Life science companies face significant challenges around the sales and marketing environment, as OIG regulations, the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, the new PhRMA code, and state-by-state mandates quickly reshape operating guidelines. In response, some companies are evaluating enhanced CRM,/SFA solutions to increase their sales and marketing capabilities and promotional competitiveness.

In recent weeks, I have had conversations with a few companies currently traveling down this path. One common theme between them that immediately stuck out was their meticulous planning, due diligence, and thorough evaluation of prospective solutions, which was being taken to an extreme well beyond what I've typically seen in the past with other applications.  During the earlier part of this decade, these companies invested huge sums of money in their CRM and SFA systems, but have been only mildly satisfied with their perceived return on investment. As a result, they're hoping to avoid making the same mistakes twice.

Below I've included what I believe are the most important takeaways from my conversations, regarding topics to consider when selecting a CRM or SFA vendor, beyond standard evaluation of system functionality.

• Clearly understand what problems you're trying to solve, both technical and business process oriented, to make certain your new system fits your existing processes, and you are not changing processes to fit a new system.

• Document both positive and negative aspects of your current solution, to ensure your new system solves existing problems, but doesn't create any new gaps by dropping features you currently rely on.

• Make sure all functional requirements are signed off on by all stakeholders in your company, and involve them from the beginning of the evaluation process.

• Select a vendor that provides multiple deployment options (on-premise, hosted, SaaS) and provides flexibility for companies to switch between them, or use multiple modes in unison, as needed.

• Evaluate your data to verify whether its current format, data model, and storage location will allow for easy migration to a new system, or whether its structure will require significant simplification and rework to enable portability.

• Identify whether a business user will be able to manage and configure the new system on an ongoing basis, or whether maintenance and system tweaks will need to be performed by somebody more technical with programming knowledge.

• Consider each vendor's partner network, financial stability, pricing model, whether they're an acquisition target, and if their culture will be a good match for your company's societal order.

Some of these may seem more obvious than others, but you'd be surprised how often companies skip some of these steps. Most notably, I often see companies only document what their current system is lacking, and not its positive aspects, only to later realize that their new system lacks some of these important components. Likewise, I often see companies fail to include all stakeholders in the evaluation process, until the decision has already been made.  Including representatives from all stakeholder groups from the very beginning of the search process can dramatically improve stakeholder attitude and system utilization post-implementation. Again, these are just a few of the more important guidelines I identified across my conversations that I believe some companies sometimes forget to follow. If you have other key selection process guidelines that have helped you succeed with your own evaluations, please feel free to share them.