Changing the Healthcare World, an interview with Erik de Rooij

In a world time where most people are thinking about retiring and relaxing from so many years of working hard, Mr. Erik de Rooij is working even harder and using his experiences gained from the pharmaceutical industry to change the world.

Erik de Rooij is the CCO of Shaman, a multichannel content platform for B2B sales teams to conduct highly engaging meetings that he joined four years ago. Erik had previously spent 18 years in the pharmaceutical industry, first as a sales rep for Pfizer, before working his way up the organization from Business Intelligence, SFE to Sales Manager, and then Brand Manager. After spending 12 years at Pfizer he then went to work as Commercial Director for Meda Pharma in The Netherlands. Meda later became Mylan. Erik De Rooij joined Shaman a few years ago and started working with founder Maurice van Leeuwen to take the company higher. Erik had taken time out from his busy schedule to talk with www.thefutureofhealth.care and shed more light on the company. Talking about their products, goals, and objectives and how they are impacting the healthcare community.

Shaman is a multichannel content platform for B2B sales teams to conduct highly engaging meetings, import existing content to build multiple, and make it easy for them to navigate storylines. Sales users can access your storylines to present one-on-one, to larger groups or remotely. Detailed statistics also help to analyze how to improve your content.

Maurice came up with the idea of a more customer-oriented (sales) conversation using, what they call the Meeting Canvas. The Meeting Canvas helps you to structure your presentation in a way that you have access to all your content but pick only what is of interest to the customer. They started after a few pilots where they saw that working with this kind of technology was driving sales and customer engagement. For the first time, Brand Managers were able to see how materials have been used and how customers respond. One of the most impressive outcomes was that reps using Shaman achieved much better sales than colleagues that didn’t. Using Shaman increased the revenue of the customer.

Since its inception they have developed Shaman with great statistics for CLM insights, a remote solution to facilitate “the hybrid rep,” a pre-call module, a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) functionality to keep 1,5 meter distance in the room of the HCP, and more and more features to enhance marketing and sales teams.

Shaman offers three products to their target audience which is made up of pharma, local, regional, and global medical device companies, Brand directors, Brand managers SFE managers, CRM managers, and IT directors. Their products are:

Shaman Platform: A best in class stand-alone CLM (presentation) solution, easy to use, providing great insights (statistics) and content management for the use of compliant marketing collateral.
Shaman Remote: Shaman Remote eDetailing is specifically designed for Life Sciences. It only allows users to share approved content, offers great ways to navigate, works on all devices, and doesn’t need any plugin! It’s the best solution to connect pharma and medical reps with health care professionals online.
ShamanGo – ShamanGo is an application that allows you to convert and import all your static approved materials quickly as interactive html for Veeva CLM/Engage. It ranges from detail aids, medical presentations, to PDF literature. Within hours you will have your new CLMs ready to use in Veeva.

Erik believes that Shaman is the best in class stand-alone CLM solution, but thinks that the product ShamanGo product will have the biggest impact. ShamanGo helps companies using Veeva to drive the adoption of their CRM system. They also help global companies to easily upload materials into Veeva within only 24 hours. This is a unique feature and will improve the time to market and save millions of dollars for those companies.

When asked about their vision on health digital transformation and where they think the opportunities are he said that they think that one on one conversation will still be an important part of the multichannel approach. Although it can be face-2-face with for example BYOD, remote, by phone, using touchpoint marketing, etc. They believe in, what they call the “hybrid rep”. As a rep, you’ll need to understand, gain competencies, and develop your knowledge much more extensively than you might do now.

For marketing teams, they expect that there will be a switch to more valuable information from the customer perspective. The current situation at a lot of companies is that twice a year a new detail aid is rolled out. They don’t believe you can keep up doing that in the future. Updates will need to be more regular and maybe even monthly or weekly. Therefore it will be important to streamline approval and the way you can upload your materials into your systems. All research shows that HCP’s have less time, are less open, and have a higher demand for value from the industry for their occupation.

When Erik was asked what he thought about the current situation and the impacts of Covid-19 on the health industry for sales representatives? He had this to say. “What we see is “forced innovation” some companies have +20.000 sales reps sitting at home because they can’t visit HCP’s. Due to the current COVID-19 situation, they all look for a solution and they all change to the more “Hybrid rep” But we see at the same time that also the HCP is more open to different ways of communication. I would be surprised if we move back to the old way of working and not keep the good and efficient parts of what we experiencing right now.”

Erik has big dreams for the future. He intends to be part of the driving force that will enhance a change in the sales approach. Shaman wants to be the best CLM solution in class that helps people to do better, more engaging, and interesting conversations. Therefore, they like to partner with the number 1 solutions in the industry and serve enterprise companies to become more effective. “We want to become the global CLM solution,” he said.