Marketing/Sales Automation SaaS Product Update
About IQVIA
IQVIA is a leading global provider of advanced analytics, technology solutions, and clinical research services to the life sciences industry. IQVIA creates intelligent connections across all aspects of healthcare through its analytics, transformative technology, big data resources and extensive domain expertise. IQVIA delivers powerful insights with speed and agility — enabling customers to accelerate the clinical development and commercialization of innovative medical treatments that improve healthcare outcomes for patients. With approximately 86,000 employees, IQVIA conducts operations in more than 100 countries. IQVIA is a global leader in protecting individual patient privacy. The company uses a wide variety of privacy-enhancing technologies and safeguards to protect individual privacy while generating and analyzing information on a scale that helps healthcare stakeholders identify disease patterns and correlate with the precise treatment path and therapy needed for better outcomes. IQVIA’s insights and execution capabilities help biotech, medical device and pharmaceutical companies, medical researchers, government agencies, payers and other healthcare stakeholders tap into a deeper understanding of diseases, human behaviors and scientific advances, in an effort to advance their path toward cures.
Project Overview
Nexxus Marketing was the Flagship marketing automation product for Appature, a startup in Seattle that was later bought by IQVIA. Since its inception, the product had been primarily development-driven and focused on customization requests from the clients using the product. Nexxus Marketing needed to become scaleable so that companies using it could bypass long and complicated onboarding processes and start using it “out of the box.” Many companies were turning to marketing automation solutions that were not specific to the health/pharma/biotech vertical because they were easier to use, had better API integration offerings, and did not require intensive customization from delivery teams.
The product design team conducted interviews with our users as well as internal resources who have direct customer contact. Through our research, we identified features that could be removed, features that were needed, and the areas of our product that needed major overhauls in order to keep pace with competitor products.
Outcomes
We were able to deliver a research report and provide insight into the key challenges faced by our top personas. Some of our findings made it into the product roadmap, and others launched a “northstar” vision project lead by design to help the product team start thinking about where our product suite could be in 3-5 years. We kept the designs in wireframe mode, because the company had a new, robust interface library. The wireframes were still rather detailed, because the engineering team had not started using the new interface library, and the design team wanted to make it easy for the engineers to understand which components we were intending to be used in different parts of the new design vision.
Takeaways
I loved getting to re-invision a product by combining elements of a flagship product created by a local startup with other products in the sales product suite of the larger entity who purchased them. Bringing together the marketing and sales efforts that teams were engaging in separately to create better organizational visibility was very rewarding because it was all about optimizing internal processes so that the customers experiencing the marketing and sales efforts weren't overwhelmed and annoyed.
Unfortunately, I did not stay at IQVIA long enough to see the results of our explorations come to fruition. The team that I worked with was fun and engaged in the work, but IQVIA was a HUGE corporation with a very limited understanding of technology, and little investment in making their product suite better. Because they're the biggest game in marketing and sales data in pharma, their motivation to improve their product was low. That made for a rather demoralizing environment, and I was eager to pursue other opportunities when one of my favorite recruiters reached out to me.