2014 Strategy Series

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY

GlaxoSmithKline Improves Sales & Marketing Effectiveness Across 78 Markets Worldwide Using Skura SFX™ Adaptive Sales Enablement

web: www.skura.com email: sales@skura.com

OverviewGlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK) is a British multinational pharmaceutical, biologics, vaccines and consumer healthcare company headquartered in Brentford, London. It is the world's fourth-largest pharmaceutical company as measured by 2009 prescription drug sales. GSK has a portfolio of products for major disease areas such as asthma, cancer, virus control, infections, mental health, diabetes, and digestive conditions. It also has a large consumer healthcare division that produces oral healthcare and nutritional products, drinks, and over-the-counter medicines, including Sensodyne, Boost and Horlicks. !Skura Corporation is empowering the next generation of sales reps. The Skura SFX™ platform is the first to offer adaptive sales enablement, providing unprecedented visibility and insight throughout the entire sales process. Skura SFX enables sales and marketing executives to engage with customers across all channels and devices—from a single platform—providing accountability and measurement across the entire sales cycle. The Skura SFX platform offers next-generation predictive analytics, ensuring the right message reaches the right person at the right time, increasing sales and customer success.

ChallengesIn 2011, GSK found that physicians were increasingly “closing the door” on its sales reps, giving them less in-office face time and making it difficult for GSK reps to educate physicians regarding the scientific advances the Company was making. GSK decided that the communication pathways its reps were utilizing had become stale and that a technological solution was needed to make interactions with physicians more relevant, engaging, and personalized, while also upgrading the way its reps visually brought GSK’s science to life. In this way, GSK hoped to add real value to the relationships its sales reps had with individual physicians while gaining advanced analytical insights to feed back to its central marketing team in the process.

web: www.skura.com email: sales@skura.com

Solution

GSK began an extensive search for a technology vendor that could tailor an offering to its needs and that also had the capacity to accommodate GSK’s global presence. The end goal according to David Ross, Global Head of Sales Force Effectiveness, GSK Consumer Healthcare, was to find “an incredibly simple, straightforward, meaningful platform that was stable, that worked every single time, and that our representatives absolutely and utterly fall in love with so that it would be virtually impossible to take it away from the sales force.” !In addition to the most superior platform, David and team sought to answer the question of, “which organization [can] deliver an operational platform today, has real clarity regarding how they will develop that platform over time, and will actually form a partnership with the companies they work with to co-create the future?” !In 2012, after an exhaustive review of sales enablement technology vendors and many proof-of-concept pilots, GSK made the decision to utilize the Skura SFX™ adaptive sales enablement platform across its enterprise, quickly rolling it out to 78 markets worldwide. !As a device-and-channel-agnostic solution, Skura SFX was immediately functional for all of GSK’s reps, regardless of what device they or their physicians used. Skura SFX also integrated immediately with all CRM systems / the CRM system utilized by GSK reps, automatically pulling information from the CRM into the SFX platform and posting detailed information and analytics back to the CRM both during and after sales calls. This ensured the accuracy and objectivity of CRM information without further effort on the part of sales reps and served to maximize GSK’s CRM technology investment.

David Ross, Global Head of Sales Force Effectiveness, GSK Consumer

Healthcare

web: www.skura.com email: sales@skura.com

Benefits

The Skura SFX adaptive sales enablement platform gives GSK’s global central marketing team the ability to easily update content and push it out to local markets around the globe in real-time. This ensures legal compliance and consistent messaging across all sales reps, while eliminating traditional content dissemination costs. !“We’ve simplified the whole top-to-bottom chain,” states Ross. “Now that we have Skura, what comes from our central marketing team gets implemented absolutely perfectly in [local] markets. We have the ability now to very quickly change campaigns, switch campaigns on and off, do minor tweaks, and get content straight out to the world. In the old world it would take months to do anything like this. In fact, we wouldn’t do it because we wouldn’t have the data for the insights. So it’s making us much more responsive.”

Global Content Management “It’s making us much more responsive.”

Analytics and Objective Insights “Suddenly we can understand the impact of our campaigns”

Furthermore, GSK sales and marketing teams now have access to previously unavailable insights regarding the interests and engagement levels of each physician. GSK can now witness how physicians engage with specific pieces of content—both during and after sales calls. This direct feedback is coupled with Skura’s predictive analytics, which suggest the optimal message, timing, and channel to approach individual physicians. Together, Skura SFX enables the GSK marketing team to personalize approaches, provide more meaningful content, and build stronger relationships with physicians globally.

web: www.skura.com email: sales@skura.com

“The thing that’s changed my world the most in the sense of my central team, is the fact that the data and insight that we now have from the analytics platform behind the Skura product [means that we] know every minute of the day, all around the world, what content is being used, when and how,” states Ross. “We’ve got the ability to drive a huge amount of analytics…to really understand what we are using in calls, what’s impacting physicians, what’s changing recommendation behavior, and what’s not working. We then link that into other metrics around the impact around recall of message, around recommendations of other brands, and suddenly we can understand the impact of our campaigns. More than ever before…we are able to tailor content to individual customers, rather than going in with generic stories and presentations…so everything is getting down to that individualized basis.”

Sales & Marketing Alignment!“We’ve doubled the amount of time we spend on calls with physicians.”

Skura SFX also offers GSK direct insight regarding sales rep best practices, allowing the Company to see in real-time exactly how its top sales reps are selling, what marketing content is or is not working, and how specific approaches resonate with physicians. This creates a continuous cycle of improvement between sales and marketing, where sales teams feed information from the field back to the marketing department, who then hone content and approaches accordingly to provide back to the sales function. !“We’ve doubled the amount of time we spend on calls with physicians…by having rich, interactive content that the physicians really want to get into,” Ross continues. “We can track this through our analytics. We’ve pre-benchmarked this before we introduced [Skura SFX]…and on average we’ve doubled across the 78 markets where we are using this platform.” !“It has completely re-energized the sales force and the way they want to interact with their physicians because they see the way the physicians react to the content on the Skura platform… the fact that people want to interact. So we’ve got almost a complete refresh across the entire selling organization. They just absolutely love to use the platform and it makes such a difference to them. And if you’ve got a happy, motivated sales force then that’s bound to have an impact on your bottom line.”

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