Clarkston Consulting’s life sciences sales and marketing experts recently attended the 2024 Veeva Commercial Summit held annually in Boston. Veeva clients and partners listened intently over the course of two days as the Veeva team introduced new features and discussed the highly anticipated CRM migration that will take place over the next several years.

This year’s focus centered significantly around cross-functional collaboration – from discussions on optimizing commercial and medical cross-functional collaboration to deep dives on technical connections between the modules in the Veeva ecosystem. 

Key Themes from the 2024 Veeva Commercial Summit 

Below, we dive deeper into four key themes that emerged throughout the conference: 

1. Cross-functional Collaboration:

The first theme aligns with the over-arching focus of the Summit. There’s a big focus around commercial and medical functions getting on the same page to encourage innovation in the medical space. Deep dive sessions like ‘Making Omnichannel Work in Medical Affairs’ spoke to the focus of introducing concepts previously prominent only in the Commercial space to other customer-facing functions. Veeva is also updating functionality like MyInsights to allow marketing and sales teams to use similar tools to surface data and drive their daily activities. One interesting reveal was that MyInsights will now be a core capability rather than an add-on tool. Various offerings from VeevaData Cloud, including Crossix and Compass, got visibility during this year’s conference – focusing on measuring impact of marketing to allow for plan adjustments to better optimize marketing and support sales. Adopting many of these changes and moving toward cross-functional collaboration will require organizations to bring their teams on a transformational journey – or “quest” as some called it. Change management, now more than ever, will continue to be critical for ensuring alignment on new ways of working between the various teams and then adoption of the new technologies to support them.  

2. Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Solutions:

There’s been an evolution around Veeva’s AI strategy. This year, Veeva clarified its position that Generative AI capabilities are not on the immediate roadmap. Instead, Veeva has invested in a direct data API with a 15-minute refresh that partners can leverage to build Generative AI programs. This is a departure from last year’s initial discussions around a Chatbot AI pilot program. The shift created interesting conversation amongst attendees during the keynote, with customers looking for clarity around how the enhancements they were seeing in the roadmap deep dive sessions differed from AI. It seems that Veeva is encouraging partners to tackle the large language model space.  

3. CRM Migration:

This year’s Summit demystified many of the details around Veeva’s CRM migration from the Salesforce to the Vault platform. Several sessions focused on giving clients a framework to support their decisions around migration and the recommended assessment activities that can inform them. A majority of migrations are targeting 2026 – 2029 with a few early adopters starting in 2025 and strategy and assessment activities starting as early as 2024. Veeva clarified expectations for the Vault CRM platform, noting that it will have an identical user interface to the Veeva CRM solution to minimize impact on the 400,000 pharma reps in the system around the world. Veeva also confirmed its plan to support data migration, CRM configuration, and environment management – while recommended clients engage with partners, like Clarkston, to support project management, integration design and development, third- party app development, testing, and validation activities.  

Veeva is also introducing a data migration tool to support migration activities that will be provided to Veeva teams and select Veeva partners. Many clients expressed interest in what integrations will be covered under the integration partner program, to which Veeva shared that this continues to be an evolving list. Veeva’s recommendation continues to be rationalizing customization and custom integrations and reducing the level of complexity clients choose to bring to the new Vault CRM platform. Starting to refine business strategy and assessing existing customization and integrations early will help Veeva clients plan their approach, identify the necessary partners for the journey, and avoid a resource crunch expected in 2028/2029.  

4. System Connections:

Along with a focus on migrating to a single technology core, Veeva emphasized their focus on connections (or cross-module integrations) during the Summit. Enhancements like metadata sharing across PromoMats and MedComms were introduced to create better interoperability within the platform. New solutions on the roadmap, like Campaign Manager coming December 2024, seem to create a one-stop shop within the Veeva Platform for simple integrated email campaigns. These changes build off the cross-functional collaboration and CRM migration trends, creating the plumbing to make that collaboration more seamless. 

To enable the interoperability, data consistency across the Veeva suite was a big push during the Summit as well. Veeva is leading the charge by creating a taxonomy best practice for their clients and enabling automation across the platform that focuses on tagging and linking without end-user intervention.  

Customer Centricity: A Continued Priority 

Customer centricity continues to be a prominent focus for Veeva overall. All sessions came back to the idea of serving the customer. At the Summit, it was shared that true customer centricity – getting the right information to the right people at the right time – is difficult. Veeva’s changes and new features are all meant to serve their customers and, in turn, help providers and patients looking for life-changing therapies.

It will be interesting to see how the themes of cross-functional collaboration, generative AI solutions, CRM migration, and system connections continue to evolve over the next several years. However, having a partner like Clarkston Consulting as a guide through the next chapter of the Veeva journey can help clients set themselves up for success with navigating these trends and more. Reach out to us today.