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SageCRM Success Story - Citeline

In an era where the process of bringing a new prescription drug to market can cost over a billion dollars and consume a decade or more, pharmaceutical firms are eager for fast, reliable, current, and complete information on the clinical trials affecting their marketplace. Citeline, Inc. is the leading provider of clinical trial intelligence to the pharmaceutical industry.

 

Just six years old, the start up company boasts more than 20,000 registered users of its proprietary online informational database, including the world’s top 20 largest pharmaceutical firms. As an entirely virtual company, Citeline has personnel stationed all over the globe. Uniting those personnel with the information they need to do their jobs is SageCRM, backed by Lexnet Consulting Group.

“We’ve seen a 100 percent renewal rate over each of those six years,” says Pete Sikora, president of Citeline. “That tells me we’re delivering the information our clients want, and SageCRM helps us to be successful in doing that.”

System Overload

Initially Citeline used GoldMine® for its CRM needs. It worked well for the company until rapid growth made synchronization tasks difficult to manage. “A client/server application just doesn’t work well when you’ve got users all over the world accessing the system. Everyone had to manually synchronize their data, which meant the system was perpetually out of date,” Sikora explains.

Consult With A Trusted Partner

Sikora turned to long-time ally Lexnet Consulting Group for help choosing a new solution. “Lexnet is very service-focused and takes a consultative sales approach,” notes Sikora. Real-time data access for all employees was a priority, as was a clean, user-friendly interface.

 

In addition to SageCRM, Citeline evaluated Salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM. Salesforce.com, a hosted CRM application, was quickly eliminated. Citeline wanted to retain control of the software within the company to allow integration with its clinical trial database application.

 

“We spent a lot of time looking at both SageCRM and the Microsoft application. In the end, it was unanimous that SageCRM looked better, offered more functionality and was a better value,” recalls Sikora.

Citeline chose to install SageCRM on a colocated server. “It’s really the best of both worlds. We own the software and have full control over it, yet it’s housed in a state-of-the-art, temperaturecontrolled and highly secure facility,” says Sikora.

 

 Works the Way You Work

Today, Sikora says that all client communication is tracked through SageCRM. “It is very
important to me that the staff members who were using Outlook for e-mail and calendar
functions could continue to do so,” he says. “That allows them to take advantage of SageCRM with minimal adjustments to the way they work.

“We operate in a virtual workplace. SageCRM supports that model by allowing our
employees to interact and work with one another in a collaborative environment regardless of where they are in the world,” Sikora says.

 

Targeted Marketing Message

SageCRM is enabling Citeline to capitalize on the data tracked by its clinical trial database. As clients earch Citeline’s database, the search terms and user information related to those searches are captured by the application. Lexnet Consulting Group developed integration between SageCRM and Citeline’s production, clinical trial database so that staff can produce targeted marketing messages from SageCRM based on users’ past searches in the production database.

Citeline’s marketing staff generates a mail merge listing of all users who searched for information about diabetes, for example, and creates personalized e-mail messages directed to these users offering an in-depth white paper or other related service. “It works very well,” Sikora notes. “Lexnet proved they are expert integrators.”

Citeline’s sales team tracks their leads and opportunities within SageCRM. All notes, appointments and communications are tracked within the software and centrally available to both staff and management. With visibility into the company’s sales pipeline, Sikora and the management team can be confident that each opportunity is pursued and can monitor the company’s overall success rate.

 

“I would definitely say that SageCRM has more than paid for itself. We’re able to give our clients content-appropriate marketing messages that they both appreciate and respond to,” says Sikora. “The value of SageCRM goes beyond marketing to helping us improve our service offering. It allows us to identify trends and then offer our clients more of what they want.”

Communicate Effectively

Lexnet Consulting Group is currently working with Citeline to implement Sage Communicator, an e-mail marketing solution for SageCRM that tracks detailed statistics about e-mail marketing campaigns such as bounce-back, open and unsubscribe percentages.

Citeline plans to distribute an electronic HTML newsletter to its clients using Sage Communicator. It will deliver all outbound communications as a two part message — in both an HTML and text formatted e-mail. If the HTML is blocked, the text format will be delivered in its place, ensuring the highest possible delivery rate.

“Lexnet Consulting Group is our go-to partner for all matters relating to CRM. We’re very satisfied with the work they’ve done for us and the support they provide,” concludes Sikora.