The executive spent over 7 years at Veeva firstly as a solution consultant working with customers and then heading Veeva's Align and Link products within the core offering.
Disclaimer: This interview is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. In Practise is an independent publisher and all opinions expressed by guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of In Practise.
I had actually two roles at Veeva. I started as a solution consultant for their commercial product portfolio. I was basically pitching to new customers and existing customers the existing Veeva products, like everything they had for the commercial side, and also to new prospects, the overall product portfolio. Here, the main focus was around finding the right use case for the individual customer. Mainly, the CRM was the starting point, but sometimes it was also other products like OpenData. Well, not so much OpenData back in the days. Then I moved on into strategy. Strategy is usually the team in Veeva that educates and supports the sales team in the market. I was looking for Veeva Align and everything that has to do with multi-channel and multi-channel cycle planning. So this was the overall role. It was about finding the right people, finding the right customers, the right messaging for the customers, making sure that the product meets the industry needs, and also that the industry understands what we are trying to achieve with the product.
It is a straightforward territory alignment solution that really fulfills the needs of a life science company. As you probably know, in life science, at least outside of the US, there isn't a one-to-one relationship often between a sales rep and a customer. It's more like, "Okay, I have a bunch of customers and I can only see for those customers what my sales are doing. I do not know if Doctor Barnes is prescribing my drug, but I see that Doctor Barnes plus six or eight others in the brick. This brick is good, but I as a rep need to figure out who in my brick is really doing the job for me." And this is what Align does. Align assigns those bricks against the HCP without the need for having a direct relationship of HCP to this drug, which is usually the limitation of any other CRM system when it comes to life science. Obviously, you can align customers in any CRM to an individual, but if you then want to compare and make sure that you know the sales that this sales rep is producing, you don't know. Because then you need to have this brick. And this is why in a life science CRM, if you can assign already in the CRM based on the brick, it goes straight into the reporting and you will definitely see who is doing what.
Brick is this artificial term that I think is made up by IQVIA where it's a bunch of like-minded HCPs. So, let's say you are targeting the internal medicine market. Then, one brick is usually something like eight to 12 internal medicine practitioners.
Exactly. An artificially made territory.
Exactly. The only reason that I, as pharma company, should not know exactly if Doctor Barnes is using my drug or not is that I should only know that this group of customers is using the product, but I don't know exactly who it is.
It's compliance. There's a bit of compliance that there's no dependency for the HCPs and the pharma companies one by one. So that there's for the HCPs in the end they should have protection that they at the end can prescribe what they think is best rather than what the pharma sales are pushing him or her to prescribe. And this should give them this level of protection and also like this compliance aspect.
So what Align does basically in Align you define this is a brick that goes into this territory and this territory belongs to sales rep XYZ.
If you define this once and what Align does, it works in the background. It basically checks on a daily basis. Is there any new customer in my territory coming from OpenData or from OneKey? If yes, it will assign this customer automatically. And every morning when I log into my CRM, I can be assured that I have all customers that belong in my territory, assigned to my territory. This is the beauty of Align. You define it and design it once, and this tool completely runs in the background, which is the main challenge for Align as customers tend to forget how Align works because you set it up once and then it does the magic for you if you don't touch it for the rest of your life.
Yes, exactly. And this is what Align does in the background, without anyone knowing it.
Let's be clear, direct one-on-one competition is not there. There's this service offering from IQVIA. IQVIA offers what they call the alignment, and what it basically is, is an alignment where you see the bricks and then you have your sales reps assigned to it, and you need to load this manually. In the end, it does the same thing, but it does not do this automatically in the background, but Align does something more. This is where the competition comes in and makes the life of Align more challenging. Align also does what it calls dynamic targeting. It also assigns based on the alignment which of the customers should be detailed per channel, how often, and how long.
