Boost sales team productivity and effectiveness with Sales Concierge on AWS

In the rapidly evolving life sciences industry, sales teams are facing growing challenges in engaging effectively with healthcare professionals (HCPs). With the complexity of drug portfolios, innovative go-to-market models, and intense competition, sales teams require quick access to critical data, intelligent guidance on HCP interactions, and the ability to automate administrative tasks. By addressing these needs, organizations can empower their sales forces to deliver exceptional customer engagement and drive successful commercialization outcomes. This blog introduces Sales Concierge, an AI-powered architecture guidance from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that consolidates data, insights, and tools to boost sales team productivity and effectiveness. According to a recent McKinsey article, the use of generative AI tools to enable more effective customer-facing teams can result in a 10 to 15 percent improvement in productivity and effectiveness, leading to 1 to 2 percent topline growth.

Current Challenges

Today sales teams in the life sciences industry navigate a complex ecosystem of tools and systems to execute their daily responsibilities—from call planning and post-call updates, to completing internal organizational tasks. This fragmented approach often results in significant productivity challenges:

• Delays in accessing critical information about HCP preferences, treatment patterns, and market dynamics
• Increased time spent synthesizing data and insights from disparate sources
• Risk of missing out on valuable recommendations to tailor HCP engagements

The time spent navigating these disparate systems detracts from the more valuable activities, such as engaging with HCPs and other key stakeholders. Additionally, the manual effort and lag in updating system records, as well as the wasted time on administrative activities, further hinder the sales team’s ability to focus on their core mission.

Compounding these challenges, current recommendation engines are primarily rules-based. They fail to provide intelligent, contextualized recommendations tailored to individual HCP scenarios and preferences. This lack of personalization and intelligence leads to low adoption and usage by sales representatives. This hinders their ability to deliver exceptional HCP engagement and drive successful commercialization outcomes.

These productivity challenges have created a pressing need for a comprehensive solution. This solution must consolidate data, insights, and tools into a unified platform. This streamlining will empower life sciences sales teams to focus on strategic selling and enhance their interactions with healthcare professionals.

Solution Overview

Imagine having a personal assistant at your fingertips, one that harnesses the power of generative AI. This solution enables natural language interaction with underlying systems of records. It provides sales professionals access to insights and guidance for HCP engagements, as well as effortless access to enterprise reports, knowledge, and metrics. Additionally, it assists with administrative tasks, data entry, and other queries.

In this blog, we provide a comprehensive guidance on how life sciences organizations can build their own tailored Sales Concierge solution to empower their sales teams. The guidance covers the key capabilities, services, and best practices necessary to create an intuitive, AI-powered solution that enables natural language interaction, consolidates critical data and insights, and automates administrative tasks.

­­Figure 1: Diagram shows an example of a Sales Concierge Application. First image shows navigation page with links to modules
such as chat and second image shows insights page with metrics on HCP interactions.

The goal of this Sales Concierge guidance is to provide a framework for organizations to unlock the transformative potential of generative AI and intelligent automation in driving sales productivity, customer engagement, and commercial success. As you explore this guidance, consider how these principles and technologies can be leveraged to build a solution that fits the unique needs of your organization and sales team.

The Sales Concierge guidance is designed to seamlessly integrate with existing customer sales and marketing applications. It can integrate with Veeva Vault CRM, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, data products, data assets and other widely used sales and marketing tools in the Life Sciences industry. By leveraging robust integration capabilities, the solution can access and consolidate data from these systems. This enables sales representatives to have a comprehensive view of customer information, engagement history, and market insights. All of this is available within the Sales Concierge interface.

The overall success of the Sales Concierge guidance will depend on the underlying investments in enabling unified access to data. Organizations can use Sales Concierge to consume data and content from a wide range of sources. This includes curated data products, raw data sets, unstructured knowledge assets, applications and APIs across various data domains:

Figure 2: Diagram shows a list of data sources, API and applications that can be used to answer sales team’s questions via Sales Concierge Application.

Building Sales Concierge, from this guidance, includes a chat interface that delivers key business capabilities which drive productivity, effectiveness, and improved customer engagement.

Multi-Modal Chat: Powered by generative AI, this feature allows sales reps to interact with data, insights, and systems of record using natural language through both voice and text inputs. The intelligent orchestration layer handles these interactions, detecting the user’s intent and directing queries to the appropriate data sources.

