Pitt enhances industry partnership efforts with implementation of customized CRM tool
Excerpted from the February 2023 issue of University-Industry Engagement Advisor. UIDP members can view the entire issue here.
Editor’s note: a number of PowerPoint slides are referenced in the article below, which could not be reproduced in the issue itself but provide important illustrations for the concepts discussed around the University of Pittsburgh’s CRM system. We are making the entire PowerPoint originally presented during a recent webinar available here. We have included slide numbers with each slide mentioned for your reference. As you read along, each reference to a slide links back to the PowerPoint slide deck.
The University of Pittsburgh’s corporate engagement activities have become “better and faster” since the development of a customized CRM system using Salesforce, according to Scott W. Morley, director of the Office of Economic Partnerships, which sits within the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Morley described the system in a Tech Transfer Central webinar, “Best Practices for Universities in Targeting High-Potential Partnerships,” and offered more detail and insights in an interview with UIEA.
The improvements sprang from a charge by the senior vice chancellor of research to double industry sponsored research within the next five years. As part of their goal of driving industry partnering at scale, Morley explained, his team determined to “utilize the Salesforce.com platform to develop a comprehensive innovation partner and customer relationship management system.”
Prior to these changes, Morley tells UIEA, “partnering involved very simple implementation of Salesforce that was not specifically designed for research innovation partnering. We were able to do basic account opportunity management, but we were missing the real enabler of the integration of our IP management system — KSS — with Salesforce.” (Following a reorganization at Pitt, the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship now includes the tech transfer office.)
“By linking KSS to Salesforce in particular,” he continues, “the work intersection between the tech transfer team and the industrial partnerships team is truly enabled, and we have visibility across the entire organization as to opportunities for research and licensing for all assets in the portfolio.” Prior to making that linkage, “there was a very manual process of going in, searching our IP database, and talking to licensing managers to kind of round up what was going on in that space,” he told the webinar participants.
“Previously,” he explains to UIEA, “any records of communication with partners typically lived in peoples’ personal inboxes. What we’ve moved to is a system by which communication with partners is all logged within a CRM system. This enables team members to pick up communications, and to understand what’s happened in the past, so if someone resigns, moves to another position, or is even on vacation, someone else can jump in and help.”
Mike Flock, PhD, associate director of industry partnerships, has only been part of the office headed by Morley for about a year, but for the previous five years he managed internal funding programs at Pitt. “We did not have such a tool,” he shares. “We had Excel sheets on correspondence, or we’d e-mail someone about where we’re at. Salesforce has records, documents of meetings, meeting notes, stages at which participant engagement has progressed to, and the reason by which a closed opportunity occurred — or the opposite. It’s a better understanding of engagement with these companies.”
Pitt enhances industry partnership efforts with implementation of customized CRM tool
Editor’s note: a number of Powerpoint slides are referenced in the article below, which could not be reproduced in the issue itself but provide important illustrations for the concepts discussed around the University of Pittsburgh’s CRM system. We are making the entire Powerpoint originally presented during a recent webinar available here. We have included slide numbers with each slide mentioned for your reference. As you read along, each reference to a slide links back to the Powerpoint slide deck. To order the recording of the webinar Best Practices for Universities in Targeting High-Potential Partnerships, click here. All Access Pass subscribers can watch the entire program here.
The University of Pittsburgh’s corporate engagement activities have become “better and faster” since the development of a customized CRM system using Salesforce, according to Scott W. Morley, director of the Office of Economic Partnerships, which sits within the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Morley described the system in a Tech Transfer Central webinar, “Best Practices for Universities in Targeting High-Potential Partnerships,” and offered more detail and insights in an interview with UIEA.
The improvements sprang from a charge by the senior vice chancellor of research to double industry sponsored research within the next five years. As part of their goal of driving industry partnering at scale, Morley explained, his team determined to “utilize the Salesforce.com platform to develop a comprehensive innovation partner and customer relationship management system.”
