Nutricia, a unit of global food player Danone, has grown rapidly in recent years by developing and selling specialized nutritional products for people with dietary restrictions and allergies. Key to the Nutricia sales team’s success have been:

• Widespread use of Salesforce for customer relationship management (CRM)
• Extensive delivery of product samples to doctors and other health care professionals (HCPs) — over 3,000 a month and growing.

Until recently, however, there was a major disconnect between these two forces:

Nutricia lacked a centralized way to track which HCPs received which samples from which salesperson.

Among other problems, this meant the company was not capable of properly executing product recalls – putting them at significant federal regulatory risk. When recalls did happen, the company had no choice but to notify all HCPs that receive samples. This placed a heavy burden on Nutricia’s resources and hurt its brand among a critical audience.

Further complicating the challenge was the complex combination of codes (SKUs), lot numbers, and expiration dates contained by Nutricia’s products. Requiring field sales reps to manually re-enter this data would result in loss of productivity and expensive errors that complicate the recall process. Nutricia needed a solution that was easy for its reps to use and that could be integrated quickly and seamlessly into its existing Salesforce CRM.