March 11, 2015/Aktana/

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Aktana, a leader in decision support for global life science sales teams, today announced its status as a Veeva Web Approved Technology Partner, making its proprietary Decision Support Engine more easily available to Veeva CRM customers. The integration of Veeva and Aktana technologies offers powerful new tools to life science companies for enhancing the execution of multichannel customer engagement strategies and improving overall sales force effectiveness.

Most life science companies recognize the need to synchronize marketing-driven outreach with sales activities, but struggle to effectively coordinate multichannel customer engagement strategies and have been unable to progress beyond the basic sharing of customer interaction history with their reps.

Aktana’s intelligence-based platform provides bi-directional coordination across channels. The results are delivered within the Veeva CRM MyInsights as contextual suggestions to sales reps and integrated feeds to marketing systems that adaptably help tune the pace, message and channel to the needs of the specific customer.

“Leading companies understand that marketing initiatives and sales rep interactions are most effective when actively supporting each other,” said David Ehrlich, President and Chief Executive Officer, Aktana. “Aktana’s Decision Support Engine empowers life science companies to design, execute and learn from a variety of more integrated approaches that optimize the power of a unified brand voice.”

Life science companies are also challenged by how to help their sales reps extract meaningful insights from a growing amount of relevant data.  While increasingly important for customer relationships, the exercise can be unwieldy and time-consuming, requiring new skill sets. Fortunately, Veeva CRM can act as a virtual data hub, amalgamating customer-related information, while Aktana’s Decision Support Engine can pre-process that information into insights and suggestions relevant to the sales rep’s next actions. Aktana’s guidance can be based on customer engagement strategies as well as best practices that come naturally to top-performing reps.

“Life sciences companies are seeking better ways to transform big data into meaningful action. Reps need easily accessible tools to manage multichannel strategies,” said Jerome Mead, Director, Multichannel Strategy, Veeva Systems.