The new era of pharma CRM is here, learn how to adapt

 The life sciences CRM industry is on the brink of a groundbreaking shift as Salesforce officially enters the market. Its goal: to redefine how pharmaceutical and healthcare organizations engage with HCPs, patients, and stakeholders. For companies still relying on legacy CRMs—platforms lacking AI at their core, with limited functionality and poor integration with modern systems—now is the time to start planning the next move.

Three major developments are driving the changes:

• Salesforce’s release of Life Sciences Cloud for Customer Engagement (LSC4CE) in September 2025.
• IQVIA’s evolving partnership with Salesforce will apply innovations from IQVIA OCE with Salesforce’s Life Sciences Cloud to provide customers with a new single, end-to-end engagement platform.
• Veeva’s strategic move away from Salesforce, shifting its CRM product line to Veeva Vault CRM, marking a major architectural and market departure.

 These overlapping shifts ensure that most legacy CRM solutions will feel the impact in one form or another. In this article, we’ll examine the changes in detail and show how proactive, well-timed strategic decisions can help pharmaceutical companies stay competitive, remain compliant, and future-proof their operations.

Let’s get to it.

Understanding the Market Realignment

 In the life sciences sector, CRMs have historically played a far more intricate role than in general enterprise settings. Beyond sales force automation (SFA), these platforms have expanded to address specialized needs such as compliant field engagement, sample tracking, adverse event reporting, key opinion leader (KOL) mapping, territory planning, multichannel marketing orchestration, and other industry-specific functions.

For over a decade, Veeva CRM, built on Salesforce’s platform, has been the dominant player in the field. So much so that in 2019, it served 47 out of the world’s top 50 pharmaceutical companies. Veeva’s deep integration into commercial, regulatory, and medical affairs workflows created a level of lock-in that few competitors could challenge.

 Salesforce’s cloud platform provided the foundation for Veeva CRM, but Salesforce itself remained absent from the life sciences CRM market due to a non-compete agreement between the two companies.

In 2017, IQVIA introduced Orchestrated Customer Engagement (OCE) as a competitive alternative, focusing on advanced analytics, integration with real-world data (RWD), and omnichannel orchestration. Although OCE never rivaled Veeva’s market dominance, it captured a meaningful share and established itself as a credible, long-term contender.

 In short, these two CRM providers—Veeva firmly in the lead—effectively dominated the market, leaving competitors to fight over the remaining share.

In 2023, Salesforce and Veeva jointly announced they would not renew their partnership agreement when it expires in 2025. Veeva stated it would cease developing CRM functionality on Salesforce and fully migrate to Veeva Vault, its proprietary platform. Clients who choose to stay on the Salesforce-based Veeva CRM will be supported until 2030, but without updates or new features.

In 2024, Salesforce announced its plans to compete for platform leadership by launching the Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud for Customer Engagement, partnering with IQVIA to accelerate its development. As part of the expanded partnership, IQVIA will license the OCE CRM related software to Salesforce, and the parties will collaborate to accelerate development of Life Sciences Cloud for customer engagement expected to be available in September 2025.

IQVIA will continue to market the OCE CRM product and will support its nearly 400 global OCE customers in 130+ countries through 2029.

 Here’s where things stand: One major platform is shifting its infrastructure, another is effectively phasing out, and Salesforce is breaking into the space with an advanced solution, aiming to become a new leader. Given that Veeva and IQVIA’s OCE held the majority of market share, these changes will profoundly impact the pharmaceutical CRM landscape.

The Appeal of LSC4CE

LSC4CE is entering the market with significant structural and functional advantages over current systems. As we see it, there are three main areas that set it apart.

Platform Cohesion and Ownership

As a native Salesforce product, LSC4CE is not dependent on OEM partners. This structural advantage means feature requests, updates, and bug fixes will now flow through one product owner – Salesforce itself – resulting in clearer roadmaps, faster release cycles, and less organizational friction.

Furthermore, LSC4CE is fully integrated into the Salesforce ecosystem, enabling seamless interoperability with Slack for internal collaboration, MuleSoft for API orchestration, Marketing Cloud for digital campaigns, and Tableau for analytics. This reduces the total cost of integration and unlocks synergistic value across business functions.

AI-Native Design

LSC4CE is infused with Einstein GPT and native machine learning models from its foundation. Unlike existing platforms, LSC4CE was purpose-built for proactive, intelligent engagement. The platform can:

• Enable proactive, data-driven engagement with HCPs and patients
• Create highly personalized interactions for HCPs
• Support direct-to-patient initiatives at a scale
• Offer a single digital platform for AI-powered recruitment, selection, and study management
• Give reimbursement teams strategic insights to identify and prioritize the most impactful engagements
• Enhance operational efficiency for MSLs by streamlining data management and automating medical inquiry handling

As life sciences companies strive to scale personalized, compliant engagement, these embedded AI capabilities become a massive advantage. The gap between platforms with and without native AI will continue to widen.

Open Data and Integration Ecosystem

Modern commercial success depends on the ability to unify disparate data sets – from field activity logs and medical inquiry records to RWD and claims data. LSC4CE is purpose-built to operate within an open data ecosystem.

With out-of-the-box compatibility with Salesforce Data Cloud and Snowflake, the platform enables teams to build unified customer profiles, deliver real-time analytics, and comply with stringent data privacy and consent requirements. These capabilities are especially important for orchestrating global field teams, harmonizing KPIs, and satisfying audits from regulatory authorities.

