The Veeva–Salesforce split isn’t just a technology decision. For Medical Affairs leaders, it’s a forcing function — and the teams that treat it as one will be better positioned than those who wait.
Most Medical Affairs workflow systems were designed for stability. What happens when evidence frameworks evolve? Shifts in engagement models? New integrations are needed? What about planning for AI capabilities?
They lack the flexibility to adapt to change. The result is a growing gap between what you need and what your system can support.
Your Med Affairs Tech Isn’t Built For Change
If you’re leading a Medical Affairs function, the last few years have quietly raised the stakes on a question most teams haven’t formally answered: can our systems keep up with how work actually happens?
The Veeva–Salesforce split has pushed that question into the open. Veeva CRM on Salesforce has officially entered stability mode — security patches only through 2030, no further feature innovation, and migration costs that exclude all customizations and integrations. Whether you’re evaluating your current Salesforce environment, reconsidering Veeva, or navigating what to consolidate, the underlying challenge is the same: Medical Affairs workflows are evolving faster than the systems that support them.
And the gap is starting to show.
Mavens built the Medical Affairs Suite on Salesforce because we kept seeing the pattern — teams working around their systems instead of through them, losing trust in their data, and losing sight of the work that actually matters.
Here’s how to spot it early, understand why it happens, and build something better.
Be On The Lookout For These Failure Signs
Most systems don’t just go into catastrophic failure. The breakdown doesn’t announce itself. It slowly and unassumingly grows.
Status updates require pulling from three different sources. Insights live in inboxes and spreadsheets, not in the system of record. Leadership asks for visibility that sounds reasonable but is difficult to deliver.
On paper, the system might be ‘good enough’. In reality, it’s death by a thousand paper cuts.
Parallel processes get built to keep work moving. Those workarounds become the system. Your system of record stops being the source of truth. Compliance, traceability, and team confidence erode long before anyone says they have a problem.
This is the pattern. And it’s more common than most want to admit.
The Tradeoff Every Medical Affairs Leader Thinks About
When Medical Affairs teams choose or configure systems, they’re usually making a choice between two system types.
| Rigid System Like Veeva | Flexible System Like Salesforce | |
| Workflows | Fixed | Custom |
| Updates | Slower | Faster |
| Strength | Predictable | Adaptable |
| Risk | Assumptions | Inconsistency |
Rigid systems reduce variability but they lock in assumptions about how work should happen. You end up working within the system’s model, not your own.
Flexible systems adapt to how work really happens but without active governance, flexibility quickly becomes inconsistency.
The answer isn’t picking one. It’s building for both: standard workflows that are highly configurable preserve your data when change happens.
The Cost of Staying Rigid Is Becoming Harder To Ignore
What starts as annoyances compounds into something harder to reverse.
Delays in capturing and acting on field insights become routine. Incorporating new data sources takes longer than it should. Rolling out AI-driven capabilities creates more friction than value because the underlying infrastructure isn’t structured to absorb them.
Over time, compliance shifts as well. It either lives inside the system — trackable, auditable, provable — or it lives in people’s inboxes and manual processes. When work moves outside the system, that line becomes impossible to see and impossible to prove.
The real cost isn’t operational. It’s strategic.
Medical Affairs teams spend their time managing process instead of getting science into the hands of the people who need it.
Continuous Change Is Not a Phase
AI capabilities are being introduced faster than most teams can evaluate them. Internal stakeholders want real-time visibility. External expectations around evidence and engagement keep raising the bar.
69% of life sciences/healthcare sector are now prioritizing AI — up 15 percentage points from 2024 — with generative AI overtaking data analytics as the top area of focus.
This is the environment and not a transition period to manage through. Most teams optimized for one thing in the past: speed to go live.
| Optimized for Implementation | Optimized for Evolution | |
| Pattern | Fast go-live → Stable → Friction → Workarounds → Long-term problems | Moderate go-live → Continuous updates → Small changes → Long-term success |
Speed to go live gets your team operational. Speed to adapt determines whether the system holds up — and whether it’s still working for you two years from now.
What “Designing for Adaptability” Actually Means in Practice
Adaptability isn’t just making your system more flexible. It’s designing flexibility that can be governed. In practice, that means:
Evolving environment
Treat your system as continuous, not a finished implementation
Governance first
Build compliance in from day one, not as an afterthought
Platform longevity
Choose for where you’ll be in three years, not go-live speed
For Medical Affairs teams on Salesforce, the platform can support change. The question is whether it’s been structured to do so. Can new workflows be introduced without major rework? Can AI tools be integrated without rebuilding? Are updates continuous, or treated as exceptions?
Teams that approach their systems as evolving environments absorb change more effectively. Teams that treat them as fixed implementations find every change gets slower and more expensive over time.
What the Alternative Actually Looks Like
When a Medical Affairs system is purpose-built for the work, you get systems that teams love to use. The day-to-day experience is fundamentally different.
Insights are captured in the system, not chased down after the fact. Scientific publications, medical information, and research and grants workflows that live in one place, governed consistently, and visible to leadership without heroic effort. AI capabilities that can be layered in because the data foundation is clean and the workflows are structured to support them.
That’s what we built the Mavens® Medical Affairs Suite to do. Not a generic Salesforce implementation. Designed from the ground up for how Medical Affairs teams actually work and built to absorb change as the science, the technology, and the expectations change.
The teams that succeed long-term won’t be the ones that wait on the Veeva–Salesforce split. They’re using it as momentum to build the foundation they should have had all along.
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 break down three questions Medical Affairs teams should ask when evaluating whether their systems will hold up as workflows, technologies, and expectations continue to evolve. 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.
