First Databank, Inc. (FDB), a subsidiary of Hearst Corporation, is the top publisher of pharmaceutical information used within healthcare information systems. The organization had been expanding rapidly to 400 CRM users through mergers and acquisitions.

FDB’s previous CRM system, SalesLogix, was outdated and was no longer able to support their dynamic subscription business. It had become cumbersome to use and maintain. In fact, it took over a year to upgrade SalesLogix from one version to the next. Still, CRM data was not in synch with finance, which prevented FDB from leveraging their data for analysis and management decision-making.

FDB had many complex requirements in their marketing, sales, relationship management and customer care groups, and their goal was to seamlessly manage and track these within their CRM system. One additional challenge was that the pharmaceutical data provided by FDB requires absolute precision.

The company decided to move their existing CRM to Salesforce and implement Eloqua to automate marketing processes. Shared Services, responsible for the deployment, needed their requirements to be correctly defined, designed, and implemented using industry best practices.

FDB selected West Coast Consulting as their implementation partner due to our deep experience with salesforce.com and strong background in bringing large, siloed organizational teams to work together. After creating detailed requirements for each department, the consulting team successfully designed the new system, implemented new functionality and conducted thorough testing before the official launch.

The implementation included the following:

• Complex functionality analysis across all departments, including sales, marketing, finance, customer care, clinical, editorial, contracts relationship management.
• Defined complex integration points between Salesforce and product delivery, finance systems, and in-house drug database.
• Remapped outdated market segment use and product mapping, standardizing across all systems organization-wide.
• Revamped all sales functionality, while ensuring zero disruption to the business. This included giving Sales the ability to create quotes from within Salesforce.
• Applied CRM, Services, and marketing best practices to FDB’s complex processes.
• Implemented Eloqua marketing automation, integrating with Salesforce to achieve a seamless lead scoring system.
• Functional testing and roll-out across the entire organization.
• Trained clinical personnel and specialized handling of customer queries while ensuring that current processes were mapped into the new system.
• Migrated millions of data records to the new system and created processes that work
  efficiently across all departments.

The new system complies with current company processes and fully supports the subscription business model. Consensus and sign-off processes were integrated with the Product Delivery system. The sales team is now able to quote complex products, eliminating one-off Excel spreadsheets.

The integration of Eloqua and Salesforce provides Sales with better leads that are rated and scored, allowing representatives to be more effective and better prioritize their time.

The Sales and Finance organizations are now in synch and share critical CRM data that is timely and accurate.

The new system provides management the ability to use reports and dashboards to get a real-time view of the state of the organization across sales, marketing, finance, and customer care.