Taken together, these features make LSC4CE a strategic enabler of next-generation engagement models in life sciences.

What This Means for Current CRM Users

 Organizations operating legacy pharma CRMs are entering a period of reduced platform investment. Although both dominant solutions will remain available for several years, their capacity to meet evolving business and regulatory demands will steadily decline. Postponing action today risks compounding operational issues in the future:

Operational complexity. Supporting outdated CRM systems places a growing strain on IT, compliance, and commercial operations teams. With limited new capabilities coming from platform providers, teams will likely need to rely on custom development or third-party vendors for even modest functional updates. This can significantly increase the cost of compliance and support.

Rising opportunity cost. The longer organizations remain on static platforms, the more they miss out on value from AI automation, personalized engagement, and real-time data integration. For example, LSC4CE’s AI-driven rep scheduling or consent-aware outreach workflows would require costly workarounds.

Shrinking partner ecosystem.  As the market shifts toward next-generation CRM solutions, fewer system integrators and technology partners will maintain expertise in aging platforms. This talent contraction will make future migrations more complex, lengthen project timelines, and drive up costs as the pool of experienced developers, architects, and specialists continues to decline.

Integration incompatibility. Third-party systems and downstream platforms (such as marketing automation tools, patient support platforms, or AI engines) may begin dropping support for older CRMs. As APIs evolve and standards change, firms may be forced to spend more on middleware or abandon certain integrations altogether, fragmenting their digital ecosystems.

Talent retention and user engagement. Top-performing commercial and medical field reps expect tools that are intuitive, mobile-enabled, and data-rich. If current platforms fail to support modern workflows, adoption will suffer – and talent retention may become harder. CRM fatigue becomes a real issue when systems are seen as obstacles rather than enablers.

All of these factors argue for proactive evaluation. Even for companies that do not plan to migrate in 2025-2026, initiating discovery and planning efforts now is critical to ensure operational continuity, secure compliance standing, and minimize disruption.

Why Now Is the Right Time to Act

Migration timelines in life sciences are inherently long due to the industry’s complexity, stringent compliance mandates, and  global operational scope. Projects of this magnitude routinely take months or even years, from initial system audits and vendor evaluation to change management and go-live. Organizations that are beginning to work on their migration strategy now will get several advantages.

Early access to expertise. As more companies begin planning CRM migrations, the demand for platform specialists, certified Salesforce engineers, and implementation capacity will rise sharply. Acting early secures priority access to top-tier consulting talent and guarantees the resources needed to deliver a smooth, phased transition.

Influence on roadmap and implementation design.  Early adopters frequently enjoy greater influence in vendor roadmap discussions and feature prioritization. Organizations that engage with Salesforce and its partners now are better positioned to shape product evolution and ensure that their specific requirements are incorporated into future releases.

Time for parallel pilots and risk management. Starting early allows for staged testing – such as running LSC4CE in a single country or business unit – while preserving business continuity elsewhere. It also provides time for building internal consensus, adjusting processes, and rolling out training incrementally.

Delaying until 2027 or later significantly compresses options, increases pressure on internal teams, and may lead to hurried decisions with long-term consequences.

Avenga Helps Quantify Migration Complexity

Avenga is a global technology consultancy and a long-standing Salesforce integrator, uniquely positioned to guide life sciences organizations through this critical transition. As a certified member of the Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud Migration Alliance, we bring both credibility and deep functional experience to the table.

The Migration Readiness Assessment

At the core of our approach is our proprietary Migration Readiness Assessment technical acceleratort, which:

• Identifies system customizations, data dependencies, and API integrations
• Evaluates migration stages, challenges and timelines based on configuration depth and user segmentation
• Enables companies to establish a risk-adjusted roadmap and effort estimate

Combined with Avenga’s  discovery processes, the accelerator helps speed up planning and delivers a strategic foundation for future change management alignment.

Why Avenga is the Ideal Partner to Support You Throughout These Changes

Even the initial stages of pharma CRM migration preparation require knowledge and a deep understanding of life sciences CRM ecosystems. Avenga’s vast experience in the field, our migration alliance membership, numerous relevant certifications, and a proven track record of engineering excellence guarantee that you’ll get the expertise and speciaists to cover your needs.

As far as Salesforce goes, Avenga has already assisted companies in making the switch to scalable and future-proof CRM solutions by completing more than 250 successful Salesforce deployments. We have applied and refined multiple strategies to assist businesses in improving engagement, streamlining operations, and maximizing Salesforce’s potential.  

 With a team of over 110 certified Salesforce engineers and 100 experienced architects and consultants, backed by 450+ Salesforce certifications, we have the skills and resources to manage even the most complex CRM implementations. Our expertise spans workflow automation, AI-powered customer engagement, data migration, and seamless integration—ensuring business continuity and rapid time-to-value.

Make the Right Move for Your Business

As Peter Drucker said, “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence. It is to act with yesterday’s logic.” The organizations that choose to act today will inevitably reap positive benefits and position themselves for long-term success with a more advanced, scalable, and AI-driven CRM solution.

Collaborating with a certified Salesforce Migration Alliance member safeguards your CRM strategy for long-term success. Contact our experts today, and we’ll help you estimate the effort required for your LSC4CE migration. We will also help you prepare a detailed, phased, and smooth migration strategy.