting. Some key time-saving capabilities with Vault PromoMats are:

• “Single Doc Publishing” – automatically create CRM Engage Meeting presentations for different file types (such as .pdf or .ppt) and link them to existing promotional assets. This streamlines the MLR review process while letting you distribute the content to multiple channels.
• “Create Presentation” – with just a few clicks, Vault PromoMats will convert your PowerPoint or PDF file to an CRM Engage Meeting presentation and retain links between documents, allowing you to maintain the order of slides within your presentation.

If you want to reuse existing Veeva CLM content in CRM Engage Meeting, you’ll need to audit your existing materials to ensure it is optimized for the remote channel. Not all content will translate from a face-to-face setting. Key considerations include:

• Meeting length – the remote engagement will likely last longer than a face-to-face meeting so you will need to provide enough content to support the call and engage the HCP.
• Content optimization – for existing CLM content, reduce or eliminate the amount of interactive content in your CRM Engage Meeting presentations. Focus especially on minimizing animations and videos.
• Attendees – think broadly about your meeting attendees. CRM Engage Meeting supports up to 25 attendees in a remote meeting, so consider whether other HCPs or members of the care team will also benefit from your meeting.

4) Explore Modular Content & Accelerated MLR Review

Think about how to optimize the MLR process for fast-moving global events like the COVID-19 pandemic. One company has overhauled its MLR review process that allows brand managers to choose the level of MLR review that a tactic is subjected to:

• Regular MLR review – new content, indications, messaging, or products.
• “MLR lite” review – reused materials for a new channel or in a new format. The reviewer only checks a particular page or section.
• No MLR review – internal content.

A modular content approach helps companies remain agile in a rapidly changing environment. Using pre-approved, channel-agnostic modules with integrated authoring capabilities helps deliver “the right message to the right customer on the right channel and at the right time.”

Prepare for a Future of Virtual Engagement in Life Sciences

Life sciences organizations can maximize virtual engagements if they have an honest review of their content development processes, explore greater use of modular content, and evaluate the benefits of an accelerated MLR review process. A truly strategic initiative on virtual engagements will give companies greater agility to adapt to a fast-changing landscape.

For more information or advice, please contact us. Ask for Carol Jacobson for business consulting. Content partners can ask for Stacy Payne.