Prior to these changes, Morley tells UIEA, “partnering involved very simple implementation of Salesforce that was not specifically designed for research innovation partnering. We were able to do basic account opportunity management, but we were missing the real enabler of the integration of our IP management system — KSS — with Salesforce.” (Following a reorganization at Pitt, the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship now includes the tech transfer office.)
“By linking KSS to Salesforce in particular,” he continues, “the work intersection between the tech transfer team and the industrial partnerships team is truly enabled, and we have visibility across the entire organization as to opportunities for research and licensing for all assets in the portfolio.” Prior to making that linkage, “there was a very manual process of going in, searching our IP database, and talking to licensing managers to kind of round up what was going on in that space,” he told the webinar participants.
“Previously,” he explains to UIEA, “any records of communication with partners typically lived in peoples’ personal inboxes. What we’ve moved to is a system by which communication with partners is all logged within a CRM system. This enables team members to pick up communications, and to understand what’s happened in the past, so if someone resigns, moves to another position, or is even on vacation, someone else can jump in and help.”
Mike Flock, PhD, associate director of industry partnerships, has only been part of the office headed by Morley for about a year, but for the previous five years he managed internal funding programs at Pitt. “We did not have such a tool,” he shares. “We had Excel sheets on correspondence, or we’d e-mail someone about where we’re at. Salesforce has records, documents of meetings, meeting notes, stages at which participant engagement has progressed to, and the reason by which a closed opportunity occurred — or the opposite. It’s a better understanding of engagement with these companies.”
Posing key questions
Throughout the process, Morley and his team posed significant questions to themselves, which in turn informed them as to what the new system needed to do. “We started asking ourselves, where do we have friction and gaps of knowledge in our system; what do we not know on a daily basis, either about a partner or about ourselves that would help us really do a better job of identifying opportunities, ensuring healthy relationships with companies that we are working with, and ultimately growing the pipeline and growing the portfolio of industry sponsored research?” he recalled in the webinar. That list of questions is shown in Slide 7 of the Powerpoint.
“It was really about this gap of information being at people’s fingertips that are interacting with companies on a daily basis,” Morley explained. “Gaps around what technology do we have available? What research is happening at Pitt in a particular therapeutic area? What companies have we pitched the technology to and what was their feedback? Did we learn anything that may influence how we approach partnering the technology for licensing, or further de-risking through an industry sponsored research agreement? Also, from just a relationship management standpoint with multiple teams interacting with companies between licensing and business development and even some unit-based business development folks, it wouldn’t always be clear who last spoke to a particular company. Who is the key contact on their side and on Pitt’s side? What’s the history with them? What projects have been funded?”
As the Pitt team thought through this, they identified four key areas around which to center their activities of alignment:
- What is the existing industry sponsored research funding?
- What kind of licensing history do we have with the companies?
- Is there philanthropic giving, internships, student project support?
- The science — to what degree do Pitt’s strengths in an area of interest to the company meet the needs of the company?
That last bullet point, says Morley, is the most important. “As we look to create alignment with a company, those [four] are the areas we look at, and ultimately they all tie together around the science,” he explains. “So, do we have research strengths, unique capabilities, particular faculty, or even licensable assets … that are matched to the external innovation needs that are stated by a company?”
These questions, he continued, “drove us to think about a strategy that we’ve called our partnering business intelligence strategy. And that partnering business intelligence strategy has five key elements.” (See Slides 8 and 9.)
Morley further explained the strategy: “What research do we have going on in different areas? What are our licensable assets in different areas? What are the key centers and institutes having that knowledge in a way that can be acted upon easily by our business development group? Know our partners and have a clear understanding and a way to access information about what each of our existing partners and potential partners are working on and what’s in their pipeline; what are their needs from a research standpoint? How do we facilitate partnering alignment?
