We Are MMIT

Corey Crevar leads a team of specialists dedicated to helping MMIT’s clients access and analyze data from their subscription services. His team drives client retention by ensuring that clients have the market access intelligence they need for their commercialization strategies.

Tell us a little bit more about your role.

My role is split into two different core responsibilities. I work with a team of Client Success Renewal (CSR) specialists, who support our digital segment clients. We’ve designed this team to meet the ever changing and evolving needs of our clients.  Our CSRs provide support for clients through a combination of key touchpoints and automated communication initiatives.

I also oversee our customer relationship management (CRM) system. We use a tool called Gainsight, which is also fed with Salesforce data, to track all of our client interactions. Our team manages 250+ accounts through Gainsight, which provides a full view of each client’s history and key milestones.

How did you join the company? What in your background brought you to pharma?

After college, I worked in biomedical research. I spent ten years doing vaccine research, but I grew frustrated by the slow pace of development. As you know, bringing a drug from the preclinical stage to production can take 20 years or more. What I helped design in 2008 is just moving towards Phase I clinical trials now.

I wanted to see the results of my work a bit faster, so I switched gears into patient access services. I was an operational lead at a few companies, running patient assistance services for multiple manufacturers. Every day, I spoke to caregivers or patients who were trying to find financial assistance to help them with a new diagnosis or a new medication. Understanding copays and benefit structure on an individual basis was quite a different perspective on pharma than I’d had from behind the scenes, in drug design.

When I moved to MMIT, I found that this role was a great way to continue helping patients, while also helping manufacturers be more strategic in how they’re meeting the market need for their therapies.  Overall, MMIT gave me the opportunity to be more strategic and less operational.

What does your day-to-day usually look like?

My days are typically a mix of internal and external meetings. I often meet with our cross-functional teams, from Client Delivery Services to the project managers and our real-world data team, to discuss product enablement between the groups, or the specifics of an individual client’s project.

I also jump on calls with my team members for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they need support for a particular client call, or we’re trying to strategize with a seller for how to retain a client and potentially expand their contract.

I also spend a lot of time working with my team. Most of our CSRs are new to client-facing roles, so we practice active listening, and sometimes role-play various scenarios. Our enablement is meant to help our CSRs become accustomed to discovering the client’s needs and then determining how we can best deliver that information, either through our products or by querying our internal resources.

What are some of the larger projects you’re working on?

Over the past three years, we’ve reconfigured how we approach our clients as MMIT continues to grow. We realized that we needed to spend more time supporting smaller clients that might not have an army of data analysts. How do we provide them with the right resources, and accommodate their shifting needs?

We’ve restructured our teams to answer those questions. This current iteration of our client success renewal team is fairly new, so this is honestly my largest project. My team onboarded in July, and got their first accounts in September. As we obtain more data, we’re gaining a deeper understanding of our clients, and our CSRs are continually learning new ways to approach their role and refine our processes.

On a project level, I’m working on building out our risk tracking process in Gainsight, our CRM system. Every month, we complete an account health writeup for all of our at-risk clients. I’m in the process of building that same evaluation process at the product level as well. We’ll be able to identify risks earlier, which will allow us to practice risk mitigation for any product line that might be underperforming, so we can take more immediate action to resolve the issue. The information will be trackable and automated, whereas now, we spend time compiling reports to determine trends.

What are some of the common challenges of your role?

Norstella is continually evolving, which is both a strength and a challenge we accept in client success. The client success team has to stay on our toes to keep up with the new offerings and integrations. We have to work with the enablement team to gain a deep understanding of our products, as we need that expertise to help our clients when questions arise. We’re always expanding our knowledge base.

To take just one example of many, we recently launched the revamped Payer Landscape product, which looks and functions amazingly well. My team did our training a few weeks ago to make sure that we can usher our clients through that transition and provide end user training. Sometimes that continual change can be a challenge, but in all fairness, Norstella actually does team enablement very well

We don’t rest in client success, because we need to be able to pivot at moment’s notice. Our clients are bought and sold all the time, and their priorities change as a result. So we need to know our material to keep up with their new goals.

What’s been your career highlight to date?

As I said, I began my career as an individual contributor. When I really grew into a leader, during my time in patient access services, my favorite aspect was building teams. Since then, I’ve been able to put together truly incredible teams that understand what our customers need.

My career highlight has really been the development and nurturing of individual team members. Not only do I get to see what our team can achieve when we work on a common goal, but I get to watch folks move through the organization, be promoted, and expand into new roles. I set out to train people in such a way that they can easily move forward in their careers. Whether they move within MMIT and Norstella or even outside the organization, they’re taking what they’ve learned with them. That’s what keeps me going: seeing the success of my team members.

What trends are you seeing across the industry right now that MMIT is in a unique position to help with?

Our clients need more and more real-world data, and we are uniquely positioned to make it usable and digestible for them. The dots we can connect for our clients in terms of what’s going on with their patient population, where their patients are, physician activity—it’s just amazing to be able to overlay all that data together into actionable analysis for them.

With the launch of NorstellaLinQ and our ability to integrate data from all of Norstella’s sister companies, we’re able to package together so much information for our clients. They no longer need four vendors to get to the same level of data analysis because we’re a one-stop shop, and we have better data than our competitors to boot.

Which company principle resonates most with you?

At heart, I am a problem solver, so the principle that speaks to me most is resiliency, mettle and grit. It’s imperative that we dig in and move forward whenever we have a problem. In client success, we hear from happy clients, but we also hear from clients who are upset, who no longer want to purchase data or services from us, often due to budget cuts. We have to be creative to figure out how we can work with them on their bare-bones budget, and we need grit to pull through for those clients. Our team restructuring is another example of resiliency in action, and of how we approach things in the MMIT culture. We revamped the team because it didn’t initially work as well as we wanted it to. So we figured out what needed to change, and we rebuilt.

What would you tell someone just starting their career with MMIT?

Lean on your team members and ask questions!  Whenever a new person starts on our team, they meet one-on-one with all the rest of us on the client success team. They also meet with key members of the cross-functional teams, just to understand their roles and get to know them. That’s how you start having those relationships and forming your knowledge base.

What do you like most about working at MMIT?

At a previous company, I was employee 71468. It was 10 years ago, and I still remember that number, because that’s how I was treated and that’s how I felt in the organization. That doesn’t happen here. At MMIT, we have a culture of honest communication between all levels of the organization. You can talk to anybody, no matter their title, role, or team.

Every cross-functional person I work with is willing to help out. We’re able to collaborate on a common goal: what is best for our client? I haven’t always experienced that, and it’s refreshing. Being able to lean on your team, solve problems together, and learn from your colleagues to grow your knowledge and build relationships is my favorite part of working here. Nobody guards information; they just share it, willingly. That’s the way it should be, but it’s rare to have that kind of company culture.

What do you like to do outside of work?

My wife and I have two daughters, 9 and 14, so we spend a lot of family time together and with our newest family member, our dog Ellie. I’m highly involved in our local recreation baseball and softball organizations, and I coach multiple softball teams. My oldest daughter does fast-pitch softball, so we also travel for those games. Honestly, I truly love being involved in whatever my kids choose to participate in; I’ll be there to cheer them on as their biggest fan!

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