Basically, in Veeva, it's called the multi-channel cycle plan. And in this piece, in this component, there's a lot of competition. There's obviously ZS with their site and platform that are doing something similar. [Acctua] is, let's say, the biggest competitor globally for Align. ZS may be the biggest in the US from a competitive perspective. And then there are a couple of smaller companies locally that offer some services or some tiny products within Salesforce. They build something themselves in Salesforce. They are competing in some smaller markets, but on a global scale, competition is [Acctua] and ZS.
Yes, the IQVIA alignment, let's face it, it's fantastic. The only disadvantage of IQVIA alignment is that when there are updates, you need to load them. Someone needs to proactively push the button to load it rather than having this automatically run by the integration. That's the main difference.
Well, that's the thing. Bricks are mainly owned, built, and designed by IQVIA. So if there's an adjustment to a brick, usually IQVIA knows it first. Align needs to get this information from OpenData or from OneKey once the adjustment reaches the database. There is, in theory, a lack of actuality. It can happen that for one, two, or three weeks, IQVIA data is more accurate. But as you need to load IQVIA manually and if you don't load the newest version on the day it's released, this advantage usually doesn't make any difference in reality.
Well, this is a great story from the past. IQVIA, what they were doing, they were paying customers - physicians, pharmacists - in cash. They would say, "I give you this amount of cash, and you let me look into your computer," right? This happened in the eighties and nineties when computers started. Even before computers, they would ask, "Can we look into your folders? If we can do so, you are getting cash, right?" They did this at the beginning, and then regulations said, "You can look into those computers, but you can't give this back to the pharma companies. We need to have a security layer." That's where they came up with the idea of bricks; a framework around a group of customers. They publish this information every eight to 12 months and sell it to life science companies. That's how it started. It's also why it's tough for others to break into this business because they already have those data.
Since the early 2000s, it's not allowed anymore to give cash to the customer. Obviously, this is completely illegal and non-compliant.
Salesforce has Salesforce Maps. With Maps, they already have a tool that can do far more than Align. The only logic they need to build into Maps is this artificial concept called a brick. In theory, if they are really clever, they should be able to build a very competitive solution for Align very soon, if they're not already working on it.
I guess this is where their data offering comes into play. They are building their own data business, which is the only way for them to really compete going forward. They already do this very well in the US with all the Crossix products and all the former Crossix people that they acquired a couple of years ago.
Yes, in the US there is no brick, so this is the easier market to compete in. I think they've announced a couple of times that the US is just the start and they will move into more markets. The only way for Veeva to compete is by building their own data product offering.
In the US, Crossix, from my understanding, is the more modern way to collect data. Going forward, if they are able to scale this into other markets, which I doubt they can, but if they find ways to scale this, it would definitely be the better way to do this.
It's like with OpenData and OneKey, right? OpenData is also far advanced when it comes to data collection. Instead of having manual operators, it's far more automated, with more things happening automatically in the background by grabbing information from the internet and ensuring you are getting all the adjustments without waiting for someone.
IQVIA's OneKey most of the time still relies on the sales rep who sees a customer for the first time at a new address and feeds information back, which is very accurate, but it can be weeks off and weeks behind from an accuracy or data up-to-date perspective.
At least this is how they explain it to the customers and how they do it. They have far fewer manual operations and far more data from internet screens. They grab information from publicly available sources, screen hospital homepages on a daily basis to see if there is a new name popping up, and crawl the internet to really get all that information before someone sees it.
I think there's only one that they're using. I don't think there's a company that has bought both at the same time. From a sales rep perspective, they usually don't like products like OneKey and OpenData, mainly because once they send a new data change request, most of the time those data change requests are pushed back and denied.
They have to do this multiple times, which can be frustrating. Usually, pharma reps don't like automatic data products because they believe they see the customer and know where to find them, so they don't need something like this. However, sales managers know how important it is. Without OpenData or OneKey, there's no way you can exist in this business. No way.
Because you don't have the addresses, you don't have visibility to the customers. You need one of those products. It's critical, it's essential. To have your own database, it's too expensive and definitely not accurate enough.
That's a good question. I think, in the end, they are very close together. From an accuracy standpoint, OpenData might be 0.1% ahead, but just ever so slightly.