By gaining a depth of understanding about both Pitt’s research and partners’ research interests, “we can drive a sponsored research strategy around those combinations of interests that are aligned,” he continued. “Facilitating partnering operations is the day-to-day communication with companies, contact management, understanding their licenses, understanding the research agreements we have in place with them, putting all that information at people’s fingertips to facilitate their jobs and then measuring and reporting our performance. We understand, for instance, how many companies we’re talking with in a particular therapeutic area in any given year and entertaining opportunities with them; which particular technologies are available for licensing; which are getting attention, and which are not.”
‘How can we use CRM?’
Morley said it took about six months to plan the system in depth with the IT team, “and then probably another six months or so to build out and test and ultimately launch.” The system is about a year into its deployment. “I can say that it’s going quite well; we’ve got tremendous uptake by our business development and licensing teams and those that support those groups,” he stated.
“The key to the build out going smoothly was, first off, it benefited from having experience with Salesforce as part of the organization,” he says. “They knew what worked well, and what areas needed to improve. Various individuals on the team had some experience in Salesforce administration — I did — and we were able to serve as an interface between the user group and the Salesforce development team.”
“The team here had generated a user guide, which I skimmed through as a useful reference, but most useful was a colleague,” adds Flock. “Every Friday morning he’d show me different features. He made me control the screen; I was the one doing it — creating a contact, creating an opportunity. I’d check in on Friday with questions he’d be able to answer. Or, he’d say, ‘I see you did not do this.’”
That personal guidance continued for the first six weeks, Flock says. “Having that resource, someone familiar with the system, gave me the opportunity to get familiar really quickly,” he notes. “The best part of learning is getting in and doing and having someone serve as a coach along the way.”
“It was a very detailed, but very efficient planning process,” says Morley. “We understood the platform it was ultimately being built on. We knew the things we had to address, and we’d think through them. We presented it with business use cases that did not have obvious solutions in Salesforce. It’s impressive, building some custom solutions within the platform that addressed our needs — particularly the development of technology records into Salesforce — a huge enabler of partnering.”
The technology records
“If you’ve got any familiarity with the Salesforce system, it kind of centers around accounts, contacts, and opportunities — and usually being a sales deal in a traditional sense,” Morley noted. “But, in our case. we needed to add this element of a technology record.” The technology record, he explained, “pulls in information from our IP management system. So, every day there’s an automatic data merge that pulls data over from KSS, and there is a subset of technology records that get released to Salesforce for business development purposes. The basic information comes over in a one-way fashion, and then we further curate the technology record.” (See Slide 10.)
“We further populate things like the sector, the technology type, the therapeutic area along with the technology description,” he continued. “We log things like the commercialization priority, the commercialization focus — it’s either a license or a new innovation — and of course all the people involved in this.”
The main tech record, he explained, can then be joined to other objects in Salesforce. “It really is the central piece to the whole system; everything kind of stems out from the technology record,” he said.
Morley further noted ‘technology opportunities’ on the right of Slide 10. “These are specific opportunities with companies around this technology, so either a licensing opportunity or a research opportunity, and we have agreement records,” he added. “This is streaming over from our IP management systems. We get a basic look [for example] at whether there is a CDA with this company, another CDA with this company, and I can also look at the basic patent information around this technology. So, without having to go into the IP management system, we bring over the basics here that allow us to do business development on this technology record and create, really, a 360 degree view of everything going on with this technology.”
The opportunity records
Morley next turned his attention to opportunity records, which are “set up any time we have an interaction with a company around either a technology, a research opportunity, or even a general inquiry as the front door group,” he explained. “So we have complete records of interactions with companies, which is very powerful as we are managing those relationships. But this opportunity record is set up specifically around your research and innovation opportunity.” (See an example in Slide 11.)
The technology the record is linked to can be seen in the upper right of the screen “so I know that this company, this particular opportunity with the company, is interested in these three particular technologies.” Also included is the account name, a description of the technology, any existing agreements, and any additional opportunities it is linked to.
In this case, the opportunity was linked to an option agreement that’s also been executed for this technology. “This one came through the faculty — they had a relationship with the company and brought it to us,” he explained.
