The Challenge
An international healthcare company equipped medical sales representatives with large slide decks to inform medical professionals about new products and medical research during in person meetings. These meetings were important to the healthcare company’s core mission of creating and making available innovative, life saving medicine. However, the job of representatives was made difficult because these slide decks were hundreds of slides long, featured many images, charts, and graphs, and were subject to stringent compliance and regulatory requirements. The representatives were having a hard time navigating to specific slides or pieces of information they needed mid conversation because they could not meaningfully search for topics within a slide deck that was voluminous and had a lot of untagged multimedia. They also had to remember and abide by compliance rules without having any checkpoints or reminders built into the content itself. These challenges combined resulted in decreased sales conversion and win rates, lengthened time to respond to the needs of buyers, and exposed representatives to increased compliance risk.
The Solution
EK architected and developed a Sales Enablement Proof of Concept (POC) built in a CCMS with a front end in React. This POC broke the content in slide decks down into topical components that could then be efficiently assembled into customized microsites by representatives in the field. These highly configurable microsites allowed sellers to efficiently customize their sales collateral for the needs of buyers.
For example, content about a research study might have components for Overview, Methods, Design, and Results. When a representative wanted to discuss just the general details of the study, they had the option to only include the study Overview component in their microsite, so as not to bog down their conversation with unnecessary details. The content in the Dynamic Content POC was also much more conducive to being used on the go, by being available in a URL instead of a .ppt file that required downloading, and by being searchable both using keywords or via the site navigation. These features made it much easier for sales representatives to fluidly navigate from topic to topic during their conversations with medical professionals, customizing their presentation on the fly to respond to the lead qualifying information. The content model also accounted for regulatory and compliance rules by creating relationships between content segments that must be shown together, or in a certain order. This way, representatives faced less of a burden to recall and adhere to compliance themselves, and could count on the content itself to be compliantly ordered.
Finally, the POC made multimedia assets like images, graphs, and charts more findable by leveraging a specific content component for media assets. This way each asset could be tagged and described with metadata, rendering it searchable by keywords. This created a much simpler interface for representatives seeking to find a specific data point or image within many media assets. Ultimately multimedia handling requirements at the enterprise level would require a DAM, but EK was able to deliver satisfactory functionality appropriate to the POC within the CCMS.
The EK Difference
EK’s Advanced Content Team was able to provide the healthcare company with a dynamic, innovative Sales Enablement POC that solved for multiple challenges medical sales representatives were facing. EK combined industry leading content engineering expertise to redefine the shape and structure of content with user experience design best practices to ensure the solution was intuitive to navigate so that Sellers could easily and efficiently find customized Go To Market content and sales collateral. EK’s technical consultants were also able to develop an extensible POC over a short amount of time and with little risk, so that the healthcare company could quickly realize business value from their investment. Rapid delivery of working software also provided an efficient tool for testing and providing feedback on features and functionality.
The Results
As a result of the Sales Enablement POC, the healthcare company has been able to populate and build out a larger Dynamic Content repository that extends the content model and includes even more configurable sales collateral. The company will be able to mature their solution over time using the extensible content model and Sales Enablement POC that EK built. Medical sales representatives will ultimately be armed with an ever-expanding selection of easily personalizable content, resulting in improved sales conversion and win rates.