Ding Xiaofeng, General Manager of Veeva China: Initiate the 3.0 China Strategy to Build a Fully Digital Ecological Closed Loop for Commercialization.

On October 24, 2024, Veeva Systems (NYSE: VEEV), the global leader in cloud software for the life sciences industry, held the "2024 Veeva China Business Summit" in Shanghai. At the event, Veeva announced a series of business progress based on its insights into the Chinese market.

"A core question is how we consider the design of the next-generation products?" said Ding Xiaofeng, General Manager of Veeva China, during his speech at the event.

In order to find the answer, since the epidemic, Ding Xiaofeng and his team have conducted interviews with several pharmaceutical companies and found that a common problem in the industry is the serious departmental silos: Different teams within a company have different processes and standards for interacting with customers, and the direct impact is low efficiency and the resulting costs.

Ding Xiaofeng also shared that in the internal digital projects of some customers, dozens of additional commercial applications with different standards would be derived around Veeva. It is conceivable how high the operating costs are to manage so many systems.

The redundancy of internal IT products also leads to barriers among numerous and complex systems, and even hinders the effective accumulation and in-depth analysis and utilization of data assets, resulting in insufficient insight into market demands and customer behaviors, and a lack of solid data support for market decisions.

"Our idea is whether we can do some subtraction and integration to really help everyone reduce costs and increase efficiency in a practical way, rather than just staying at the slogan level," Ding Xiaofeng said.

Ding Xiaofeng, General Manager of Veeva China

At the summit, Veeva officially announced that it has spent eight years and assembled a 150-person product team to develop a new-generation commercial marketing platform specifically for the Chinese market - Veeva China SFA, which has been renamed "Veeva China CRM Suite" to continuously meet the needs of the Chinese market.

Veeva China CRM Suite is a new-generation commercial marketing platform exclusively created for the Chinese life sciences industry, with a very complete set of standard product suites, and 12 versions are updated and released annually.

At the target user level, it is centered on HCPs (referring to healthcare professionals such as doctors), based on the needs of the most important core business scenarios in the commercial marketing promotion of pharmaceutical companies, providing a one-stop and complete digital management solution for commercial operations, including advanced core CRM management, full-process meeting management, and multi-channel interaction management, to help enterprises manage the entire process of drug listing and marketing in a compliant and digital manner, empower medical representatives, and promote collaboration among sales, marketing, and medical teams.

In addition, based on Veeva's complete product ecosystem that runs through the entire life sciences process and is global, Veeva China CRM Suite can be interconnected with the market-leading Veeva OpenData master data management service and many system products within the Veeva global ecosystem (such as Veeva PromoMats, Veeva Link, etc.) to exert system synergy.

In order to further improve the product connection efficiency, Veeva China CRM Suite can also be innovatively linked with Veeva's global business cloud products to help pharmaceutical companies achieve more efficient global integrated management in commercial operations and further improve the innovation speed.

The renaming of Veeva China CRM Suite means that Veeva will bring more and more rich CRM suite products to its customers in China with a more complete product ecosystem, and will also continue to build a closed-loop ecosystem of software, data, and consulting to better utilize AI to help customers reduce costs, increase efficiency, and create value.

Regarding the currently booming AI trend, Ding Xiaofeng also mentioned that the AI capabilities in China will be further expanded, and the capabilities of large language models will be further integrated into the products, and the AI ecosystem in China will be opened.

"We will help customers establish and create more AI usage scenarios, which is a part of the China 3.0 strategy," Ding Xiaofeng said in his speech.

Currently, Veeva China CRM suites have successfully served more than 40,000 end users of 17 pharmaceutical company customers, including many globally renowned multinational companies such as Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD), Merck KGaA, and Aspen, empowering their local business growth in China and ensuring their global compliance and headquarters visual management.

The following is the speech record of Ding Xiaofeng, General Manager of Veeva China, edited and released:

Hello everyone, the title of my speech today is China Innovation 3.0. Here, I would like to take you through our 14-year journey in the Chinese market.

There are several interesting time points in this journey:

As you can see, we launched our first project in China in 2010, started the data business in 2013, which is today's Veeva OpenData, initiated the localized product strategy of Veeva China SFA (now renamed Veeva China CRM Suite) in 2017, and in 2020, our local commercial solutions entered MNC pharmaceutical companies. In the past two years, we can see that more and more MNCs are adopting Veeva's local commercial products.

The speed at which MNCs choose to adopt Veeva's local commercial platforms and systems is accelerating, and Veeva is also accelerating its innovation in the Chinese market by getting closer to customers. So, how does Veeva achieve this? What basic principles does it follow?? I have listed a few points for you:

First, customer-centric product design, we are committed to helping everyone reduce risks through a proven solution. We are proud to say that if we look at the entire market today, China CRM Suite, as our main commercial product provided for the Chinese market, currently has 17 customers. Under the background of PIPL and CBDT, Veeva's products and data have been fully implemented and operated in China, which is a significant investment by Veeva in the Chinese market.

The overall commercial product line of Veeva China will be part of Veeva's global business cloud. The communication between our product team in China and the team in the United States at the product level will become more and more frequent starting this year. We will see many global innovations implemented in China, and we also see that good innovative ideas from China will feed back to the global market, forming a virtuous cycle. This is what we believe we have achieved from 1.0 to 2.0 in the past 14 years.

Centered on customers, how do we consider the design of the next-generation products? In fact, in the past three years, from the epidemic to PIPL and CBDT, we have had the opportunity to conduct a large number of interviews with many MNC pharmaceutical companies in China, including leading domestic pharmaceutical companies. In fact, we are also asking ourselves a question: What kind of product and what kind of a complete solution should we provide to the market.