The process begins with intent detection, where the Orchestration Engine interprets the user’s question and identifies the relevant tools, such as agents, knowledge bases, and prompts. These tools then perform tasks like generating SQL queries (text to SQL), creating API calls (text to API), and retrieving content from unstructured data sources. This enables sales reps to query on various data and insight assets. Examples include HCP insights, market information, account details, competitive intelligence, territory data, industry trends, and next-best-action recommendations.

Figure 3: Diagram shows how users can interact with a sales concierge application that’s powered by a generative AI orchestration engine,
which uses agents and a knowledge base to respond to user questions.

Digital Agents: Leveraging generative AI-powered agents, the Sales Concierge solution can manage tasks such as creating call summaries and capturing post-call notes. It can update system records for the relevant use cases (including creating support tickets, updating call notes in CRM, and updating meeting calendars). It does this while creating a one-stop digital shop for accessing information across various applications and data assets.

The Sales Concierge serves as a front door to launch various apps, portals, or systems of record, providing sales teams with a centralized and efficient way to access the resources they need to drive adoption. This innovative approach represents a transformative shift in the way sales teams can operate, leveraging the power of generative AI and intelligent automation to enhance productivity, customer interactions, and overall commercial success.

Actionable Insights: Integrating with multiple data sources enables the Sales Concierge solution to provide answers to a variety of key questions. This equips sales teams with the information they need to engage healthcare professionals more effectively. This includes comprehensive details about HCP insights and engagement, sales performance and market share, day-to-day planning, and training and performance tracking.

Figure 4: Diagram shows an example of chat module within Sales Concierge Application. First image shows a chat interface with sample questions.
Second image shows how a natural language query is converted to SQL to pull data from a database and to output the results in natural language.

Sample questions the Sales Concierge can answer includes:

HCP Insights & Engagement

• How many new and continuing patients does this HCP have?
• What were the last couple of messages delivered to this HCP?
• What is the prescribing and referring behaviors of this HCP?
• What past interactions with this HCP (emails, samples received, competitor visits) have occurred?
• What upcoming meetings, conferences, or events are scheduled with an HCP?

Call Planning

• What pending follow-ups, outstanding requests, or action items are needed for this HCP?
• Which HCPs should I visit today?
• What is the next best action or recommendation for engaging an HCP based on their preferences?

Sales & Brand Performance

• What are the recent market share and volume changes for my products?
• How do our company’s products compare to leading competitors within this territory or zip code?

By integrating with relevant data sources, Sales Concierge provides sales representatives with comprehensive insights and actionable information. This enables sales teams to make more informed decisions, deliver personalized engagements, and drive greater success in their interactions with healthcare professionals.

Architecture Overview

The architecture leverages the breadth and depth of AWS to create an efficient and effective guidance to implement Sales Concierge solution. This comprehensive, modular, extensible and flexible architecture has been designed to address critical success factors for adoption, scale, and cost-efficiency, seamlessly integrating a wide range of capabilities.

Key capabilities of Sales Concierge include natural language and voice interaction, structured (text to SQL) data access, API and unstructured data access, and optimized latency and cost. The solution also features a modular and flexible design, privacy and responsible AI controls, and robust data security and governance controls.

Powering the solution’s intelligence are AI agents that can intelligently select the appropriate tools, APIs, and actions required to interact with the system of record and other connected applications. This enables seamless automation and workflow orchestration, streamlining the daily tasks of sales representatives.

Figure 5: This architecture diagram showcases the comprehensive suite of AWS services that power the Sales Concierge solution,
including services needed for application, orchestration, generative AI tools and data management.

At the frontend, the application utilizes AWS Amplify to provide a seamless and responsive user interface. AWS Amplify seamlessly integrates with Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly, enabling a multimodal interaction experience. Sales representatives can engage with the system through both voice and text inputs, receiving responses in the format that best suits their needs.

This frontend connects to the backend through Amazon API Gateway, which manages and secures the API layer, routing user requests to the appropriate services. The core of the backend processing is handled by AWS Lambda, which executes the server-side logic and handles the various user requests.

To power the dynamic content generation, data processing, and generative AI-driven insights, the architecture integrates Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies. The Amazon Bedrock Prompt Flows component orchestrates the user inputs, detecting the intent and directing queries to multiple targets based on the user’s needs.