“If it’s a lost opportunity, we’ll note the loss reasons,” Morley added. “And again, it gives a state of the sale code for this technology or this particular research program; we’ve had a number of lost opportunities over the last several months. We can begin to [share] feedback for the investigators about why perhaps their technology hasn’t been getting traction with partners. What can we do to orient in a different direction that might be more attractive to potential partners for translation purposes?”
Activities can be logged in the record as well, he continued. “There is a plug-in for Outlook, so every time we send a company an e-mail about an opportunity, we log it here and keep a nice record,” he noted. “This has been tremendously useful for business continuity purposes; if somebody needs to take a leave of absence or somebody even leaves the group, having a complete record of everybody’s activities is incredibly helpful.”
The system also creates dashboards, and Morley shared an example which is shown in Slide 12. The business development dashboard shown “gives me a view of the number of open opportunities we have by different team member, how many new opportunities were created this month,” he said. “This is used as an indicator of our business development/outreach efforts. We can further break it down by taxonomy.”
He describes “a funnel showing how we’re moving opportunities through the different stages. We go from a discovery stage, where it’s really interaction with the company, to evaluating the opportunity, ultimately to a scope of work and then contracting and signatures on that opportunity. There’s lots of flexibility in Salesforce to do dashboarding. We also do a distribution on our ‘Top 100’ most engaged partners about assets on a quarterly basis to our company contacts, called ‘The Opportunities Report.’” (See Slide 13.)
Taken as a whole, he continues, “we embrace Salesforce as management tool to make sure not to let opportunities die on the vine. The reporting allows us to flag opportunities that have not had activities posted against them in the last 30 days.”
A ’360-degree’ view
“The 360 degree view of technologies, investors, opportunities, agreements, [and the fact that] we have the patents, the programs, and the funding that are involved in those is tremendously helpful,” Morley declares. That comprehensive view also “improve coordination between our partnering and tech transfer teams; it has greatly enhanced coordination and communication by having everything that is going on around a particular asset or research deal in one place” — a benefit that’s been especially useful “being in a remote operating structure for the last couple of years, and even now as we are back to more of a hybrid environment.”
The CRM system, he summarizes, has “improved partnering operations and management, and improved management insights.”
There are “very tangible examples” of that impact, he reports. “The visibility to look at technologies and to understand all opportunities currently in flight has on several occasions helped us avoid potential conflicts when work was happening by multiple team partners. In the old days we may not have known someone else was talking to other partners about a particular technology — or whether it was for research or licensing.”
“For me, having a tool like this is really valuable in the sense that you can keep tabs on activity for each engagement — engagement with faculty, engagement with the company, and where you’re at with the technology,” adds Flock.
Looking over the past year, he continues, “I can say we’ve had several opportunities specific to oncology or neuroscience technology data that started to show us some trends. We’ve started thinking how to better leverage some of these technologies based on those feeds. Also, there are reminders — [such as] ‘no activities in the last 30 or 60 days’ — which encourage us be accountable in follow-ups and not just letting [opportunities] sit there.”
A “classic example” of how the system aids communication, he recalls, involved a faculty member reaching out to him about a company that wanted to work with him. “I could go in and search that company and see my colleague was working very closely with another faculty member within that department — right next to them,” he says. “Rather than me create a parallel conversation, I can go to the colleague; it allows us to connect the dots.”
The same holds true with industry partners, he notes, as they often have different units and silos. “I can pull them up and see colleagues that have had actual conversations,” he explains. “Without a system like this I could only send a broad e-mail to my colleagues. Seeing exactly where the process is and where to plug in has been extremely useful.”
Of course, Morley added, it is critical for team members like Flock to actually use the system and participate in the group communication it enables. “It is wonderful to build these, but if nobody ever utilizes it and never puts their information into the system, it’s all for naught,” he concluded.
Contact Flock at 412-383-0952 or mike.flock@pitt.edu: contact Morley at 412-624-0403 or scott.morley@pitt.edu.