Migrating from Veeva to Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud: An Indegene Handbook

Executive Summary

Life sciences CRM landscape is at a pivotal inflection point. Veeva has announced the end of its long-standing partnership with Salesforce by September 2025, while Salesforce has responded with the launch of its Life Sciences Cloud (SFLC) in partnership with IQVIA. This development represents a decisive shift for pharmaceutical, biotech, and MedTech organizations that have long relied on Veeva CRM as their system of engagement.

Key risks to manage :

Quick-win opportunities :

This paper is designed for CxOs, IT leaders, and Commercial and Medical executives evaluating their CRM strategy in response to these market shifts. It introduces Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud, outlines its four core pillars, and details the six migration streams that must be carefully orchestrated for a successful transition.

The objective is clear: to help organizations move confidently toward a modular, AI-enabled CRM future, while protecting the integrity of regulated systems and ensuring seamless continuity for field, medical, and patient-facing teams.

What is Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud?

Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud (SFLC) is an end-to-end intelligent engagement platform designed specifically for the life sciences industry, including pharmaceutical, biotech, and MedTech organizations. Built on Salesforce’s trusted, HIPAA-ready, and GxP-compliant foundation, SFLC unifies clinical, medical, and commercial operations. It enables organizations to harmonize data across disparate sources and deliver data-driven, compliant, and personalized experiences for both healthcare professionals and patients.

Powered by Agentforce, Salesforce’s digital labor platform, SFLC integrates AI, data, and industry expertise to automate routine tasks, orchestrate engagement, and accelerate decision-making across the life sciences value chain. For organizations planning a CRM migration to cloud, SFLC provides a scalable, future-ready foundation that aligns with best practices in Salesforce CRM implementation.

Through deep partnerships with organizations such as IQVIA and integrations with real-time data sources, SFLC helps life sciences companies break down silos, maintain regulatory compliance, and achieve faster time to value. It supports a hybrid CRM migration strategy, allowing enterprises to modernize engagement while retaining critical regulated systems. The result is a single, unified platform for the future of healthcare engagement.

Core Pillars of Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud

SFLC’s capabilities are organized into four core pillars.

1. Salesforce Platform: The Foundation

The Salesforce Platform provides essential capabilities such as workflow automation (Flow), secure data access, analytics, and omnichannel user interfaces. MuleSoft integration ensures seamless connectivity with other enterprise systems. Organizations can also build custom applications and AI-powered agents on this foundation.

2. Data Cloud: The Unification Layer

Data Cloud establishes a single source of truth for patients, HCPs, and HCOs. Its Zero Copy architecture, combined with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), ensures real-time, accurate, and integrated data across clinical, medical, and commercial workflows. This layer eliminates silos, enabling personalized engagement, advanced analytics, and insights-driven decision-making without the need for complex data replication or heavy ETL processes.

3. Life Sciences Cloud Modules: The Process Layer

4. Agentforce AI: The Experience Layer

Agentforce functions as an intelligent assistant that overlays all workflows. Role-based AI agents support MSLs, field reps, patient services teams, and other stakeholders by generating insights, automating routine tasks, drafting communications, and recommending the next-best actions.

Roadmap and Pricing Editions of Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud

Salesforce released its Life Sciences Cloud roadmap earlier this year, outlining the phased rollout of features over the next 18 months.

The figure below maps the planned features against the Salesforce roadmap for clarity.

FAQ: Does Life Sciences Cloud replace existing clinical, medical, and patient systems, or complement them?

Life Sciences Cloud is intended as a strategic complement rather than a one-to-one replacement of validated systems such as CTMS, EDC, PV, or Veeva Vault. Salesforce positions LSC as an orchestration and engagement platform, supporting a hybrid CRM migration strategy for life sciences companies.

Salesforce has already included patient services and certain clinical engagement features in general availability (such as recruitment and enrollment primitives, inventory management, and patient services tooling). However, deeper capabilities in clinical automation, customer engagement, and Agentforce remain on the roadmap and will be delivered in staged releases.

