Boehringer Ingelheim: Launching New Medicines Using Connected Engagement

A connected customer engagement model uses the strength of unified teams and technology to benefit stakeholders in biopharma. Sales, marketing, and medical teams that work in harmony to deliver deep scientific information and resources can:

• Strengthen key opinion leader (KOL) and healthcare professional (HCP) relationships
• Overcome hurdles to customer access, especially at launch
• Ultimately improve patient treatment adoption of vital new medicines

Dee-Dee Van Wormer, Boehringer Ingelheim’s senior associate director of customer facing effectiveness, recently sat down with Nicson White, vice president of Veeva NA Commercial Business Consulting, to discuss the company’s connected engagement approach and the benefits it provides.

“Delivering outstanding customer experiences and accelerating launch processes were catalysts for us in thinking about connected engagement,” she says. While the company maintains a strong presence in diabetes, heart disease, and other broad treatment areas, it’s preparing to launch 20 therapeutics over the next 20 years in new and rare disease areas with unmet patient needs.

Hear how Boehringer Ingelheim uses connected engagement to stay focused on customer excellence.

Technology that connects teams

Many companies make decisions about technology adoption and build from there. Boehringer Ingelheim, however, prioritized people first to drive a successful, customer-centric approach to connected engagement.

“We asked, ‘What behaviors do we want to enable and encourage?’ and came to Veeva Business Consulting to help us shape the operating model. The project focused on ensuring our technology would facilitate teaming and sharing of insights, as well as speed adoption of the tools and data,” Van Wormer says.

She sees the CRM as more than a place to house and collect commercial data. It needs to serve increasingly complex field teams — territory managers, account managers, medical and other specialists, including their new account medical advisor role — with insights and sound business planning.

“As a field team member, you might have 10 teammates and are trying to navigate what each is doing for a customer as you plan. Plus, we’re continuously hiring new teams,” Van Wormer says. Everyone must understand the rules of engagement. Connected engagement — supported by a deep life sciences application for sales, marketing, and medical teams — keeps the focus on customers and ensures smooth handoffs. Teams know who’s been engaged, what they need next, and when to bring in medical colleagues.

Partnering to serve new customers

Finding KOLs and HCPs in new therapeutic areas and ensuring cross-team alignment for customer centricity pre-launch takes a forward-looking approach. Oncology is one such area of focus for Boehringer Ingelheim. Van Wormer and her team prepared by interviewing colleagues about their needs, which include specialized testing to bring research and new medicine to patients worldwide.

After digging into their current customer account profiles and account planning methods, they saw that the setup wouldn’t fully serve the oncology team for launch and beyond. The solution was to create new items in account profiles that would be highly applicable to the oncology business.

“You could say a community helped to build our account plans and account profiles. We worked with Veeva to create a good solution. We gained additional credibility in oncology by partnering with the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA),” she adds. SAMA has recognized Boehringer Ingelheim for its customer-first model to better reach patients, listen and gather feedback, and apply the insights to shape future therapeutic innovations.

Prepared to benefit from AI innovation

Boehringer Ingelheim’s strong technology foundation is integral to its expansion into new treatment areas. Creating the right customer profiles and account planning approaches was step one. Then field teams needed encouragement to use all the CRM tools at their disposal to reach and better serve customers, according to Van Wormer.

Now the company is prepared to benefit from incoming AI innovation in Veeva Vault CRM, allowing for even richer and smoother teaming. With the ability to quickly surface insights and content informed by prior customer interactions, field teams can supercharge their existing edge even further.

Van Wormer cites the example of Voice Control, a Veeva AI feature that allows users to control Vault CRM with their voice to compliantly record and auto-transcribe call notes from any device or location (Figure).

“I was a representative in the field. Many times I got into my car and thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to press a button and capture my notes?’ Our field teams will be able to log customer call notes and assign a task to teammates in minutes,” she says. Sales, marketing, and medical will rapidly know what was discussed with a customer so they can better plan for their next interaction.

Innovation, agility, and personalized engagement with HCPs matter more than ever in reaching patients. Van Wormer says the Boehringer Ingelheim team feels well-prepared for successful launches using a connected engagement approach.

Considering a connected engagement model? Learn about the strategies and technology shaping the market.