On Demand Webinar: How Leading Teams Use Salesforce To Take Control Of Research And Grants Management

Grants teams are being asked to do more, prove more, and move faster. Request volumes are growing, compliance expectations keep rising, and most teams are running leaner than ever. Yet many still manage this work with legacy systems, email chains, and spreadsheets.

In our recent webinar our Mavens, PK Kanumury, Founder and Head of Alliances, and Dave Henderson, Practice Lead for Research & Grants, showed what modern research and grants management looks like when the business team owns the process.

“Research and grants is a highly collaborative process between internal and external stakeholders, and it carries real liabilities. So capturing the details matters, and so does visibility into every stakeholder approval at every step along the way.”

– PK Kanumury, Founder and Head of Alliances at Mavens

Here’s what they covered.

Why Research And Grants Management Needs A Platform They Own

Mavens® Research & Grants Cloud is a Mavens product that runs on Salesforce. It was built around one idea: business teams should be able to own and control their process without waiting on a vendor, IT ticket, or software release.

One request record serves everyone involved. Each group gets its own views, permissions, and actions tied to the business process. Compare that to most legacy systems, which stitch the work together with email, spreadsheets, and change tickets, adding overhead and delays at every step.

“Scaling really means being able to add programs, markets, change what programs we’re addressing, what markets, and what are the business rules without waiting on a vendor or release. And that only really works if the rules are a configuration layer that your team owns.”

– Dave Henderson, Practice Lead, Research & Grants at Mavens

Building on Salesforce also gives teams the trusted security, global availability, and scale they need. Research & Grants Cloud sits alongside Medical Information Cloud, Scientific Publications Cloud, and Regulated Content Cloud as part of the Mavens Medical Affairs Suite.

Every Request Type, One Platform

Research, medical education, and expanded access requests don’t follow the same path. Research & Grants Cloud handles this with lifecycles: each request type gets its own stages, transitions, and permissions, all within the same instance.

Dave walked through three examples:

Investigator-initiated research: Many stages with branching paths. Teams can kick off manual processes like a change in scope, a hold, or early termination of a study.
Medical education: A faster cycle with fewer steps. Independence is key, so the funder has no say over content, faculty, or learners, and there’s no drug shipment or forecasting involved.
Expanded access: No funding at all, and time is critical. In an emergency case, the process may run in hours, with controls to confirm the request is medically appropriate and that product can be supplied legally.

All three can live side by side, each fenced off with its own behaviors, processes, and permissions.

Changes In Hours, Not Sprints

In the live demo, Dave worked as a program administrator: a business-side super user who manages forms, workflows, and programs without needing full Salesforce administrator rights.

Form Builder

Program administrators build and change request forms themselves. Highlights from the demo:

Budgets at the line-item level: Split costs into categories, apply overhead only to the types you choose, and reuse the same component to collect actuals during reconciliation.
Country-specific attestations: Show the right attestations based on the requester’s country, and block submission until they’re accepted.
Conditional fields and related records: Show questions only when they apply, and let requesters add related records, such as drug requests for forecasting.

Workflow Builder

Workflows are shown visually and stored as Salesforce records. In the demo, Dave split interventional studies into their own screening workflow. The new path added a safety reporting plan check and brought in a drug supply lead for forecasting, all before scientific review.

Activities are assigned automatically based on business rules like program, country, and therapeutic area or product.

How fast is it? Dave said a new program can be configured in a couple of hours, and a workflow in a few minutes. Cloning an existing form or workflow makes it even faster.

“Let’s get down to managing the business process, not changing software,” he said.

What Requesters And Program Managers See

For external requesters, forms and programs appear on the portal as soon as an admin checks a box. There’s no web developer and no publishing process. Requesters pick a program from a tile view, fill out the form, review a summary, and submit.

For program managers, the new request is picked up by the right workflow right away. In the demo, the interventional workflow fired as expected. It created three activities: two for the program manager and one for the supply lead. Once all three were complete, the request moved on to scientific review.

Managers with elevated permissions can complete or reassign activities for a colleague. The system tracks who each activity was assigned to and who actually completed it.

A Full Audit Trail, Built In

In research and grants management, “who did what, and when” is a compliance requirement. Research & Grants Cloud combines standard Salesforce field tracking with a big objects change log, so even long text fields are tracked over time.

Every change is gathered into one view showing: