12 Questions with Michael Müller-Peltzer

Michael Müller-Peltzer leads the European strategy for Vault CRM Campaign Manager at Veeva Systems. He is responsible for bringing this novel commercial campaign management solution to the market, consulting life sciences customers on ideal application areas, and helping define its future roadmap. Müller-Peltzer has been a management consultant with McKinsey, headed sales and marketing teams in various health tech companies, and holds a PhD in information systems research.

What are the main responsibilities of your current role? With Vault CRM Campaign Manager, Veeva is bringing a novel campaign management solution to the market to help commercial teams create and execute campaigns for HCPs. The product is evolving quickly, so, as strategy lead, my responsibilities are varied – e.g., shape go-to-market strategy, identify unmet customer needs that the product can cover, consult customers on ideal application areas, help live customers get the best out of the solution, and make sure customer feedback helps us plan the future roadmap.

What are your biggest short-term goals for this year and next year? Campaign Manager is a huge milestone for Veeva to close the loop on marketing automation in its Vault CRM Suite. The most important goal is to define a clear vision for the future of life sciences marketing and medical campaign management and how our solution should support this. Our first customers’ input is invaluable.

What are your biggest long-term goals for five years or 10 years from now? I’d love for our product to set a new industry standard and fundamentally change the way of working in life sciences marketing (and medical campaigning), like a fully synchronised sales and marketing team, where each interaction feeds the next, regardless of which channel it is coming from.

What are some of the biggest ongoing challenges in your work? As with every new product, finding the right entry point, the ideal first customers that benefit from your product right away, and spreading the word. Deep understanding of actual needs (which are often not initially communicated) and careful navigation of what our early-stage product can cover and where it should move next are also crucial.

What is your background prior to this role and how did it prepare you for the work you do now? As a management consultant, I learned a lot about identifying needs, solving problems in very different settings, and communicating with all kinds of stakeholders – from CIO to operator. This now helps me to find solutions in real partnership with customers instead of “just” selling software.

As a sales and marketing leader in my past four years, I have learned a lot about what it takes to effectively engage HCPs. Good engagement strategies require great teamwork, an agile way of working, and software that supports fast execution and superior collaboration between marketing and sales. I am now applying these learnings to the strategy and direction of our new product and every customer conversation.

What is your personal mission statement? What values keep you centred in your work? I thrive on helping the life sciences industry accelerate innovation to market and thereby enable patients to receive the right therapy faster. At Veeva, I now have the opportunity to grow a solution that might eventually be transformational in how commercial teams engage with HCPs, such that HCPs get the right information at the right time through the right channel about innovation.

Values that I actively live by and that help me every day include curiosity, humbleness, empathy, creativity, partnership, and honesty.

What do you see as the biggest challenges facing the industry right now? Increasing pressure on pricing and market access, rising R&D cost and declining productivity, innovations in personalised medicine that require more tailored go-to-market strategies, complex HCP stakeholder landscapes, and declining access to those HCPs – while there are still siloed and unsuitable HCP engagement formats.

Personalised and smart engagement (e.g., next best action) has been on top of many companies’ agendas, yet, most currently find that those engagement strategies are hard to execute, particularly if you face barriers of change management, regulation, and scattered system- and data-landscapes.

What excites you most about current industry trends? We’re at the door of entering the age of personalisation. Where patients receive exactly the treatment that helps them best. Whether it’s getting the right generic molecule or a highly complex cell therapy. Great technology enables personalised engagement that helps communicate these innovations effectively. AI tools or even just a great UX can make your work enjoyable, allowing you to focus on the tasks that add value.

What advice do you have for your pharma industry peers? A large share of a drug’s success is still based on human interaction and connection. Even as AI is more and more intrusive into our ways of working, the speed in which a drug gets absorbed by the market and reaches the patient is based upon very basic human values: how trustworthy do HCPs perceive a company to be? How well does an HCP get along with a salesperson? How consistent and empathetic is the outreach to an HCP? And that only works if commercial teams have good communication amongst each other, a good company culture. In other words, don't let new technology make you underestimate the value of human connection. Instead, use technology to make those connections even stronger.

What are your hobbies? What do you do in your free time? I am easily motivated by all kinds of activities and learning new skills. I am a very keen outdoor sports fan, and I enjoy activities such as roadbiking, mountain biking, mountaineering (high-altitude tours, climbing, and ski mountaineering), skiing, and kitesurfing. I also find a lot of joy in photography, classical music, cooking, and just hanging out with my dog.

Do you have any pets? What are their names and what are they like? For the past 3.5 years, I have been going through all kinds of life situations together with my dog, Daisy. She’s a small (10kg) mix of Podenco and Jack Russell Terrier and a rescue from Spain. While inside, she’s just happy to lie at my feet, supporting me when I’m working; outside, she’s a little mountain hero and accompanies me almost everywhere.

If you could have any job other than the one you have now, what would you choose? There are so many amazing professions in the world – if only time would allow. Certainly, I’d love the idea of being an HCP – taking fulfillment from the fact that I’d be helping people every single day, applying all the amazing new therapies that the industry is bringing forward.

On another note, I could also absolutely see myself as an outdoor and sports photographer – travelling from adventure to adventure and capturing nature’s wonders and the amazing achievements the human body can bring forward. I'm a big fan of Jimmy Chin.

Connect with Michael Müller-Peltzer on LinkedIn.