THE NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE HOSPITALS NHS FOUNDATION TRUST
The Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust launched a system to help them manage and develop commercial opportunities.
The Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is one of the largest NHS trusts in the country, providing healthcare to communities across the North East of England and beyond. The Trust’s Commercial Enterprise Team identifies and develops innovative partnerships, and works with industry and other organisations to benefit patients and staff. Andrea Burroughs, Associate Director of Commercial Enterprise, leads the team.
“The team was established in June 2020 to develop commercial opportunities to generate additional income to invest in patient care. There are people in our team who have experience developing commercial proposals, conducting market research and analysis, new product development and much more,” said Ms. Burroughs. “But we are a small team, which means we needed a way to bring information about commercial opportunities into one place, if we were going to develop and deploy across such a large and complex organisation.”
And they did — as a brand new team, formed in the midst of a pandemic — using Salesforce. Here’s how.
First, the team reconciled the cost of homegrown, legacy IT.
When the Commercial Enterprise Team was formed, they inherited a number of schemes that were managed in different ways, by different teams, using their own sets of spreadsheets, methods, and models to manage the process. They knew that while this met the unique (and sometimes urgent) needs of each scheme it left a lot of room for improvement.
Homegrown systems tend to:
- Store information in a splintered or silo format, making it difficult to get a comprehensive view of the question or topic at hand.
- Require manual work to pull reports, stitch together data, and draw conclusions — all of which are often shared via offline email attachments.
- Bury the kind of operational efficiencies that might otherwise help teams streamline processes, scale service delivery, and focus more time and energy on mission-critical work.
Three things that have proven to be exceptionally important to organisations as they navigate COVID-19.
The team took this as a call to action, defining the criteria for a strategic system that would instead:
- Bring data and information about individual projects into a single platform, allowing the team to get a comprehensive view of forecasting, identify key success metrics, and more.
- Allow for integrated reporting capabilities, which would help them understand the history with a given scheme and which programs or services might have led to more successful outcomes.
- Provide a consistent user experience on the front end so that they could standardise things like communications or contract reviews without sacrificing the ability to configure program-specific workflow rules on the backend to meet the unique needs of a scheme.
“Our IT team is so busy, like the rest of the Hospital. Hosting and managing a system like this would have taken them away from helping the teams who are delivering care to patients. So, if there is something that already exists, and we knew would work based on the experience of others, why not just take advantage of that?” said Ms. Burroughs.
Then, the team embraced a “customer-first” strategy on the cloud.
The team launched an opportunity management system on Sales Cloud, Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM solution. It gives the team the tools they need to build a single source of truth about projects and drive better outcomes for Newcastle Hospitals’ commercial business as a result.
Here’s how it works:
- Schemes are loaded into the CRM as opportunities and managed along a structured sales forecast pathway. “We currently have everything grouped into different categories, and several more initial inquiries that might become opportunities loaded into the system as leads,” said Ms. Burroughs. In other words, the team now starts by looking at their business through the needs of their internal customers — the growth areas most important to Newcastle Hospitals — and then coordinating everything respectively.
Best practices from Newcastle Hospitals
- Each opportunity goes through six stages of review: initial inquiry, feasibility, development, proposal, negotiation and an active phase for live projects. The team built those stages into the system using automated workflow rules, which then track an opportunity’s performance against these as benchmarks and report on status via Sales Cloud’s integrated reports and dashboards.
- The system also shows details on an opportunity, who is assigned as the opportunity owner, which organisation it is for, expected costs incurred and expected revenue.
- All opportunities are logged against the end customer, the entry for which ultimately ends up including useful contact information, notes from project meetings, background from past projects, areas of subject matter expertise, and more. This creates a profile-like record of each customer, enabling the team to evaluate opportunities for growth.
It also allows the team to identify customers based on specific fields or keyword searches, helping them make more actionable recommendations in the event that someone within their wider organisation needs help. “We want to be able to sell a product or offer consultancy services and this enables us to track that from the same place,” said Ms. Burroughs.
Now, the team is seeing the impact a modern, digital foundation has on everyday operations.
The team’s opportunity management system went live in just two months, and automated reports and dashboards have been shared with stakeholders on a monthly basis since. Recipients can filter and configure reports to answer top-of-mind questions in a self-service model, or tag subject matter experts with questions when necessary. “It’s so refreshing to click a button and run a report in real-time, versus creating a new spreadsheet at the end of every month,” said Ms. Burroughs. “We now put that effort into hosting fortnightly meetings with each of the Hospitals’ business managers to run through their schemes and update their forecasts.”
The team can now also:
- Track the number of open opportunities
- Track the number of leads they expect to turn into opportunities
- Measure pipeline by scheme; the quantity in the pipeline as well as the total £ value
- Forecast their pipeline by stage
- Provide reports on the overall revenue which has been generated since the team's conception.
And while these newfound capabilities and metrics are of course important in their own right, the impact they represent perhaps holds the most significance for the team.
“Our goal was to bring skills and expertise from industry into working with our Hospital colleagues and to invest the income generated into healthcare delivery,” said Ms. Burroughs. “It's nice to feel, to see, to know that we're making a difference to such a big organisation that's helping so many people, especially during these times of unprecedented need.”
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