For structured data, it uses Amazon Bedrock Agents to access data from databases by using a text to SQL approach. For near real-time information it uses the text to API approach. Using the text to API approach, Amazon Bedrock Agent can also take actions on behalf of the user.

Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases is a fully managed capability that helps you implement the entire Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow. It is utilized to answer questions based on unstructured data repositories. Amazon Bedrock models generate tailored responses by selecting the best prompt from the prompt catalog managed using the feature Amazon Bedrock Prompt Management. These responses are then vocalized through text to speech using Amazon Polly or using Amazon Lex, enhancing the user experience with voice capabilities.

For data storage and retrieval, the architecture utilizes Amazon DynamoDB to maintain context and personalization for user interactions. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) stores the large data assets that are synchronized with the Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases to enrich the generative AI-powered insights. Structured data is stored in services like Amazon Redshift, and the Amazon Bedrock Agents can directly query this data using a text to SQL approach.

To ensure the security of the system, the architecture incorporates a range of AWS services. This includes Amazon Cognito for authentication, AWS Lake Formation for data governance, and Amazon Bedrock Guardrails for contextual grounding checks and safeguard data. Additionally AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is used for access management, AWS CloudTrail for auditing, and Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring. These services safeguard the Sales Concierge solution, so it adheres to relevant regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and maintains strict data privacy and security standards.

This comprehensive architecture, integrating the various AWS services, creates a robust, scalable, and highly efficient Sales Concierge solution tailored to the specialized needs of the Life Sciences industry. Adopting this guidance helps to empower sales teams to engage with healthcare professionals more effectively while adhering to strict compliance requirements.

Benefits

The implementation of a comprehensive Sales Concierge solution offers a wide range of benefits that can significantly enhance the productivity, customer engagement, and commercial outcomes for Life Sciences sales teams. It can automate administrative tasks, providing seamless access to critical data, market insights, and personalized HCP profiles. The solution frees up sales representatives to focus on strategic selling activities, leading to higher conversion rates and more meaningful customer engagements.

The integrated digital tools, virtual agent support, and continuous learning resources empower sales teams to make informed decisions, respond to customer needs more quickly, and continuously improve their knowledge and capabilities. Additionally, the scalable and adaptable architecture enables integration with existing systems such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms. This enables the solution to remain agile and responsive to the rapidly evolving Life Sciences industry landscape. Ultimately this will help drive increased market share, revenue growth, and overall commercial success.

The initial feedback from clients on the Sales Concierge has been encouraging. At one of the top biopharma companies, sales representatives noted that “The Sales Concierge saves me time by providing a single pane of access to the information.” Other reps expressed excitement, stating that the concierge “saves us time and provides tailored context for pre-call planning” and “is leading to better engagement with healthcare professionals.”

Conclusion

Implementing Sales Concierge based on this guidance offers a transformative approach to empower Life Sciences sales teams in the face of an increasingly complex landscape. By consolidating data, insights, and generative AI-powered capabilities into a single solution, can streamline operations, reduce burdens, and facilitate access to crucial information. The ability to engage healthcare professionals through personalized, data-driven interactions, supported by comprehensive profiles and insights, enables sales teams to achieve superior results and build stronger customer relationships.

By embracing Sales Concierge, organizations can experience a new level of efficiency and productivity, positioning themselves for greater success. This innovative approach from AWS represents the future of sales, unlocking opportunities for growth and transforming how teams interact with customers. The solution’s comprehensive benefits (including increased productivity, enhanced engagement, continuous learning, and improved commercial outcomes) make it a strategic investment for Life Sciences organizations.

Discover how the Sales Concierge application can boost your sales team’s productivity and enable more meaningful, data-driven engagements with healthcare professionals. Take the first step towards empowering your sales force, enhancing customer interactions, and driving greater business impact.

Contact an AWS Life Sciences Representative to know how we can help accelerate your business.

Further Reading

Explore these additional resources to continue learning about how AWS can help power your solutions:

• QnABot on AWS – Quickly create more capable and compelling conversational AI experiences across multiple channels, such as contact centers and social media
• Add Amazon Bedrock Chat Capabilities to a React Native App
• Building scalable, secure, and reliable RAG applications using Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases
• Amazon Bedrock Agents
• Amazon Bedrock Prompt Flows