When I posted recently about the Veeva vs Salesforce debate now that the two pharma CRM companies are breaking up, I got over 150 responses. Many hit on a common theme:
Why just the two power-players when there are billions of dollars on the line?
The answer reveals a lot about the pharma industry. Sadly, we are known more for being safe than for speedy innovation and risk taking.
First, a reminder of the big decision facing pharma companies:
Veeva is a cloud CRM service built on top of Salesforce that caters to life sciences companies, and the two have been partners since 2007 and dominate the market. But they are set to split in September 2025 and have already started competing, and pharma and other life science brands will have to choose.
Veeva has 47 of the top 50 pharma brands worldwide as customers and topped $2 billion in annual revenue as a niche life science business, while Salesforce is far bigger and controls the overall CRM market with a 22% market share.
In a normal market, the idea of a two-horse race wouldn’t make sense; you’d have Coke and Pepsi but you’d also have Dr. Pepper, Sprite, ginger ale, root beer, etc. That philosophy doesn’t really apply in pharma in most cases.
It’s easy to see why: We are in a tightly-regulated industry with a lot more than money on the line. Many of our decisions affect the health of human lives - though certainly picking a cloud CRM offering has lower stakes than deciding which X-ray machine to pick.
There will always be competition in business, and we will see more firms pop up to try and offer a “third way” in this split. I don’t want to count them out or diminish what they are doing. But they face long odds.
One analysis found 128 competitors to Veeva who had a combined $737 million in funding raised - a drop in the bucket compared to Veeva’s $30 billion market cap. And Salesforce’s value is 8x Veeva’s.
Some have or will be bought out by larger companies like Oracle, which will help them get on a closer playing field.
I’d expect as the deadline to pick a new CRM draws near over the next 15 months or so that companies will sit back and watch which option the big firms choose, and then fall in line behind them.
The old cliche “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM” is true in business as a whole, and doubly true in pharma.