Gwen Whitney was the former SVP of Commercial Operations and Market Access at Global Blood Therapeutics. Her team was tasked with forecasting, operations, and patient access, but their work was slowed down by ineffective business communication.
Whitney's group spent more time packaging insights into slides than actually doing the work they were hired for. Fortunately, they discovered Prezent's AI-powered business communications platform.
Using Prezent, Whitney and her team could buy back their time and turn their attention to their actual work rather than struggling to communicate it. What was once a burdensome side task became seamless.
Let’s see how Whitney's team used Prezent to transform their business communications at Global Blood Therapeutics.
Gwen Whitney was the former SVP of Commercial Operations and Market Access at Global Blood Therapeutics (GBT). GBT is an emerging life sciences company bringing novel treatments for sickle cell disease to market.
As a key part of the commercial leadership team, Whitney oversaw many functions central to the launch, including forecasting, operations, analytics, and patient access programs. They also understood the importance of business communications throughout the process:
“Business communication is very important in terms of our ability to effectively communicate to the organization. What does this data tell us? What insights can we derive here to inform, shape, and ultimately drive the business.”
However, despite its extremely talented data analysts, Whitney's team spent an excessive amount of time developing slide presentations rather than focusing on their core data work:
“We're not a communications team. So, the time we were putting into making slides, coming up with the story, and trying to package effectively so that we could communicate to the organization’s key stakeholders was a heavy lift. It often costs us more time than the work itself, and it was inefficient because our goal was not to be a communication shop. We were supposed to focus on data analytics, insights, and operations to support the business.”
Fortunately, Whitney's team discovered Prezent's AI-powered business communications platform. They instantly became convinced that Prezent was the strategic partner they desperately needed to handle the tedious communications aspects of their operations.
Let’s take a step back to how Gwen Whitney’s team at Global Blood Therapeutics handled business communications before Prezent.
“Before we had a relationship with Prezent, the business communications part of our work was difficult, especially because we didn't have any art or communications department to support us. So, we had to turn to our data analytics experts, asking them to help with business communications. There's a lot of work involved here. So, we would have to pay vendors extra to do the work because what they were doing was trying to package up data and analytics for us.”
After seeing Prezent's capabilities first-hand, Whitney's team quickly signed up. The software's ability to build audience-tailored presentations from data resonated deeply. And having an on-demand presentation team to promptly create board-ready slides was invaluable for the company.
“We have two favorite features in Prezent’s software. First it asks you who the presentation is for so that it can tailor its output based on the audience. So, if you choose to present a slide for the C-suite or senior leadership, its output will look very different than if you choose to present it for the sales team. That kind of intuition and knowledge helps build a presentation that's appropriate for the stakeholder type. After all, adapting to different levels is foundational to business communication. So, we really appreciated being able to communicate at the right level with the right level of detail.
Another favorite feature of ours is being able to focus on story and structure. I particularly enjoyed this feature because what we really need in terms of having high-caliber business communication is being able to take data and analytics and put it into a story. So, as opposed to just putting together slides, Prezent allowed us to tell the story behind the data from the beginning to the end.”
“My group signed up to use Prezent, and we ended up creating really great business communications. We started getting lots of compliments about how we would put together a story and how we packaged insights, whether for earnings calls, post-meetings, or senior-level communication…
We were about ten or fifteen people that started Prezent. But when people saw the outputs of our work and what our business communications were looking like, the marketing team came on board, followed by many others. It was really interesting to see how it grew. But it was really the output of what we were able to accomplish through Prezent that got people really excited. We became much better at storytelling, and our work looked great visually. I think it was just super compelling for people to want to be a part of that.”
“I would be remiss if I didn't mention Prezent’s additional service line, which is their overnight business presentation service. This service was invaluable to us, especially for high-volume and time-sensitive cases, which were many in our line of business. So whether it was a plan of action meeting or board slides where we needed a quick turnaround, we would go to Prezent and give them some notes on what we needed without having to engage deeply with the software ourselves…
It was as simple as us ending our workday and getting notes to the present presentation service team by 5:30 pm. And by the time we come in the next morning at 9:30 am, there would be slides in our inbox, so we could quickly adapt a set of slides to be presented that very day.”
“Stakeholders started to notice our group’s output and the very nice uniformity around it. The marketing team started asking questions like: Why do their slides look so good? We want whatever they're doing…
The biggest benefit we got from the partnership with prezent was efficiency. Partnering with Prezent allowed us to focus 80% of our time on the real data analysis work while placing 10% or 20% of our time on the business communication and packaging aspect…
The second biggest benefit for us was effectiveness. The goal of business communications is to package insights and put them into a story that makes sense for relevant stakeholders and Prezent’s software was very helpful in adding structure to the story. I began receiving slide decks where I could actually understand what the story was. So the effectiveness of our business communications very much evolved in a positive way.”
“Before Prezent, our team did their primary data analytics work from 8 am to 5 pm while working on business communications and packaging after hours, which was not ideal. At a time, our team was spending 70 to 80% of their time on packaging to make sure that we were able to effectively communicate. Thankfully, that has changed by using Prezent. Now, about 20% of our time is spent on business communications while 80% of our time is spent on our primary work functions, leading to more robust outputs.”
“We also enjoyed significant cost savings thanks to our partnership with Prezent. We hire very smart people and it’s not financially efficient to ask smart people to spend a disproportionate amount of time on slide presentations. We want smart people to work on data science, analysis, research, and insights…
So it became much more financially smart and efficient for us to outsource the communications to the experts, which allowed us to get the most value out of our employees. We were able to save a lot of money with marketing agencies, data and analytics vendors, and all other resources that we were using to support our work.”
Inefficient business communications hold you back from peak performance. As Gwen Whitney and Global Blood Therapeutics discovered, Prezent can be your partner in transforming raw information into brilliantly compelling business narratives.
With Prezent's AI-powered platform and elite presentation services, you can also streamline your cross-functional communications flows. Plus, your team could focus on their primary functions rather than tedious slide production.
The results speak for themselves:
"On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give Prezent a ten for its amazing service," raved Whitney. "I have already recommended Prezent to many of my colleagues, so it's absolutely a ten for me on a recommendation scale."
Just as Prezent accelerated commercial success for the brilliant minds at Global Blood Therapeutics, imagine the untapped potential it could unlock for your own organization. Don't let another day's worth of critical insights get lost in subpar communications.
If you're ready to start operationalizing information better and improving your teams’ performance, look no further than Prezent. Schedule a demo to learn how we can provide a tailored communications solution for your specific goals.
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