The customer is the core around which all our product lines are centered, that is, how to create a Customer Centric solution. In this commercialization process, you will see that many departments of our pharmaceutical companies, such as sales, marketing, KA, medical, and others, are interacting with customers to varying degrees.

Therefore, a difficult problem we need to solve is that until today, many pharmaceutical companies are communicating with customers using different operating models and processes between departments. Can we use a unified operating standard and language to break down the departmental silos? We will regard this as a key point at the beginning of product design. Today, we will discuss this point in detail, how to achieve cross-departmental collaboration, and even cross-organizational collaboration.

Second, for the commercialization system of pharmaceutical companies, we will do integration and subtraction to effectively reduce costs and increase efficiency. Through our observations of the Chinese market and even the global market in the past three years, this problem is very prominent.

Last week, I visited a leading MNC pharmaceutical company, and their global CIO has been emphasizing one voice: to simplify and to integrate. In fact, you will see that in the past 10 years due to the rapid development of China's commercialization, the number and complexity of the commercialization systems of each pharmaceutical company have been increasing. In the implementation of a project of a leading MNC, we saw that 30 related commercial applications appeared around Veeva, which have been accumulated over the past 10 years with the rapid business development. It is imaginable that the cost of managing and operating 30 systems is very high.

Our idea is whether we can do some subtraction and some integration. Here, how to do integration and how to do subtraction are our major starting points in China and globally. You will also see that currently, many MNC headquarters are discussing the same topic with Veeva. Can we really help everyone reduce costs and increase efficiency through these practical methods rather than just staying at the slogan level.

Therefore, Integrating and Simplifying are very important starting points for us to design the entire product and the entire Chinese solution.

Third, Global Governance, Local Innovation is our underlying architectural principle, which runs through all the topics today and is a cornerstone to help us design products and create Chinese solutions.

We want to Build A Holistic Commercial Excellence Platform. I used a word Holistic - complete. In fact, the first concept that Holistic contains is that our functions are comprehensive. Of course, we need to consider the integrity of functions, but I think in the process of dealing with all customers in the past two or three years, the deepest experience I have is that Holistic means that we need to consider the benefits and values of multiple stakeholders in the enterprise in multiple aspects, rather than just the implementation of a single digital solution. When localizing, we will find that there are actually many stakeholders. I often joke that the complexity of this industry is that we see that the stakeholders are a very large group, involving both global and local operations.

We must be based in China and also consider the global situation. We must consider the particularity of the regulations in China itself, but also the universality of the global situation. So, you can imagine that Veeva is prudent and cautious in doing this. Veeva has always been a prudent company. Another concept of Prudent is "thoughtful and comprehensive". We also hope that we can use a prudent attitude to move forward and develop together with you in the Chinese market.

I have mentioned 1.0 to 2.0 and the three major principles for designing products in the Chinese market. Everyone must be wondering where Veeva will invest in 3.0? Why rename the product China SFA, which has been operating for 7 years, to China CRM Suite? What does this change mean?

We can see that the entire China CRM Suite is a suite, including China CRM, China Events Management, Approved WeChat (formerly Rep Triggered WeChat), China Engage (formerly Remote Meeting), etc. It will fully support all relevant teams of the pharmaceutical company's commercialization and meet the extensive and personalized commercialization needs of life science enterprises. In the future, there will be more and more components in our commercialization platform, and they will be provided to the Chinese market in an organic and integrated suite manner. It is not just the CRM in the traditional sense. For example, we are very pleased that the conference management platform we have created specifically for the pharmaceutical company customers in the Chinese market has been adopted by many leading MNCs.

You can see that we need to connect sales, Marketing, and Medical. In fact, the content side is very important, and the channel is also very important. Our major product acceleration this year is in the Marketing Cloud. We will launch a product in China - China CRM Campaign Manager, which will be officially launched in Q2 next year and is currently in the research and development process.

Finally, let me talk about AI.

In fact, in the process of communicating with the headquarters, we often say that the Chinese team has its own operating model, and we really want to take our AI capabilities a step further in China. In the later part of today's event, we will show you how to use some large language models and AI capabilities. At the same time, we will also officially open the AI ecosystem in China this year.

Currently, we have 13 global partners for in-depth cooperation in the AI field. I believe that in China, we will use the same strategy, combined with our team, to help customers establish and create more AI usage scenarios. This is a part of the China 3.0 strategy. We will give you a more powerful and complete suite - China CRM Suite to help you continuously reduce costs and increase efficiency for your business.

Veeva is building a closed loop from consulting to data to software globally. I would like to use the term: Closed-loop Ecosystem. Many partners, customers, and consulting companies here may have dealt with software companies and data companies, but few companies have linked the three together.

From my personal experience and understanding, the product is our major collection. We need to find the commonalities in the industry. We want to create an industry cloud. Before this, we will have many customer needs and scenarios that need to be identified through consulting and turned into tangible assets. At the data end, in fact, everyone knows that Veeva OpenData has a very high market share in the Chinese market in the past few years. We are also thinking about a question: Is only factual data enough?

We will find that in today's Chinese market, many pharmaceutical companies care about insights, and they are highly accurate insights. How to have both factual data and insightful data, as well as the resulting label system, is something that our Chinese data team has done a lot of innovation on, and we will share with you in the later part of the event. Veeva has a commercialization system that has been operating in the Chinese market for more than 8 years, and so many customers and users are using our platform every day. We are willing to continuously pass on our insights, trends, and innovations in the industry to our customers to help them operate more safely, compliantly, and efficiently in China and globally. This is the mission of our generation of Veevans: To improve efficiency and reduce costs for this mission-driven industry.