For regulated source-of-truth functions, the recommended pattern is to integrate LSC for engagement and orchestration while maintaining validated systems as the authoritative records. In practice, this approach allows organizations to benefit from modern Salesforce CRM implementation while continuing to rely on CTMS, EDC, PV, and Vault as validated systems of record.

On the commercial side, LSC is particularly strong. It leverages Salesforce’s proven CRM capabilities, including omnichannel engagement, rep and MSL enablement, HCP 360, analytics, and automation. For enterprises exploring Salesforce Service Cloud implementation or broader commercial transformation, LSC helps close the loop between clinical evidence and commercial action.

Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud Editions and Pricing

Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud is offered in four editions, each designed to meet different maturity levels across commercial, medical, and clinical teams. The table below reflects publicly listed prices as of August 2025, following Salesforce’s 6% price adjustment across Enterprise and Unlimited editions.

Note: Prices are per user per month and reflect Salesforce’s public listings.

Key Pricing Considerations

Sample “All-In” Scenario for a Mid-Sized Pharma

Team Size: 100 field reps

Edition: Unlimited ($555 per user per month) → ~$55,500 per month (~$666,000 per year)

Add-ons: Salesforce Maps, Sales Enablement, Medical Email Generation (~$120,000 per year combined)

AI Usage: Agentforce pilots with ~2M Flex Credits (~$150,000 per year)

Estimated All-In License Cost: ~$950,000–$1.0M annually (before discounts)

Note: This estimate excludes migration, validation, training, and integration costs, which require a domain-centric technology partner familiar with modern workflows, compliance, and molecule-to-market journeys.

How Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud Differs from Veeva Vault

Several key architectural and strategic differences distinguish Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud from the traditional Veeva ecosystem.

Platform vs. Suite Approach

Veeva’s ecosystem is built around specialized applications (Vault CRM, Vault PromoMats, Vault RIM, etc.), each focused on a specific domain. SFLC, by contrast, is built as one extensible, unified platform. All SFLC modules share the same data model and core services, reducing data fragmentation and eliminating duplicate integrations. For example, an HCP record enriched in Salesforce Data Cloud is available simultaneously across Sales, Medical, and Clinical modules.

AI-Native Architecture

SFLC seamlessly incorporates AI from the outset. Agentforce embeds real-time recommendations, summaries, and automation directly into user workflows. For instance, instead of manually preparing call notes, a sales representative can request “key points from last year’s interactions with Dr. Smith” and instantly receive a digest. Veeva, by contrast, is adding AI features incrementally (such as AI-certified content review partnerships). Salesforce also offers built-in predictive analytics through Einstein AI, supporting use cases like sales forecasting and patient risk scoring, which Veeva lacks natively.

Unified Data Layer

SFLC’s Data Cloud provides a single source of truth for HCPs, HCOs, patients, trials, and outcomes. This enables integrated profiles that span CRM data, trial data, and third-party sources such as claims or EHRs. Veeva’s architecture traditionally requires separate integrations between Vault CRM and Vault RIM/Quality systems. In SFLC, clinical and commercial data coexist, enabling smoother coordination. Notably, Salesforce continues to partner with H1 and IQVIA for HCP reference data and announced a OneKey connector for HCP data in late 2025.

Ecosystem and Integration

SFLC benefits from Salesforce’s broad ecosystem. Native integrations with Tableau CRM, Slack, MuleSoft, and other Salesforce clouds provide access to a vast partner network and reusable components. Marketing Cloud and Slack, for example, extend automation and collaboration capabilities with minimal integration effort. By contrast, Veeva environments often require custom integrations—even between Veeva CRM and Veeva Vault—for use cases such as sample compliance or multichannel marketing.

Compliance and Security Flexibility

Both Salesforce and Veeva are built for regulated life sciences. Veeva Vault CRM is GxP-validated out of the box, with FDA/EMA audit-ready processes. Salesforce takes a more flexible approach. Using Salesforce Shield (audit trails, data masking, etc.) and third-party validation frameworks such as Sware, organizations can design custom compliant workflows. In other words, Salesforce provides a configurable compliance toolbox, while Veeva delivers fixed, pre-validated templates.

