How a top-5 pharma scaled self-service content to 45 countries

After two earlier self-service pilots stalled, a top-5 pharmaceutical company onboarded 175 brand and digital teams across 45 countries in six months with Shaman — cutting email delivery from 1.5 weeks to one hour, and putting local markets back in control.

The customer: A top-5 pharmaceutical company specialising in innovative medicines.
Existing technology: Global Veeva Vault PromoMats with multiple Veeva CRM instances.
Scope: 175 brand and digital teams across commercial and medical departments, all therapeutic areas (Rx), in 45 countries.

The challenge: a content factory that couldn’t scale

Since the pandemic, HCPs have demanded more personalised, omnichannel content — and marketing teams have produced more of it every year to keep pace. Across the industry, rep-sent emails rose five-fold and commercial content volume quadrupled between 2020 and 2022.¹

This customer was meeting that demand through a global digital content factory that produced approved emails and CLM presentations centrally. But as every asset had to be adjusted, segmented and localised for markets around the world, the model buckled. Producing content could take two to three months to reach customers. It was complex, error-prone, and left local teams feeling trapped by the growing demands on their time.

The company had already tried to fix this. It set out to build a self-service model on Veeva Vault PromoMats, starting with two pilots. But the self-service experience proved too complicated and tedious for local brand teams to adopt — and the effort stalled.

Three roadblocks: technology, process, people

Before a self-service model could work, three problems had to be solved.

• Technology — The content factory ran on a bespoke tool that wasn’t integrated with MLR review or Vault PromoMats. Teams pushed content to Veeva Vault and CRM manually for testing, assigned tasks through a ticketing system, and worked with content creation entirely separated from production. The result was siloed teams with little visibility, fighting a clunky system.
• Process — With no integrated workflows and no unified naming or tagging taxonomy, teams uploaded to Vault manually and blindly. Lead times were long, content variety was low, and field teams were under-using the CRM content that did get through.
• People — Staff were frustrated by manual uploads, long lead times and constant back-and-forth. They often didn’t know the Veeva status of their own assets, and had limited knowledge of the systems they depended on. They weren’t agile — and they felt they’d lost control of content creation.

The Shaman solution: one integrated, self-service model

The threads were clear: the customer needed an integrated, all-in-one solution that gave teams control and visibility — and, critically, one that local markets would actually adopt. Shaman delivered a version of its Veeva-integrated authoring platform, tailored to the customer’s workflows and tech stack.

• Technology — We migrated the customer’s content — including emails and 150,000 global CLM slides ready for localisation — into Shaman’s Approved Email, Marketing Email and CLM builders, customised to integrate with their workflows. The Shaman brand design system gave teams a set of on-brand templates, and Shaman Hub kept design templates and images shared and maintained centrally.
• Process — We replaced a complex, manual, siloed process with a single closed workflow, giving teams visibility of the entire lifecycle — from creation to MLR review, and from automated HTML production to Veeva upload. Teams could finally see the version and Veeva status of every asset. A globally standardised naming and tagging taxonomy, enforced by validators before sync, ended the manual Veeva processes staff had struggled with.
• People — Because the earlier pilots had failed on adoption, we gave content teams a modular, step-by-step onboarding designed to reach the “aha” moment as fast as possible — and keep them motivated to keep learning.

Support from day one

Migrating an entire content production model is daunting at this scale. Shaman supported the customer throughout.

• Customer Success — Dedicated success managers aligned to the customer’s countries and therapeutic areas, trained on their tech stack, with a dashboard to track content-health levels. Live in-app support and a custom help centre answered questions in the customer’s own workflows and terminology.
• Hypercare — Live training, Q&A and certifications for both local agencies and selected content-team ambassadors, plus monthly meetings with country teams to manage how roles and workflows would change.
• Advice — Hands-on best practice: building emails from the brand design system without design or coding skills, personalising assets with Veeva Approved Email fragments and tokens, and breaking CLMs into selectable mini-brand stories for engagement.

The outcome: faster, cheaper, and actually adopted

The model that had stalled before became a success.

• Time to market — CLM presentations went from 6.5 weeks to two days — a 94% improvement. Emails dropped from 1.5 weeks to one hour — a 98% cut.²
• Cost — The customer cut CLM costs by up to 86%, and email costs by up to 84%.
• Adoption — Within six months, 175 teams across 45 countries were onboarded. Depending on the market, 50–100% of all content in the customer’s Veeva Vault is now created with Shaman, and over 80% of users are active — all logging in monthly, half every week.

Why it worked where pilots had failed

The earlier self-service attempts didn’t fail because self-service was the wrong idea — they failed because local teams couldn’t adopt the experience. The difference this time was an intuitive, user-centric platform, a single integrated workflow that removed the manual Veeva work, and hands-on adoption support for every market. Self-service only delivers when the people doing the work actually take it up — and here, they did.

¹ Source: Veeva Pulse report, 2022.
² Based on an internal questionnaire survey conducted by the customer. Includes content production and activation in Veeva Vault/CRM, excluding review times. Figures are averages — results vary per market.