I don't think that really matters, no. The way data is being positioned is about the speed of data validation. It's faster data validation because more is done automatically rather than waiting for a sales rep.
It always sounds good in the sales process if you can pitch your product. Yes, but in the end, your question implies that it doesn't really matter so much if this is two hours or one day. The sales rep will not look into this data set anymore at that time, on that day. They will wait for when they see this customer the next time in two, three, or four weeks.
It used to be on the low side, right. But these days, I guess they are getting more customers, but I think they are still far behind. OneKey still has more. I think the challenge with OpenData is that the overall success of Veeva kind of got in the way of OpenData at some point. Pharma companies were always complaining, "Oh, we're dependent on IQVIA, we need to do everything with IQVIA." It is not good to have everything from one source. And then Veeva came, and every product is now coming from Veeva. Then they started to say, "Oh, but we first complained about IQVIA being completely monopolistic, and now we are saying the same for Veeva." So, this is why I think the success of Veeva products kind of got in the way of OpenData being more successful.
I think what they're doing is exactly the right thing. Just continue, keep pushing it, keep pitching it, right, and at some point, they will fall. It's just that you need a lot of patience with the data offering.
In the early days, OpenData was buying themselves into the market, similar to what they did with CRM. This is the current approach. They are trying to align with comparable pricing levels, but typically, Veeva bundles their products because they know there are certain products that pharma companies cannot live without. They often combine offers, saying you can get this product at a far better price if you also take OpenData. This strategy has been applied with many global customers. I believe they will continue this approach, especially now as they are pushing customers towards the new Vault platform, where they will likely incorporate OpenData into their offerings. This is one of the strategies that will definitely be used.
I think some customers will be tempted by the savings, possibly saving half a million per year on a global scale, and they'll go for it. Why not? However, others will be concerned that dependency on Veeva is becoming too significant. We need to ensure we maintain balance. So, I believe they will be successful with this strategy, but it won't necessarily grant them market dominance or the largest market share.
From what I hear and see, it's less about the costs and more about the risk of losing the core of what drives their sales, such as access to customers and the accuracy of addresses. Often, even if a global decision is made to switch data offerings, some countries or markets are reluctant to follow due to the challenges involved. If the transition doesn't go smoothly, they could lose three to four days of sales in the field. That's a significant concern.
Yes, with the switch, even if you already have the address of Doctor Barnes in your CRM system, if Doctor Barnes is not included in the OpenData the next day, he will disappear from the CRM system.
Yes. They should be.
Yes, that's the risk. There's also the risk that something goes wrong with the data transfer. You could lose it for one, two, or three days, which can already cause issues because the sales representatives cannot go into the field if they don't have the addresses. So, this is the cost they fear. It's not just about the 50K to 60K per market; it's more about, "What about three days out of the field?" This could mean millions in losses, and we can't afford to lose those millions. This is why switching and data offering from that which is so deeply integrated into your CRM is usually only done if you need to make significant changes to your CRM system, not just because it's maybe 100K cheaper per year. That doesn't really make the difference.
In theory, yes. But sales reps tend to be somewhat lazy. If they go to the CRM system and don't find the customer, instead of just visiting the customer, they start complaining. They might say, "Hey, I don't see this customer. Does it mean he's not in my territory anymore?" So, this is usually the behavior of sales teams. It's a disciplinary thing, but it is usually how they operate. I think this happens often enough.
Veeva Link is essentially the next level of customer data where you get all the stakeholder information that is publicly available. They gather this from various sources, such as PubMed, X - formerly known as Twitter - and by scanning the internet, the homepages of clinics, and the homepages of physicians to collect this kind of data. They then compile this and sell it as an extra. It's not really part of OpenData; obviously, it takes OpenData customers as the base layer and enriches this with all kinds of stakeholder information. For instance, when did this customer attend an event? Were they a speaker or just an attendee? When was their last publication? Were they the first author, second author, or last author? Are they part of clinical trials? When was the last clinical trial? What was the topic? What is their rate of participation in clinical trials? All this kind of information is crucial, maybe already on an R&D side of things for a pharma company.
