Strategic Upgrade: Veeva Unveils Veeva China CRM Suite to Lead Digital Marketing Innovation in China's Life Sciences Industry

In recent years, regulatory policies in the pharmaceutical industry have continued to tighten. Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly prioritizing accelerated digital innovation and the establishment of efficient digital systems as their core strategies, aiming to leverage new technologies and business models to stay ahead of the curve, enhance operational efficiency and effectiveness, and effectively reduce various costs.

However, the path to innovation is not always smooth. Many pharmaceutical companies have accumulated numerous systems over the years, but these systems are often siloed. This fragmentation not only fails to clearly reflect market demands and support critical decision-making, but also hinders the integration and in-depth mining of data assets. Therefore, even though the previous wave of digitalization in the pharmaceutical industry has reached every corner of the sector, many pharmaceutical companies still struggle to excel through differentiated strategies.

Standing at the intersection of the global wave of digital transformation and the profound changes in the pharmaceutical industry, Veeva Systems (NYSE: VEEV), the global leader in life sciences industry cloud software, successfully held the “2024 Veeva China Commercial Summit” on October 24, 2024, at the MGM West Bund Hotel in Shanghai, aiming to find answers to the aforementioned challenges.

During the event, dozens of industry leaders from renowned pharmaceutical companies engaged in in-depth discussions on topics such as digital innovation in the pharmaceutical sector, commercial marketing operations, and digital marketing system platforms, thereby addressing the various new challenges currently facing pharmaceutical enterprises in their digital transformation initiatives.

Before selecting a specific path for digital transformation, we must first clarify the opportunities and challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry.

In the view of Chen Shaofeng, Chief Commercial Officer of InnoCare Pharma, although the pharmaceutical industry is still regarded as a sunrise industry, a clear trend of polarization has emerged. The R&D focus of pharmaceutical companies has now fully shifted to frontier areas such as oncology, autoimmune diseases, and GLP-1 therapies, while the research, development, and promotion of traditional generic drugs, such as those for hypertension and hyperlipidemia, are gradually declining.

However, despite the continuous improvement in drug specificity and efficacy, the target patient population is becoming increasingly limited. This stands in stark contrast to the broad base of patients and physicians that characterized the traditional mass-market pharmaceutical sector, reflecting a profound transformation within the industry.

Zhen Zhicheng, Head of Commercial Excellence at Roche Pharmaceuticals, discussed the core challenges currently facing the industry from a marketing perspective. First, the launch environment for new products is complex and volatile; frequent policy adjustments and intensifying competition are steadily shortening the window for peak sales of new drugs. Consequently, companies urgently need efficient strategies to accelerate market penetration and maximize market share for their new launches.

Secondly, the era of multi-channel sales has arrived, with traditional hospital channels coexisting alongside diverse pharmacy formats and emerging online reimbursement policies. This requires enterprises to rapidly adapt to this transformation by flexibly adjusting their business models while ensuring data completeness, thereby fully addressing the impacts of multi-channel dynamics and seizing market opportunities.

In addition, Zhang Weijun, Head of Business Insights and Technology for Bristol Myers Squibb China, highlighted the challenges encountered when entering new therapeutic areas. Currently, a core challenge facing Bristol Myers Squibb is a significant lack of insight into market data and target physician populations, making it difficult to accurately identify physicians who hold access to patients in need of our care and support. This necessitates the adoption of cutting-edge innovative technologies to deeply mine and effectively integrate data, moving beyond traditional data procurement models and transforming insights into actionable strategies. These efforts aim to enable sales and marketing teams to precisely engage target physicians and reach patients who truly require assistance.

Faced with the dual challenges in clinical operations and marketing faced by pharmaceutical companies, Veeva remains customer-centric, delivering solutions that align with customers’ actual needs.

In June this year, Veeva launched the Veeva Development Cloud, a digital cloud platform spanning the entire lifecycle of drug R&D, manufacturing, and commercialization. This platform provides pharmaceutical companies with comprehensive digital solutions covering the full lifecycle of new drug development and market launch, thereby facilitating their digital transformation and upgrading.

At the 2024 Veeva China Business Summit, Veeva further strengthened its commitment to digital marketing in the pharmaceutical industry by strategically upgrading its next-generation commercial excellence marketing platform—Veeva China SFA, which was meticulously developed for the Chinese market over eight years—and renaming it “Veeva China CRM Suite.”

According to Veeva, the Veeva China CRM Suite is a next-generation commercial excellence marketing platform exclusively designed for China’s life sciences industry. It features a comprehensive suite of standard products, with 12 version updates released annually. Centered on healthcare professionals (HCPs), such as physicians, and addressing the core business scenarios most critical to pharmaceutical companies’ commercial marketing and promotion, it provides an all-in-one, robust digital solution for commercial operations management. This includes advanced core CRM management, end-to-end meeting management, and multi-channel engagement management. The platform helps enterprises manage the entire drug launch marketing process in a compliant and digital manner, empowers medical representatives, fosters collaboration among sales, marketing, and medical teams, and supports pharmaceutical companies in achieving commercial operational excellence.

