A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where did you find traction? In building the product for the pharmaceutical industry, how did you scope the product? Did you have some anchor customers?

Peter Gassner: This wasn’t that complex really. This was pharmaceutical CRM. We just decided to go there. It’s a known area and these companies had systems for it. Either they were custom-made or they bought it from customized vendors.

Sramana Mitra: What’s special about pharmaceutical CRM that is dramatically different from a Salesforce system?

Peter Gassner: Basically, the sales people are educators. They’re not actually selling things. They don’t close an opportunity or have a lead. They educate doctors on new therapies. They may bring them a drug sample. It’s a mass market. There’s about a million doctors in the United States. There’s a lot of government regulations in each country around the world about what type of promotion you can do with the doctor because it involves human health and national budgets, especially in places outside the US.

For example in the United States, a commercial about a pharmaceutical product is legal but it does have some things that you have to do. In most other countries around the world, a TV commercial is not legal. Period. There’s a lot of these regulations and processes that need a very special thing that they call PharmaCRM. It’s not Salesforce automation. It’s more of a system of tracking organized education. It’s very specialized. A lot of people think it’s easy. That application has a data model of probably 300 objects. It’s complex. It’s like a mini-ERP system.

Sramana Mitra: You were taking this whole workflow to the cloud. There were existing systems, but they were not modern cloud systems. There was a budget. People understood the need for this system. You were just modernizing the modern workflow.

Peter Gassner: I call it replacement parts. They already knew they needed something for dealing with this. We just said, “This type of thing is much better at doing that.” We didn’t have to convince people they needed that type of tool. They already knew they needed it. That was nice. The idea was nothing special. We did take a risk. I knew we had to take a risk.

When you start a company, you should try to do something that most people think is a bad idea because, otherwise, it’s just too obvious. It would have already been done before. You always want to pick something that most people think won’t work because the odds are against you. You’ve got to get in on something that somebody else is not. I thought pharmaceutical CRM would be good and do it on the cloud and build it on top of Salesforce.

This segment is part 5 in the series : A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner
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