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Veeva Vault CRM is the CRM pharma companies use to plan and record their reps' visits to doctors, with sales, marketing and medical on one platform, one customer database and AI built in. It is Veeva's CRM rebuilt on its own platform, Vault. If you search for Veeva CRM, you will find both names. This article covers what it does, how a visit works from start to finish, what Engage, Approved Email and Campaign Manager add, where the AI agents come in, and what moving from Veeva CRM to Vault CRM involves.
Joaquín País, CEO of ShowerThinking, also explains it on video:
What is Veeva CRM?
If you have ever met a pharma rep with an iPad, there is a good chance it was running Veeva CRM. It is the CRM most pharma companies use to prepare, carry out and record their visits to doctors and hospitals.
Veeva describes Vault CRM as a CRM for life sciences that connects sales, marketing and medical teams on one platform, with a shared customer database and embedded AI. In practice, it holds:
- The profile of every doctor and every hospital.
- Territory and account plans.
- Visits, in person and remote.
- Approved content and emails.
- Each doctor's consent.
- Events and the work of the medical team.
The easiest way to understand it is to follow one rep through one visit.
Before the visit: the doctor's account
Before seeing a doctor, the rep opens the account. A timeline shows every contact the company has had with that doctor: visits, emails, medical questions, and whether the doctor opened the last thing they were sent. The CRM also shows the doctor's preferred channels, a suggested next action and the notes from the previous call. The visit starts from what the company already knows.
During the visit: CLM, reactions and medical inquiries
During the visit, the rep presents from the iPad with CLM, the presentation app, whose content arrives already approved from Veeva PromoMats. As the rep goes through the slides, the CRM records which ones were shown and how the doctor reacted to each message.
If the doctor asks something the rep cannot answer, like a dosing question for a specific group of patients, the rep opens a medical inquiry from the same screen and the medical information team answers it. When the visit ends, the slides, the reactions and the inquiry are already in the call report.
Remote meetings, Approved Email and chat: Veeva Engage
A lot of this work no longer happens face to face. With Engage, the rep meets the doctor by video, on Engage itself, Microsoft Teams or Zoom, and shares the same approved content. Three buttons let the rep record whether the doctor reacted well, neutrally or badly to each slide, and it all goes into the call report.
Between visits, there are two more channels:
Before any message goes out, the CRM checks consent: what the doctor has agreed to, for which product and on which channel.
Marketing and the field in one system: Campaign Manager
Marketing works in the same CRM. With Campaign Manager, the brand team builds a journey: an audience, say oncologists, a sequence of emails from the brand, emails the rep sends personally, and suggestions for the rep to follow up. The content comes from PromoMats, and the rep sees in the CRM how each doctor responded to the campaign.
Marketing and the field look at the same doctor with the same data, instead of two lists that never quite match. We covered how campaigns used to reach the field in rep suggestions triggered from Marketing Cloud.
AI in Vault CRM
Veeva has put agents inside Vault CRM. These are the two that change a rep's day the most:
- Agentic Call Report. After a visit, the rep just talks: who they met, what they discussed, what the doctor thought and what should happen next. The agent removes the filler words, pulls out the facts and the follow-up tasks, and fills in the structured call report the company still needs. While it does that, it checks the text for compliance risks.
- Conversational assistant. The rep asks, by voice or in writing, what to prioritise today, and the assistant answers with the doctors to see, the open threads from previous notes and the approved content that fits each conversation.
The rep still decides. The agents do the typing and the searching.
What really changes: the call report
What a doctor says about a treatment, in their own words, becomes information the company can read across all its visits.
Veeva CRM and Vault CRM: what changed
The original Veeva CRM was built on top of the Salesforce Platform. Veeva rebuilt it on its own platform, Vault, the same one that runs PromoMats and its other applications, and called it Vault CRM. The old product has an end-of-support date, so every company that uses it has to move.
What moving to Vault CRM involves
For the companies that stay with Veeva, the data model stays the same, so the records and most of the setup move across. What has to be rebuilt are the connections with the company's other systems.
If you are planning the move, start with your data and your integrations: the AI agents depend on both.
Frequently asked questions
Is Veeva CRM the same as Veeva Vault CRM?
Vault CRM is Veeva's CRM rebuilt on its Vault platform. Veeva CRM is the previous version, which ran on the Salesforce Platform and has an end-of-support date.
What is CLM in Veeva?
The presentation app reps use to show approved content to doctors from the iPad. The CRM records which slides were shown and how the doctor reacted to each one.
What is Veeva Engage?
The part of Vault CRM for remote and digital engagement: video meetings on Engage, Microsoft Teams or Zoom, compliant chat with doctors and sharing approved content. Everything is recorded in the call report.
What AI does Vault CRM have?
Agents built into the CRM: the Agentic Call Report, which fills in the call report from what the rep dictates, and a conversational assistant that helps the rep prioritise and prepare each conversation.
What should a company prepare to move to Vault CRM?
The data and the integrations. The data model stays the same, but connections with other systems have to be rebuilt.
Sources
- Veeva, Vault CRM Suite.
- Veeva, Vault CRM Engage.
- Veeva, Vault CRM Approved Email.
- Veeva, Vault CRM Campaign Manager.
- Veeva, Vault CRM demos in the Demo Center.
- Veeva, annual report (Form 10-K): Veeva CRM supported until December 31, 2029.
Moving to Vault CRM?
At ShowerThinking we have been working with Veeva CRM for years, next to the commercial and medical teams of pharma companies. If you want to talk about your migration or about putting the AI agents to work, get in touch.
