If you’re a marketing leader at a biotech, rare disease, or specialty pharma company, odds are that you came to that role after working in Big Pharma. It’s an increasingly common career option: after learning the ropes and achieving success at an established pharma company, many marketers are ready to tackle a different kind of challenge. The entrepreneurial spirit of these smaller companies can be a refreshing change. Plus, their relatively flat and lean organizations enable marketing leaders to make more of an immediate impact than they might in a traditional pharma environment.
While the agility of these younger, smaller organizations has its appeal, Big Pharma alumni who make this move often discover that along with the different culture comes a different level of support services across many aspects of the business. For example, if you’ve taken this path, you may have experienced the absence of a giant human resources department that helped create a smooth onboarding process in your prior job.
The other support area that Big Pharma marketing alums working in biotech, rare disease, and specialty pharma often miss is IT/systems support.
This pain point often becomes apparent when it comes time to put together email campaigns targeting HCPs. Back at the old place, you most likely had Salesforce Marketing Cloud up and running before you arrived. And when you needed to launch a campaign, odds are you had a marketing operations team that could handle the technical aspects of getting the emails launched.
In your new role, the company may not have implemented Salesforce Marketing Cloud or any other HIPAA-compliant digital marketing software. And when you ask around for who might be able to help get a platform setup and make sure it’s properly integrated with your other systems the answer is a shrug. Now you’re really missing that Big Pharma support!
Or maybe your lean, mean, small-to-mid-sized pharma company has in fact implemented Marketing Cloud. But when the time comes to put together that first critical email campaign, you find out that the one person who knew how to work with the software left the company a couple of months ago. Doh!
The good news is, you’re not the first marketer to face these challenges. And a solution is more accessible than you may have imagined.
The fact is, Implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud isn’t especially challenging...if you have the expertise and experience of working with this powerful tool in the highly regulated life sciences space. The same can be said of sending email campaigns and launching other marketing efforts using the platform: it’s a manageable lift if you know the platform.
The bottom line is you don’t need that Big Pharma IT or sales operations to get up and running. But it makes sense to get professional help to setting up Marketing Cloud correctly, which includes ensuring HIPAA compliance. And you may want support to ensure that your email campaigns launch without a hitch.
Because we provide these services, we’ve seen the look of relief on clients’ faces when they realize that they can offload these headaches to experts. It’s not unlike the moment when a new homeowner with DIY fantasies discovers that the local handyman can make fast work of repairing the drywall. Could they have done it themselves? Maybe. Are they relieved that they could hire a pro to do it right the first time for a modest fee? Absolutely.
In summary: implementing an email marketing platform like Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be a big step forward for your organization. Don’t let the lack of internal support stand in the way of taking this step. As we can tell you first-hand, the help you need is only a click or a call away.
About Conexus
For small- to mid-sized life sciences companies that need to reach and market to healthcare providers, Conexus offer the rare combination of deep life sciences experience with end-to-end support expertise, including support for Salesforce.com applications. As a Salesforce Consulting Partner, we are dedicated to delivering excellence and are certified in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud and Sales Cloud. We help customers get up and running on the industry’s leading and and marketing technologies up to 33% faster than traditional implementations. From implementing and maintaining Salesforce applications, to building, managing and measuring digital campaigns, Conexus serves as “The Team Behind Your Team.”
