Tag: Pricing Content

Leveraging Contract Benchmarking: Strategies for Negotiating with Veeva Systems | Blog

This blog shares how Everest Group helped a large life sciences company negotiate best-in-class rates for Veeva Vaults and CRM during contract renewal negotiation. Continue reading to discover how contract benchmarking can empower your enterprise to make effective deals, or get in touch.

Veeva Systems, a cloud-based software provider, has established a prominent market position in the global life sciences industry. The business’ market success often leaves customers with limited to no leverage during commercial negotiations, with prohibitively high costs of switching to a different provider and few other viable market alternatives. This leads to difficulty when attempting to negotiate better contract prices with Veeva.

However, by gathering accurate contract benchmarking data for the various Veeva products, procurement teams can negotiate top-tier rates and contract terms.

Let’s explore an example of how Everest Group helped this large US life sciences company identify savings opportunities in their Veeva Vaults and CRM contract renewal negotiation.

The supplier background

Veeva Systems offers several software products to help clients capture clinical trial data, enhance regulatory compliance, control quality, manage adverse events for clinical and post-marketed products, and more.

In addition, the company’s full-fledged CRM suite, Veeva Commercial Cloud, enables sales, medical, and marketing teams to work together more seamlessly. Customers also use Veeva professional services to implement Veeva products, manage programs, configure applications, integrate or migrate data, and garner sampling expertise.

Veeva has created a strong foothold by leveraging its state-of-the-art product suite. Most major pharmaceutical companies use one or more Veeva products. We have observed that Veeva’s wallet share has significantly increased with most customers over the years, due to the widespread adoption and use of their software products.

How we helped the customer 

Like many other existing Veeva customers, our client’s spending with Veeva increased significantly over time. The renewal proposal was nearly 2.5 times their current spend. To help the client get the best rates, we leveraged our internal contract database to identify similar large Veeva deals for the same Vaults, CRM, and professional services.

We followed our standard rigorous normalization approach to identify deals in our contract database that were similar in nature and size to the client’s deal with their software provider. This ensured a like-to-like comparison and offered contextual benchmarks for the client.

In addition to providing the client with the price benchmarks for various Veeva products and services, we also shared some tactics to help them negotiate effectively with Veeva.

Some of the key recommendations were:

• To seek a ramp-up plan instead of further negotiating peak prices. This provides the customer with the flexibility to pay a fee lower than the peak price for the initial one or two years, allowing them to optimize the total contract value (TCV)
• To leverage year- and quarter-end sales team targets to get extra discounts. Veeva may agree to higher discounts in contracts signed during the close of their fiscal year or quarters than other times

While each relationship with Veeva is unique, we firmly believe these recommendations and the right contract benchmarking can put any enterprise in a better negotiating position.

To discuss software contract negotiation or for a detailed analysis, contact Rahul Gehani and Udit Maheshwari or [email protected]. Explore Everest Group’s contract benchmarking offerings, or join our LinkedIn Live discussion on delivering commercial value in outsourcing contracts on.