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With Veeva and Salesforce as global front runners in life science customer relationship management (CRM) and commercial tech landscape, it was a natural partnership from the start. But that marriage is soon to end as Veeva announced it will not be renewing their agreement to remain on the Salesforce platform once it expires in September 2025. Instead, it will be moving its CRM to the new Veeva Vault CRM, their own system specifically made for Life Science organizations.
So, what does this mean for Veeva? What does this mean for its users? And how can marketers in the Pharma world prepare for the big switch? Assemble has been doing our due diligence to get all those answers. Here’s everything you need to know.
Why the Breakup?
It wasn’t all roses at the beginning either. In fact, Veeva always had its concerns with dependence on a third party infrastructure (Salesforce and AWS) — many of which started coming true. The risks being:
- Less than optimal customer experience. The pair suffered significant service outages in the past.
- Geography/Market restrictions. The markets in which Veeva could sell its CRM were highly dependent on Salesforce, meaning it would also be left stranded if they left any existing markets.
- Domain expansion restrictions. As the leader in the MedTech domain, Salesforce restricted Veeva from expanding here.
- Competitor product possibility. The agreement doesn’t restrict Salesforce’s customers from being able to customize or configure their platform to meet their operational needs — versus buying Veeva products.
- High exit cost. The cost to shift Veeva CRM to another platform is astronomical. And if Salesforce annulled the agreement on short notice, it would massively impact all Veeva users.
What is Veeva’s Next Move?
As a result of the split, Veeva created their own CRM to replace Salesforce. The goal is to have a CRM that’s specifically custom designed for LifeSciences organizations. They want to develop an entire ecosystem of connected applications, datasets and processes that keeps the information client information, metrics, tracking, past and expected behavior, etc. as effectively and purposefully as possible.
Additionally, achieving backend implementations should be a lot quicker and straightforward than with the Salesforce platform. In fact, there are still client requests for specific features from 2009 still pending.
What it Will Look Like
For those of us who have experienced the Salesforce interface, we can probably all agree on how complicated it can be to just find information or account details at times, let alone building a metrics report. It’s a huge, multi-purpose system — we get it. But Veeva is determined to implement a much simpler functionality, that includes everything necessary for a Life Sciences specific CRM. Accessing your assigned accounts, calendar, territory or region, and custom reports will be much easier and streamlined.
When it Will all Happen
What it Means for Users
Better Customer Experiences. With all new solutions and applications hosted in a single source, the end-to-end customer experience will be superior. It will also leverage its strong partner ecosystem across therapeutic areas and functions to facilitate first-hand and personalized service from Veeva support.
Growth. With the end of Salesforce restrictions, Veeva will most certainly break into a MedTech-focused CRM as well, with more rapid growth than other domains. This will only be in addition to continuing its expansion in the Pharma market.
Vault CRM App. As of April 11th, 2024, the Vault CRM app is live. The only difference to the existing app is that it’s connected to Salesforce CRM, while the new app is already connected to Vault CRM platform. Once the transition is complete, this will be the only CRM part of the Veeva system.
Veeva CRM Bot. The new Vault CRM app also comes with a ChatGPT like add-on as part of an additional license, allowing reps to get key insights on how to conduct calls with HCPs (an extra license will be required).
Challenges during the Transition
CRM is the only part of the Veeva ecosystem that relies on Salesforce — making up just 5%. So replacing this minor segment should be pretty easy and painless. With Veeva’s backend layer keeping track of all customer and HCP information (i.e., purchase history, specialties, location, etc.), it will conduct an “under the shell” process of migration, with the Vault CRM mirroring what is done on Salesforce CRM during the platforms’ overlap. This will give users time to digest the new Vault CRM interface and its custom implementations as compared to existing features in Salesforce CRM.
How to Migrate Existing Data
Don’t worry - there’s nothing Veeva users actually have to do on their part. Everything already in Salesforce will be duplicated into Vault CRM, and the migration will happen systematically. And any information added during the transition period will be stored in both areas.
What Should You Worry About?
If you’re part of the 62% of users who applied significant customizations to your Salesforce environments through proprietary tools (such as APEX, lightning components, etc.), they’ll need to be migrated to the primary language technologies used to build this new Vault CRM layer (i.e., JAVA). This could take up to a couple of weeks or months, depending on the architecture of these implementations.
But as part of the effort to make the migration more seamless, Veeva will provide inventories of those existing customizations, displaying what those items are, which are actually in use, and which are no longer relevant.
Good news for the other 38% of users who have implemented very minimal customizations, the impact of the transition is going to be very minimal.
Assemble is Here to Help
By mapping out your transition journey today, your team can be fully prepared to take advantage of the changes to come right from the get-go. And if you have questions, let the Assemble team help. We pride ourselves on being Veeva Marketing experts, so we’re staying on top of all the latest regarding the big move and how you can get the most out of the CRM moving forward. Contact us to chat about your goals today.