Enhancing Sales and Marketing Collaborations with SharePoint and AI 

Commercial teams in the life sciences industry need to be agile to drive effective launches, digital Healthcare Practitioners (HCP) experiences, and drive innovation for new commercial models. Be it understanding HCPs preferences or running omnichannel campaigns across various geos, commercial teams need to lead with AI. 

An effective way to achieve cross-functional collaboration without compromising on data security is utilizing your organization’s already existing Microsoft ecosystem and extending it with SharePoint customizations. SharePoint offers capabilities for collaboration, streamlining document management, and automating inefficient processes. You can also integrate AI capabilities on top of SharePoint to uncover hidden insights for assisting in decision support and recommending the next best actions.  

Let us dive deeper into how SharePoint + AI can become a game changer for the life sciences sales and marketing functions. 

How SharePoint and AI can Revolutionize Pharma Go-To-Market 

Here are a few opportunities on how sales and marketing teams can drive effective collaboration using SharePoint and AI. 

1. Internal sales portal: AI can analyze prescription data and HCP personas stored in SharePoint to provide recommendations on targeted HCP engagement strategies, the right product messaging, optimizing HCP outreach. This enables decision makers in Commercial teams to develop alignment around field marketing activities. Additionally, teams can leverage and AI to design training programs tailored to the unique requirements and pain points of the target audiences.  

2. External partner portal: SharePoint can become the centralized repository for storing and organizing training materials, and product information. This ensures smooth correspondence and robust collaborations between partners. 

3. Marketing portal: AI-powered integration with SharePoint transforms marketing collaboration. AI can streamline workflows for efficient sharing of emails, events, branding assets, and campaigns. One such example is smart document retrieval which enables commercial teams to access branding materials with just a click, reducing TATs for lean marketing teams.  

4. Unified insights: AI algorithms applied on CRM data in SharePoint offer a 360-degree perspective by combining interactions from all outreaches done by commercial teams, be it CME events or field visits.  

5. Predictive campaign analytics: Sales provides relevant practitioner prescription trends to SharePoint, while marketing uploads campaign analytics. You can identify high-performing markets and strategies for effective future launches.  

6. Rapid competitive benchmarking: AI can effectively scan external sources for critical information, including clinical readouts, updates on competitors’ pipelines, and recent approvals within the life sciences industry. This data can be seamlessly integrated with SharePoint Collaboration portals ensuring the right stakeholders have access to the most relevant information. 

7. Coordinated content development: Sales and marketing teams can identify content gaps by employing AI sentiment analysis on sales call notes and feedback surveys stored on SharePoint. Teams from various departments, including R&D, marketing, and strategic planning, can access this shared intelligence and take collective actions to bridge the gaps. 

Why Choose SharePoint for Collaboration? 

SharePoint is an excellent platform to promote collaboration as it fulfils all the requirements of a secure and compliant portal. Here are some pointers on why life sciences should choose SharePoint for their sales and marketing collaboration needs. 

1. Intellectual property protection: With SharePoint’s strong permissions and configuration options, process owners can safeguard their intellectual property and manage access to critical data. 

2. Risk & compliance management: Data security is the primary concern for life sciences organizations. SharePoint provides robust compliance features and advanced security measures which ensures adherence to the industry standards and regulatory requirements. 

We helped a global pharma client attain the audit requirements for the document management processes using SharePoint, check out the full case study here.  

3. Cross-functional communication: SharePoint makes it easier for teams and departments to communicate with one another, promoting better collaboration and information exchange. The version controlling and restricted-view access controls help in establishing a seamless document management workflow. 

4. Customizable lists and document management: SharePoint provides document management tools for sharing files and tracking them with team members and customizable lists for tracking different kinds of information. Additionally, it has an integrated commenting system for exchanging document feedback. Our team built a customized document management system where SharePoint lists helped them to allow multiple reviews and reconciliations for each document along with audit logs for each review.  

Our custom built prevented the DMS system from slowing down despite allowing multiple reviews. Check out the full case study here.  

5. External collaboration: Leveraging SharePoint coupled with AI can significantly enhance external collaboration efforts for sales and marketing teams. SharePoint’s secure collaboration features, coupled with AI-driven access controls, ensure that external collaborators have access to the right information. Further AI can analyze usage patterns, suggesting optimal collaboration settings while maintaining data privacy. AI analytics in SharePoint can provide real-time insights into how external collaborators interact with shared materials. This includes tracking document views, time spent on specific pages, and collaboration patterns. These insights empower the marketing and sales teams to tailor their strategies based on real-time data. 

6. Integration with other applications: Integrating SharePoint with other applications and coupling it with AI offers a powerful solution for pharmaceutical companies in streamlining collaboration between various departments. SharePoint’s integration capabilities make it a central hub for information and unify all the departments of sales and marketing into one ecosystem. Coupled with AI ensures disparate applications, such as market research platforms, CRM systems, and analytics platforms, can work together cohesively.  

7. Value: Traditional infrastructure for collaboration and document management incurs high costs. Since SharePoint is a cloud-based platform, it eliminates the need for extensive on-premises infrastructure. The pay-as-you-go model of cloud services ensures that pharmaceutical companies pay only for the resources they use. SharePoint offers various licensing and subscription models, providing flexibility in choosing plans based on specific needs. These factors make SharePoint a value-first choice for meeting the collaboration needs of the pharmaceutical organizations. 

8. Access to Microsoft 365 suite: The Microsoft 365 package, which also contains Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, and power platform which seamlessly integrate with SharePoint. The sales and marketing teams can work in a unified and familiar environment leading to effective collaboration within the teams. SharePoint’s integration with Outlook facilitates seamless email collaboration and ensures the email communications are closely tied to the collaborative efforts. 

9. Cloud application: Since SharePoint is a cloud-based program, companies can use it from any location with an internet connection to store and retrieve their data, documents, and files. Sales teams that operate from various locations globally can access information on the go. Furthermore, SharePoint has strong security features to safeguard private information, including threat detection and two-factor authentication. 

SharePoint is a useful tool for the life sciences sales and marketing teams because of these characteristics, which also help them manage intellectual property, uphold compliance, and drive better collaboration. 

Conclusion 

In summary, SharePoint with AI provides a versatile platform for document sharing, content management, and collaboration, making it an effective tool for life sciences sales and marketing teams. Organizations can enhance cooperation, make data-driven choices, and expedite sales and marketing processes by utilizing SharePoint’s capabilities. SharePoint’s capabilities can be further improved by connecting it with other Office 365 services and outside tools. This will improve teamwork, productivity, and user satisfaction.