But also, if you want to know who is the biggest stakeholder in cardiology in my region, for example, Veeva Link is the way to do it. Here, you will see who attended as a speaker at how many cardiology events in the last two, three, or four years, and what was the topic. Maybe ideally, you can see the presentation that he or she detailed, all this kind of very in-depth information. So, Veeva Link is fantastic. Really fantastic.
Usually, it's the MSLs, right? Because it's so expensive, you usually limit this to your MSLs, but also, this kind of data is usually not that relevant for primary care sales reps. Do I need to know how active my customer is on Twitter or on X? Probably not. But as an MSL, I need to know who is the key stakeholder that everyone follows in my topic that I can influence. So, this is usually why it starts from the medical teams, and some key account teams need it.
This is charged per therapeutic area. So, if you're in cardiology, you pay for all cardiologists and you get it as a bundle. Therefore, the price depends on the number of therapeutic areas. I think initially they had oncology, but now pretty much everything important is covered.
Yes, I think the last time I heard the price, it was for one therapeutic area in one market, which is usually one country, around 50K.
So, imagine a company like Novartis, they have easily eight to 10 therapeutic areas, and they operate in all the markets. So, it costs them half a million just for Veeva Link in one market. This is just one country, and they are live in a hundred countries. You can't scale Veeva Link on a global level; it's too expensive. I don't think that's how Veeva wants to sell Link. They want to really keep this to the core markets of the companies.
H1 is the biggest competitor.
I think H1 is broader from a therapeutic area perspective, what they cover. But from what I hear about quality and speed of updating, Veeva Link is far ahead of H1 these days. I have a former colleague from Tact who is now head of sales at H1. I asked him recently if it makes sense to join H1. He said they are not performing as well as they should. So, they're really having tough times.
I guess it has to do with the integration. Even though Veeva Link isn't integrated into Veeva, it sits in an iframe in Veeva. So it looks like it's being integrated, but it's on purpose not integrated because they don't want to mix the data with the CRM core data. H1, on the other hand, needs to go into the CRM data. They need to adjust the data model to accommodate their fields and their level of information. So, this is usually a far more complex sale process because there's really a data manipulation project that needs to happen. With Veeva Link, you simply just get one new tab in your CRM and boom, you have it. So that's really the challenge for H1, that they are a bit more baked into the data model of CRM.
Yes, in my honest opinion, they can't. And I'll tell you why I don't think they can in the long term. It is ridiculously expensive to keep Veeva Link data accurate and maintained. Up to this point, I still believe that Veeva doesn't make any money with Veeva Link. They continue to invest money into it.
It's because you need many people to crawl this data, to ensure that the data is correct, that you are getting access to it, and that you are on top of it. If there are new data sources, you need to maintain very high-quality control. It's a very resource-heavy offering and requires a lot of investment. This is also the only reason why OpenData is still there. Initially, Veeva completely misjudged this whole project. If you followed the start of OpenData, it was terrible. The name was terrible, and the product was terrible. Then they realized how it works.
With OpenData, they paid all the dues they needed to understand how data offerings work. At some point, they realized data is a long-term business. If you decide to go in, you need to go through those five, six, seven to 10 years where you invest money. But then, in the end, if you have the patience and the money to get through those years, you make money out of it. But a company like H1, which is still rather small and in startup phase, I don't think they will have the money to survive in the long term. I really don't see it. If they're lucky, maybe IQVIA or Salesforce gets behind them.
Ideally it should sit very close to your CRM core data, so that you know that this customer is the one that is so active.
This is how H1 does it, with an integration into CRM. They add data fields onto the account objects. And then you have your H1 table where you can see, okay, this is Doctor Barnes. And this is my OpenData and here is my H1 piece.
