If you’ve landed here, we think it’s safe to assume that you’re already a pro in the healthcare & pharmaceutical industry. But if you stick with us, we’ll show you how to make your life a whole lot easier.
We’ve spent the last 10 years building a platform that’s designed specifically for you. In this playbook, you’ll find the answers on how to streamline medical congress planning, efficiently schedule appointments, effectively engage with HCPs, & more.
Watch each video section or read the summaries below.
Our founders and team have served the healthcare & pharmaceutical industry for over 20+ years. We have dedicated our careers to learning the workflows, use cases, and ideal outcomes to deliver success that matches or exceeds the investment that you put into your events.
We have brought success to companies and teams of all sizes. From companies in the development stage with under 10 employees who have goals of building industry awareness, up to companies with 70,000 employees with multiple product lines, indications, global regions, and more cross-functional teams than one could count.
Our experience in numbers:
The majority of companies communicate and plan congresses entirely through Excel, PowerPoint, emails, and Outlook invites. This method is inefficient, time-consuming, costly, sometimes frustrating, and ultimately lacking in visibility and alignment.
Organizations invest hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars into sponsoring and sending team members to medical congresses. And while there are typically intended goals, objectives, and strategies surrounding this investment, the method to communicate them to team members often falls short.
Companies spend a significant amount of money and time (whether from internal team members or external agencies) to create large PowerPoint decks. This PPT/PDF format is then traditionally emailed out or uploaded to SharePoint.
These decks are difficult to update and re-distribute. Additionally, team members have a difficult time trying to access, search, and get to the most important information. And after all of that, the organization still has no idea if anyone read it, understood it, or found it at-all valuable.
Online Presentation Platform: Take the PowerPoint and upload it to an online platform, such as Prezi, Beautiful or Pitch. This way it's at least online, searchable, and trackable.
Communication Platform: Send communications through a trackable communication platform. This way you'll understand whether the email was opened, read, skimmed, and the links that were clicked.
Cadence Combines Both: Take it up a notch with our platform. Resources centrally located within Cadence are easy to access and distribute. Plus, they are fully trackable. Embed your content throughout the platform in features like Home, Schedule, Attendees, Groups, Speakers, Maps, Notifications, and Custom Pages.
To our knowledge, Cadence is the only answer to the above pain points. Here are a few highlights of our platform:
Meeting rooms at most congresses cost between $10,000-$25,000. Some organizations have one or two built into their booth while others have upwards of 30+ meeting rooms. This can rack up quite the hefty bill – adding up to over $720,000 for the organization, just for meeting rooms alone.
These meeting rooms have varying date/time availability, participant capacity, and AV/projector capabilities. And yet, you'd be shocked by how frequently attendees have little to no information about these rooms ahead of time.
The rooms may be owned by specific functional teams and in that case typically a gatekeeper is assigned. In this case, it becomes near impossible for team members to reserve or request to use that room. Then a very in-efficient workflow ensues that is both time consuming and costly.
Additionally, because most internal meetings or customer engagement meetings originate in Outlook, it's yet again a cross-your-fingers approach that the meeting room is not double-booked.
Use Online Forms for Meeting Room Requests that include Automated Communications & Workflows: AirTable or TypeForm are two good options. We typically lean towards AirTable, as the completed forms can automatically populate an online table that can be downloaded to Excel.
Use a Meeting Room Reservation Platform: This would be a slight improvement, but these platforms are still not tied to the overall congress, team member availability, and customer availability.
Cadence Overview: Our best recommendation would be our platform, of course! With Cadence, companies can bring visibility to scheduling meeting rooms. The meeting rooms can be visible to all or just specific groups or teams. Additionally, all Appointment requests for team members and customers are sent and tracked within the platform as well as connected to Outlook. And once the congress has concluded, you have access to meeting room utilization analytics that do not exist elsewhere.
At ASCO this year, we saw one company with 30+ meeting rooms, which costs upwards of $720,000. Their rooms were barely 30% occupied. With our platform, they could have saved $500,000 on this feature alone, but even more costly is the opportunity that was lost in potential engagement to advance relationships and clinical trial conversations with HCPs.
Teams and team members are asked to prepare the list of customers they want the organization to meet with. Then through email communication, the team members, engagement leads, and regional leads collate the list into an excel file.
There are a multitude of problems with this system. First of all, customer information is often outdated or incorrect as there is no way to store the most updated information.
Additionally, there can be overlap across teams that is never properly communicated thus doubling efforts. And building and constantly maintaining the list in excel can be a tedious and frustrating process.
Customer engagement is a top priority in the Cadence platform. With our system, you will have unprecedented visibility into HCPs lifecycle and better alignment across the entire organization.
On top of that, tasks that traditionally would take weeks and hundreds of hours now take just a couple hours. We have found that organizations can reduce time spent by 80% when adopting Cadence.
Once team members have decided who they want to engage with at an upcoming medical congress, they will (either internally or through an external agency) send appointment requests by email. This results in a back-and-forth correspondence that goes something like this:
"Are you attending ESMO this year? We’d love to schedule time to discuss recent data releases.”
"Yes I am."
"Great when are you available?"
"Saturday morning would be great."
"10 or 11:30am available?"
"No, how about Thursday…”
Once multiplied by hundreds of proposed engagements, you can see how this quickly becomes a tedious process. Not to mention, this email communication does not account for team member availability, HCP availability, nor room availability.
And most importantly, it's not visible across the organization. Collating this information, whether internally or externally, is a timely and costly process. Ultimately it may end up in an excel or online spreadsheet, which is near impossible to maintain and distribute.
We suggest that you use Cadence for effective outreach. We built our Appointments feature specifically for medical congresses designed to work efficiently through every step of outreach.
We've heard from countless clinical directors and leadership team members that effectively facilitating meetings can have a big impact on advancing clinical trial communications and conversations.
With our platform, organizations can expect less time spent, more engagements, and better preparedness, which can reduce costs significantly and further advance relationships between teams and HCPs.
Companies spend tens of thousands to millions of dollars on their booths. For the largest oncology congresses, organizations may spend over 25+ million dollars on the Sponsorship & Booth themselves.
The justification is that when used effectively, there can be a big return on that investment. Each and every lead, customer, and partner that visits the booth may lead to participation and advancement of a clinical trial, get an indication or drug FDA approved, bring important awareness and market access globally, etc.
The way each of those interactions is captured currently is through outdated, clunky badge scanning devices. Organizations have to pay for each one, meaning only one team member can use it or it must be shared. Then you scan and hope to receive an excel of that information days to weeks later. The largest problem with this method is that all you notate is the person’s contact information, and there is zero context regarding the interaction.
With Cadence, the process goes something like this:
Each and every interaction is captured in real-time with detailed context in how it relates to the organization's goals, objectives, and strategies. Plus, any team member can access the information where and when they need it.
Well folks, that’s all for our Medical Congress Playbook. To learn more about medical congresses in Cadence visit our website or schedule a free, personalized demo with one of our knowledgeable team members.