Strategic consideration: The choice between SFLC and Veeva often comes down to breadth versus depth. Veeva emphasizes deeper, purpose-built life sciences functionality, particularly around content management and samples. Salesforce, in turn, emphasizes a broader, AI-driven platform with a future-ready roadmap. The reality today is that Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud can replace most core CRM functions and provides a vision for integrated engagement. However, Veeva Vault continues to set the standard for regulated content, quality, and R&D systems, especially in clinical and medical domains.

Hybrid Path: The Near-Term Future of Life Sciences Cloud Adoption

Veeva currently holds the majority of the market share in life sciences technology solutions. Migrating to SFLC requires careful consideration of which systems to retain and which to replace, even when starting with Salesforce as the commercial CRM platform.

The table below summarizes commercial-use-case Veeva solutions, their SFLC counterparts based on announced roadmaps, and where gaps remain:

This hybrid approach allows organizations to leverage SFLC for intelligent engagement and orchestration, while continuing to rely on Veeva for regulated, validated, or specialized processes.

Mapping the CRM Stakeholder Journey in a Hybrid Environment

In a hybrid healthcare ecosystem, understanding how CRM stakeholders interact across multiple touchpoints is critical for delivering a seamless experience. This journey maps how stakeholders, including Key Account Management, Marketing, Data, Digital, and IT teams, engage with CRM systems at each stage of their workflow.

By visualizing these interactions, organizations can identify opportunities to:

The following journey highlights the flow of interactions, showing where stakeholders’ responsibilities overlap, where collaboration is essential, and where hybrid tools enable a more connected and efficient experience.

6 Key Migration Workstreams for Pharma Teams

Migrating from Veeva CRM to Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud (SFLC) is not a simple lift-and-shift. It requires careful planning, staged execution, and attention to data architecture, business processes, and regulatory compliance. The main workstreams global pharma companies should consider include:

1. Data Migration

Data is the foundation and getting it right is critical. A clear approach is needed for mastering data, transactional records, and historical content.

2. Integrations

Hybrid coexistence is often unavoidable in the near term.

Agentforce AI Integration

Salesforce introduces role-specific AI agents that transform engagement for HCPs, patients, investigators, and internal teams. Their effectiveness depends on trusted, regulated data from Veeva Vault and partner systems. A hybrid strategy ensures Salesforce agents drive engagement while integrations provide compliant, validated data.

3. Content Migration

Content drives daily user interactions, so accurate migration is highly visible. Organizations must convert content into SFLC structure while ensuring rendering is consistent.

Key Content Types:

4. Process Re-Engineering

Systems migration alone is not enough; business processes must adapt to Salesforce design and roadmap.

5. User Migration and Change Management

Migration is also about people.

6. Validation & Compliance

Regulatory approval is essential.

Best Practices for Global Multi-Brand CRM Migration from Veeva to Salesforce

Successfully migrating from Veeva CRM to Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud across multiple brands and regions requires strategic planning and execution. The following best practices have proven effective:

Future-Proofing CRM in Pharma

Migrating from Veeva Vault CRM to Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud is a strategic initiative to future-proof an organization’s CRM and engagement platform. The unified, AI-enhanced Salesforce platform enables integrated data and smarter workflows across commercial, medical, and clinical domains.

This transition should follow a well-defined CRM migration strategy, not a single cutover. By identifying which Veeva capabilities to replace, such as sales force automation and digital engagement, and which to retain, including Vault for regulated content and quality, organizations can achieve the best of both worlds.

Key success factors include strong executive sponsorship, phased rollout, rigorous validation, and clear Salesforce data migration best practices. Costs and risks are significant; analysts note that CRM migration to cloud platforms like Salesforce can be “long, expensive, and risky” if not executed properly. These risks can be mitigated with structured Salesforce CRM implementation approaches and experienced partners.

For many enterprises, choosing the right Salesforce Service Cloud implementation pathway is just as critical as adoption of new engagement capabilities. Done right, it transforms not only technology but also ways of working.

At Indegene, we help global pharma and biotech companies navigate this complex transition, ensuring that CRM modernization not only meets today’s business needs but also positions teams for innovation and sustainable growth in the future.

Talk to us to learn more.