High-speed Salesforce delivery for rapid business growth

During the pandemic, up to 80% of non-COVID-19 clinical trials were postponed or cancelled due to hospital restrictions and the risk of infection. An unfortunate consequence of the global lockdown, therefore, has been a delay in medical advancements.

Castor creates technology that makes the clinical trial process smarter, faster and more accessible. Throughout the pandemic, they have been developing decentralised clinical trial tech to ensure research can continue.

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Facilitating tech innovation

On a mission to make clinical trials more inclusive and accessible, Castor’s pioneering technology takes trials out of the hospital and into the home by digitising trial processes on an intuitive platform optimised for self-service. For example, their eConsent web portal for patient recruitment allows screening and informed consent visits to be conducted from anywhere, and their ePRO solution captures trial participants’ data on the go via a user-friendly smartphone app, eliminating the need for paper diaries or clinic visits.

Their growing suite of tools is being created with the ultimate goal of standardising and coding machine-readable trial data so that it can be reused for thousands of other studies or products, essentially centralising research data for ongoing use.

Investors have been paying attention to the revolutionary potential of this technology, and in 2020/2021 Castor have secured Series A and Series B financing, totalling $65m of investment.

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CRM transfer at pace

Castor knew they needed to hit the ground running and equip their sales team with the appropriate marketing tools and flows to grow their business quickly. But their existing CRM software wasn’t capable of the many integrations they required. They needed a CRM that would integrate smoothly with state-of-the-art tooling for their sales reps, including SalesLoft, Zoom Info, FinancialForce, GetFeedback, Google Calendar and Pardot. Salesforce was the obvious platform, and they needed someone to implement it.

“We launched an RfP and Gen25 came out as the clear winners,” says Rob Konterman, Castor’s COO.

“Gen25 had a proven track record as an implementation partner, they understood the challenge, and their CTO, Tim Schuitemaker was incredibly knowledgeable. We saw that they had the right expertise to deliver.”

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Streamlined project delivery

Gen25 quickly understood the challenge of delivering a platform change that was both rapid and at scale, and implemented project management measures that ensured the project could move at pace.

“Gen25 set a clear cadence from the start, with stakeholder review meetings, clear sign-off and general project management skills, which are rarely seen in start-up projects.”

With just 10 weeks to deliver a minimal viable product including data migration and integration, it was essential to prevent the project’s scope from expanding to ensure completion.

“On a project like this you’ll have 10 people wanting something different from the transition,” Rob adds, advising that, “From the start, Gen25 communicated very clearly that anything outside of the scope would need to be very carefully considered. They kept the scope tight, pushing back on additions and raising temporary solutions to prevent delays that would have been extremely costly.”

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A future-proof solution

Gen25 consultants were at the heart of the project, providing technical implementation support.
“Not only did they do this, but they took time to deep-dive into Castor’s internal business processes to build a long-lasting solution and advise on the best industry practices based on their past experience,” says Yauheni Bankouski, who led the project from Castor’s side.

The result is that Castor now has a significant upgrade from a clunky and inefficient CRM, to a fully custom Salesforce CRM system incorporating Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. The platform switch not only gives Castor a 360-degree view of the customer, it delivers essential custom integrations swiftly and reliably while connecting seamlessly with the Pardot marketing platform.

“It’s hard to determine how much success the platform switch has had compared to the general business growth.

“What we do know is that we have just raised Series B financing and we couldn’t have done that without the capability this has given us.”

Castor needed a platform that, like their own technology, was fit for the future. Gen25 delivered.

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