Yes, you need to have a project that first of all maps the customers together. It also builds this integration and needs to ensure that you're not breaking the CRM core. Also, H1 is not a tool that you would use on a global level. You will only use it for a couple of brands, for a couple of markets. And in a pharmaceutical company, usually they have one or two CRM cores that should work for all the markets. You need to be very careful not to break the core.
I think it's a door opener for any other data offering, mainly around sales data. With this, they really learn how to sell data. I think the main learning they've already made is that if you own the product and the data, you rule the world. If you only own the product or only the data, you always depend on the other side. You depend on the data model of your product offering and as a product offering, you depend on the quality of the data. But if you have both, you can control it. I think this is what Veeva understood with Link, that they have the data plus the product as one baked-together solution. And this is the Link product, the core product, which is the frame of the data. I'm confident that this will be the product they will use as a platform also for any other data offering, like sales data or whatever they are trying to do outside of Crossix, outside of the US. This will help them significantly to get faster into this business without losing as much money as they have with Veeva Link.
I think this is what everyone believes is the next best thing. Salesforce is already very strong with their CDP, which Veeva is also now looking into in order to compete. I think this is also the core where Veeva got far stronger with their Crossix purchase. That finally gave them access to patient data. But from a commercial perspective, will it make any changes in the mid to long term? Probably not, because now everyone needs to focus on what their new CRM system looks like. And I think Salesforce, for sure, understood this by now, but they started very heavily with their CDP offering, mainly because they couldn't do anything in life science for commercial due to their partnership with Veeva.
But the challenge is that in a pharma company, you're not allowed to have patient data in the same system where you have the HCP data. There is not allowed to be any kind of relationship. And this is why it's not yet clear how the future of those products together will be. This can't be in one cloud. It needs to be two separate clouds, because the company is legally not allowed to own this in one. They can't. And therefore, I guess this is the next thing that needs to be figured out. How can they consume patient data and how does it make sense for them to consume the patient data?
I think it makes sense for medtech companies where some education is needed, even for the patients. Absolutely agree. But why, for example, should Bayer educate on how to use aspirin? Everyone knows this by heart. There is no point for them investing in these products into any kind of CDP. And yes, they would love to see the patient who is really using this product, but this is luckily legally impossible. Imagine a world where every pharmaceutical company would know that Will Barnes is using this drug on Mondays. This would be horrible. It's good that we have these kinds of legal regulations here.
Yes, I believe Salesforce is ahead of Veeva in this market for sure. They definitely benefited from having a better platform already in place. They own the platform rather than just having a new one. So, for now, Salesforce is ahead, and being a larger company, they can maintain this advantage for a while. Veeva is now focused on ensuring that their customers will continue using their Veeva CRM. They need to focus on this.
That's the interesting part. Every pharma company I speak with wants to stay on the Salesforce platform. They're not saying they want to move to Salesforce; they just want to stay on it. However, they know that this might not be possible. They want to stay on Salesforce because they have built so much knowledge and so many resources around Salesforce. They have many Salesforce consultants around them that can really help them instantly.
For the Vault CRM, there isn't such a big network of resources available yet, even though some companies already offer Vault CRM consultancy. It is not the same yet. Some even have their own Salesforce consultants and administrators in-house. I think this is the biggest change that needs to happen. This is why they ideally want to stay on the Salesforce platform because they have the resources, the knowledge, and the APIs they built into the Salesforce platform. The biggest challenge that Veeva faces is telling customers, "Hey, you need to build your own APIs. We have an open API, but it's your integration." And I don't think they can stick to this. It will not work out.
They need to offer an implementation-based migration for the integrations. They outsourced this to companies like Accenture. But if you have ever worked with Accenture, you know how much they charge for such projects, right? I think this is the main issue.
Yes, that's the interesting part for Veeva where Veeva is quite pleased about it. The costs are pretty much the same. Even though it will still be a Salesforce system, you still need to migrate to the new Salesforce instance. So, the cost is also there. However, you have far more partners that can help you. You're not forced to work with Accenture; you can go to other companies that offer cheaper rates. There's far more competition in this market, so you potentially can save money. And because of this, getting it done is definitely cheaper. But this is the question that every company comes to answer, and I guess therefore Veeva is very open to negotiating good prices if you move to Veeva Vault CRM very soon.
