Choosing the system your Medical Affairs team will run on for the next decade is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make.
Get it right and your team can move faster, adapt to new technology, and integrate AI without starting over. Get it wrong and every change becomes a project, every audit becomes stressful, and every new capability requires a workaround.
Learn From The Past To Prepare For The Future
In our last post, we walked through what Medical Affairs system breakdown looks like and the warning signs to watch for. The added pressure of the Veeva–Salesforce split deadline in 2030 has forced teams everywhere to take a hard look at what works and what doesn’t.
Most platform decisions still get made on the wrong criteria. Speed to go live. What the vendor promised in a demo. What another pharma company chose. What your IT team chose for the enterprise. None of those predict how well the system holds up when the work keeps changing.
Mavens® built the Medical Affairs Suite on Salesforce because we kept seeing teams make this choice based on short-term fit, not long-term design.
Why It’s A Harder Choice Than It Looks
Most Medical Affairs teams are choosing between three options. Each falls short in a different way.
- Veeva gives you guardrails. Predefined workflows, compliance baked in, clear expectations for how work should flow. You don’t have to make many decisions — they’re already made. That works until the work changes and the guardrails become walls.
- Salesforce goes the other way. Flexible, configurable, shaped around your processes. Recognizing the gap, they launched Agentforce Life Sciences to bring more structure and AI capabilities to life sciences teams. It’s a meaningful step forward but it’s still a horizontal platform. The medical affairs specific workflows, compliance requirements, and data structures aren’t built in. It gets you part of the way there. Not all the way.
- Standalone tools are where many teams actually live. A scientific publications system here, a medical information tracker there, grants in a spreadsheet. Each made sense when adopted. Together they create the fragmentation we described in our last post, work scattered across systems, compliance depending on memory, visibility requiring heroic effort.
They all reflect a different philosophy about control, flexibility, and transparency. When you choose a platform, you’re really choosing how much structure you want to live inside — and how much room you’ll need as the work keeps changing.
The goal isn’t choosing between safety and flexibility.
What Medical Affairs teams actually need sits in the middle — the governance and compliance rigor of a purpose-built platform, with the flexibility to evolve as the work changes. None of the three options above fully delivers that. Which is exactly the problem the Mavens® Medical Affairs Suite was built to solve.
Three Questions To Ask Before You Go Into A Vendor Demo
Most teams jump into vendor conversations before they’ve answered the harder internal questions. These aren’t questions for the vendor. They’re questions for you. How you answer them will tell you more about what you need than any demo will.
- Will your Medical Affairs workflows look the same in three years? If yes, a rigid, predefined system is a reasonable bet. If no, or if you’re not sure, you need a platform built to evolve with you, not one that locks in today’s assumptions. Most teams, when they answer honestly, find the answer is no.
- How visible is your entire Medical Affairs stack right now? If leadership can get a confident answer about publications, medical information, and research and grants without someone manually assembling it, your current setup is working. If it requires heroic effort every time, that’s not a reporting problem. It’s a system design problem your next platform needs to solve.
- How are you preparing Medical Affairs for AI? Not in theory. In practice. Do you have clean, structured data? Governed workflows? A single source of truth across your function? AI doesn’t create those foundations, it depends on them. If your system isn’t ready now, adding AI will create more friction than value. Your platform decision and your AI readiness decision are the same decision. Treat them that way.
What Your Answers Are Telling You
If your workflows are still evolving, visibility is scattered, and AI readiness is unclear — the three options most teams start with won’t get you where you need to go.
Veeva works well for teams with stable, well-defined processes that aren’t likely to change. For most Medical Affairs teams today — navigating the Veeva–Salesforce split, planning for AI, and managing work that keeps expanding in scope — that description doesn’t fit.
Generic Salesforce gets you the platform but puts the entire burden of configuration, governance, and Medical Affairs expertise on your team. Agentforce Life Sciences moves in the right direction but isn’t built for the specific workflows, compliance requirements, and data structures Medical Affairs teams run on.
A purpose-built Medical Affairs solution on Salesforce is where those gaps close. The structure and governance your team needs, built in from day one. The configurability to keep up as the science, the technology, and the expectations around your function keep evolving. Publications, medical information, and research and grants in one place — with shared data, shared visibility, and no heroic effort required.
That’s what Mavens® built the Medical Affairs Suite to deliver.
Questions To Bring Into Every Vendor Demo
Whatever platform you evaluate, these are the questions that reveal whether it will actually hold up:
- How does your platform handle workflow changes after go-live, without a full reimplementation?
- Where does compliance live in your system, and what happens when work moves outside it?
- What does AI look like specifically for Medical Affairs, publications, medical information, and research and grants?
- How long does it take to add a new capability after implementation?
- What does your typical customer’s system look like two years after go-live?
Are You Ready For AI? Find Out Now.
Take the AI Readiness Assessment to evaluate where your Medical Affairs tech stack stands today — across workflow flexibility, governance, data integrity, and more.
In the next post, we walk through what a purpose-built Salesforce environment for Medical Affairs actually looks like in practice — and the three things teams get wrong when they try to build it themselves. Medical Affairs teams shouldn’t have to work around their systems. The Mavens® Medical Affairs Suite modernizes medical affairs for scientific publications, medical information, and research & grants.