Veeva China CRM Suite: Next-Generation Commercial Excellence Marketing Platform

Currently, the Veeva China CRM Suite encompasses a series of locally developed products and solutions tailored specifically for the Chinese market, including Veeva China CRM, Veeva China Events Management, Veeva China Engage (formerly Remote Meeting), Veeva Approved WeChat (formerly Rep Triggered WeChat), and Veeva China Campaign Manager. These offerings comprehensively address the extensive and personalized commercialization needs of life sciences enterprises.

• Veeva China CRM: Centered on healthcare professionals (HCPs), it digitizes and closes the loop across the entire drug launch and marketing lifecycle, helping pharmaceutical companies enhance team collaboration and academic promotion efficiency, improve personalized HCP experiences, and achieve sustainable performance growth.

• Veeva China Events Management: Integrated with CRM on a unified platform, it enables end-to-end digital and compliant management of the entire meeting lifecycle, covering all types of online and offline events, thereby facilitating multi-dimensional analysis of academic conference promotion effectiveness from a holistic perspective.

• Veeva China Engage: Seamlessly integrated with Tencent Meeting, enabling remote academic communications with physicians that are both simple and compliant.

• Veeva Approved WeChat: Digitally manages multiple channels for frontline team interactions with HCPs, enabling bidirectional, trusted communication. It facilitates timely access to HCP insights and preferences, delivers personalized content, and significantly enhances the effectiveness of academic promotion.

• Veeva China Campaign Manager: A new marketing automation platform built specifically for China’s life sciences industry, enabling pharmaceutical companies’ marketing and sales teams to collaborate on compliant, precision-targeted campaigns. It simplifies and accelerates marketing outreach to healthcare professionals (HCPs) while further optimizing the HCP experience. Core capabilities cover the entire campaign lifecycle, including creating and managing campaigns, building target audience lists, sending messages via WeChat and WeCom, providing action recommendations for sales representatives, and tracking campaign performance.

Furthermore, leveraging Veeva’s comprehensive product ecosystem that spans the entire life sciences lifecycle and global operations, the Veeva China CRM Suite can seamlessly integrate with the market-leading Veeva OpenData master data management service and numerous system products within Veeva’s global ecosystem (such as Veeva PromoMats and Veeva Link), thereby unlocking synergistic benefits. It also enables innovative integration with Veeva’s global Commercial Cloud offerings, empowering pharmaceutical companies to achieve more efficient globally unified management in their commercial operations and further accelerate innovation.

From Veeva’s perspective, successful digital transformation hinges on the close synergy among software, data, and consulting. In the realm of pharmaceutical commercialization, Veeva actively leads and robustly builds a closed-loop system that leverages the synergistic effects of “Software + Data + Consulting.” With data as the foundation, software as the engine, and consulting as the wings, Veeva integrates globally leading software technologies, extensive industry data resources, and professional consulting services to provide comprehensive support for pharmaceutical companies’ commercialization efforts—from strategic planning to practical implementation.

Currently, Veeva has successfully served over 40,000 end users across nearly 20 pharmaceutical enterprise clients, including globally renowned multinational corporations such as MSD, Merck KGaA, and Aspen.

In addition to the all-new solutions, the renaming of Veeva China CRM Suite itself underscores Veeva’s unwavering commitment to being “rooted in China and serving China.”

Ding Xiaofeng, General Manager of Veeva China, stated at the conference, “We are very proud that the Veeva China CRM Suite has become the preferred digital solution for commercial excellence among many multinational and local pharmaceutical companies. As we continue to strengthen our integrated services in software, data, and consulting, we will bring more innovation and value to our customers in the Chinese market.”

Next April, Veeva will launch Veeva China Campaign Manager, a marketing automation application developed specifically for the Chinese market as part of the Veeva China CRM Suite. This solution enables enterprise marketing and sales teams to seamlessly synchronize campaign activities, simplifying and accelerating marketing outreach to healthcare professionals (HCPs) while further enhancing the HCP experience. The concept for this innovative application was first unveiled at the Veeva China Commercial Summit.

Matt Farrell, Executive Vice President of Global Strategy at Veeva Systems, stated, “We are delighted that the Veeva China CRM Suite is helping more enterprises establish efficient, convenient, and productive HCP engagement experiences. As our product portfolio continues to expand, we will provide customers with a richer array of innovative solutions, further leading and meeting the demands of the Chinese market.”

Growing alongside China’s life sciences industry and its customers, while steadfastly adhering to a long-term strategic development philosophy, is Veeva’s unwavering commitment to “building an industry cloud for China’s life sciences sector.” After thirteen years of dedicated cultivation in the Chinese market, Veeva will continue to develop its China Industry Cloud, invest in locally developed product lines, drive digital transformation and upgrading across the industry, and empower high-quality development within China’s life sciences sector.