Yes. They can definitely offer a good discount for the first two, three, or four years on the new Vault platform. In theory, Salesforce should be the big winner here. But in reality, I don't believe it is such an easy thing for Salesforce. It also comes down to people.
I think Veeva will pay very good attention to ensure that they're getting the top 20, at least most of them. They will lose just one or two. I believe they will make this so compelling for them to follow. And then there's this big thing that pharma companies already have Marketing Cloud from Salesforce, so they already have a bit of a relationship with Salesforce. But the way Salesforce operates in sales and as a company is fundamentally different from Veeva. From my perspective, what I experience, Veeva engages in a much better way. Salesforce is kind of very high-nosed, very much like, 'This is the Salesforce way, like it or leave it.' And Veeva is far more accommodating. This is why, in the end, you're also selling to people. This is why I think even though on paper Salesforce should be the big winner, I think that Veeva will definitely not lose as much ground as we probably believe right now because they have better people and they will be able to get a lot of customers moved onto their Vault platform.
It's a completely different user interface. It's a completely different login at this moment, and this is how it needs to be. So, the user experience is rather low at this point in time.
These days, most of the time I have it online in my browser; I have my CRM as an app on my iPad. This is the main difference.
I think this is the challenge as Veeva is only really strong and available in the US, so we can only look into the US. Other markets, obviously, Salesforce is significantly ahead of Veeva when it comes to a global scale. In the US, this is definitely completely different because Crossix has been doing this since the very early days. So they already have good experience. But outside of the US, I think there's a fundamental difference at this point in time where Salesforce is significantly better.
Aktana focuses on omnichannel engagement, addressing questions like what I should do with my customer, when, which channel I should use, and what exactly I should do with my customer. It really helps a field user do the right thing at the right time. That's the core business of Aktana. There's no competition whatsoever with Veeva or IQVIA. None of them have a next-best-action recommendation engine like we do at Aktana. We are competing with different companies. ZS is a rather big competitor in this space, or some service offerings from IQVIA are also in this space. But from a product perspective, with the platform being available, this is where Aktana stands out because it's a platform that we are selling rather than a service offering.
No.
Yes. Aktana consumes all the data that the pharma company has available for particular customers, all the activity data, all the transactional data, sales data, everything that is available about customers is basically consumed. Based on this, there are recommendations sent back to the field user saying, "Hey, the last time when we saw that customer attended a webinar for this topic, it was useful to send an email two days later to summarize what happened in the webinar. Do you want to send this email now? And your customer usually reads emails in the afternoon. If you send it, make sure it's going out in the afternoon." Things like this. This is what Aktana does concretely. I take the salesperson by the hand and give them a concrete suggestion, "Hey, this is what we believe is best to do with the customer in order to move the customer along the customer journey to be a better prescriber of your product." So there's no data collection, it's just a recommendation based on the data that the company owns.
We don't collect the data. We consume the data from the pharma company. This is why what we suggest can be different for one company compared to another. Because some companies might have sales data for their products, some don't. Some might have approved email, some don't. If they don't have approved email, how can we know about the best times when they opened the email? We can't. But if they have approved email, we know when is the best time for a customer to read an email. This information is where we are dependent on the data sources.
Well, it's homemade, right? Their move to the Vault platform is the biggest risk, and they will for sure lose customers. It cannot work out that they can move forward with 100% of their customers. It will not work. They will lose customers, that's for sure. But I think the way they want to compensate for it is that they put more products into the offering when the companies move. So they will maybe give two or three years of OpenData on top, they will maybe give Align on top, they will maybe give multi-channel on top so that they enlarge their footprint by giving some products for a while on top in order to compensate for those companies that they might lose over time. So the biggest risk, let's face it, is their own arrogance.
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The executive spent over 7 years at Veeva firstly as a solution consultant working with customers and then heading Veeva's Align and Link products within the core offering.