The project in a nutshell
When a Contract Research Organization was acquired by private equity, it suddenly lost access to key shared services from its former parent company. It called upon Xceede Solutions to rapidly create an enterprise-grade contract management solution.
The Challenge
UBC needed to develop its own contract management solution.
The Solution
A standalone contracting workflow and document repository, data management, forecasting and sales prospecting tools, and a new sales/proposals workflow.
The Outcome
Rapid growth in prospecting opportunities, increased executive visibility into the sales pipeline and an accelerated sales cycle.
What the company needed
United Biosource Corporation (UBC), a leading provider of pharmaceutical support services, had recently been acquired by a private equity firm, ending the company’s relationship with its parent company, Express Scripts. UBC was no longer able to leverage shared services from Express Scripts, so UBC needed to develop its own contract management solution.
In addition, management wanted to increase lead generation results as well as streamline and optimize their sales process by using a Salesforce® CRM.
We needed Xceede Solutions to scale their solution delivery quickly because we didn’t have our own IT lead, only subject matter experts,” explains Brian Vander Pol, UBC’s Director of Business Development. “The divestiture increased the velocity of our needs quickly, and I am very satisfied with the support Xceede Solutions is providing.
UBC partnered with Xceede Solutions to create a standalone contracting workflow and document repository, data management and sales prospecting tools, and to replace UBC’s sales/proposals workflow and forecast tool and convert that data into a scalable Salesforce®-based CRM.
Xceede Solutions helped UBC come up with an implementation roadmap, so they could have a modular approach to the development of their platform and could begin reaping business benefits from their investment sooner than later.
Our solution
With the roadmap in place, Xceede Solutions developed an end-to-end sales solution created to take advantage of the robust power of Salesforce. This solution included:
Opportunity management
Sales
intelligence
Relationship management
Proposal management
Contract
management
Analytics &
Reporting
These were all part of the Phase I solution.
Xceede Solutions then moved on to the implementation of Phase II, which included such tasks as implementing a Contract Management solution.
This project was essentially a full renovation of the house, in terms of providing end-to-end solutions in every area of sales and marketing. We have consulted closely with them to understand the business needs that are driving their sales and marketing technology needs.
Project scope
Departments
- Sales
- Legal
Users
- 20 across departments
Solutions
Salesforce® solutions
- Sales Cloud
AppExchange apps
- D&B Optimizer
Data integration
Enterprise systems
- BioMed Tracker
- Microsoft Sharepoint
- Spring CM
Solution alignment
Using our Exentatio Methodology, we mapped the project so our solutions would impact the company’s key drivers.
Desired outcome(s) | Key driver(s) | Solution objectives |
|---|---|---|
Revenue growth |
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Profitability growth |
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Risk management |
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Key project highlights
Opportunity management
The main goal of the project entailed streamlining United BioSource’s opportunity management process. Xceede Solutions worked with management to formalize the process and implemented Salesforce® Sales Cloud to support the process.
Every other project highlight supports and strengthens Opportunity Management.
Sales intelligence
In order to optimize the lead generation process, Xceede Solutions integrated the new Salesforce® CRM with BioMed Tracker, an industry-specific data provider. With this new data integration process in place, the Sales team was able to prospect potential clients and opportunities from within their CRM.
Proposal management
United BioSource was using a homegrown solution based on Sharepoint and Smart Web. We migrated the solution to Salesforce® in order to provide the proposal management team a seamless and unified experience, while eliminating room for errors resulting in data duplication, inconsistencies and gaps.
As part of the solution, we ensured the proposal management solution was embedded at the appropriate level of the opportunity management workflow. We also ensured that the sales process includes appropriate stages for proposal management.
Contract management
Xceede Solutions assisted UBC and SpringCM in implementing a Contract Management solution on Salesforce. We worked closely with the legal department to create business processes around the various contract types as part of their Sales process.
We worked closely with SpringCM to customize Sales Cloud for better integration with their Solution.
We also assisted in training 15 users.
Analytics for experience-based selling
As a Contract Research Organization, UBC responds to many RFIs. Xceede Solutions developed a data model in Salesforce, leveraging Tableau CRM analytics, that allowed the Sales team to rapidly mine previous contract data. This enabled them to rapidly check in Salesforce for the company’s previous experience, giving them the information needed to answer RFIs with proposals that offered concrete experience. This increased their probability of winning deals.
Results
UBC has had more than 250 (and counting) prospecting opportunities created for the sales team and has Sales Intelligence visibility into 7,000+ drugs currently in development.
In addition to these hard results, UBC has:
- Improved prospecting activities using BioMed Tracker sales intelligence data.
- Increased ability to track marketing campaign ROI.
- Boosted executive team visibility on sales, pipeline and prospecting.
- Increased accountability of the sales team.
- Improved visibility around proposals.
- Created a new capability for managing and streamlining their contracting processes.
I have come to trust and rely on Xceede Solutions’s general business expertise. I pressure test our ideas with Xceede Solutions before we make any changes because I trust their experience and knowledge. Both their technical skills and general business acumen has been invaluable to UBC.
At a glance
United BioSource
United BioSource Corporation is a leading provider of pharmaceutical support services, partnering with life science companies to make medicine and medical products safer and more accessible. The company combines insight from data, understanding patient behavior and the science behind clinical specialties to help clients make more informed decisions and optimize patient care.