Pharmaceutical marketing is at a great inflection point, presenting a massive opportunity for growth and streamlined healthcare provider (HCP) engagement. Currently, in-person and non-personal interactions often miss the mark and are rarely aligned to the individual specific audience or the singular target HCP. This is partly because those engagements are managed through disparate and disconnected platforms.
The cost of HCP disengagement isn’t only limited to missed connections; it ripples outward, impacting providers, patients, and even the future strategic opportunities of pharmaceutical companies. Commercially, one-size-fits-all marketing strategies risk alienating HCPs and eroding brand loyalty.
When HCPs lack timely, relevant information, patients may miss out on crucial treatments, undermining care quality. Surprisingly, only about 25% of companies have robust metrics for evaluating HCP engagement, leaving most without a clear feedback loop for improvement. Further, IT groups spend a third of their time wrangling data and integrating technology to support engagement and insights. (Study Reveals Integration Challenges Threaten Digital Transformation, With Organizations Spending on Average $3.5 Million on Custom Integration Labor Costs, March 30, 2021.)
Whether you’re investing billions in your field force or competing with limited budgets, the launch of Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud (LSC) presents the opportunity to shift from transactional to relational management, offering a fully integrated solution that can yield greater overall return on investment and provide timely information to HCPs for improved decision-making in healthcare.
Like professionals in most industries, HCPs are highly constrained for time, flooded with a mix of messages from many different channels, and managing demanding workloads while trying to stay current in a rapidly evolving field. Consequently, new, potentially life-changing treatments don’t make their way to the patients who could benefit from them while providers juggle the demands of their workday.
To advance our ability to effectively engage HCPs, pharma marketers must overcome several industry challenges:
Fewer than half of HCPs are considered accessible to pharmaceutical reps, meaning on-site visits and in-person dialogues have become rarer. Many HCPs prefer concise digital touchpoints over lengthy meetings, emphasizing the need for relevant and timely communications.
The proliferation of channels—email, social media, EHR portals, and more—often leads to inconsistent messaging. With only 30% of companies effectively integrating these platforms with consistent, situationally appropriate messaging, digital fatigue is now well-past a growing concern—it has undermined brand trust and rep effectiveness.
As frameworks like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA take center stage, organizations must work harder to remain nimble and remain on the right side of compliance. Every point of digital interaction brings obligations around data usage and privacy, a necessary complication that can slow innovation unless carefully managed.
A unified view of the HCP and the patient type they are treating is often missing. Data may lie scattered across patient management systems, marketing automation tools, or legacy CRMs. Compounding this challenge, strict privacy guidelines such as GDPR demand heightened vigilance about consent and data usage. When data remains siloed, the promise of personalized engagement is difficult to fulfill.
Data-driven decision-making lags rhetoric. Barely 25% of organizations possess reliable metrics for gauging their promotional impact, which means that promotional spend may be wasted on activities with uncertain return. Without robust analytics, it’s impossible to refine strategies or link engagement efforts to patient outcomes.
Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud (LSC) is more than a field engagement CRM replacement. LSC leverages data models, workflow enhancements, and process enhancements—all specialized to Pharmaceutical and MedTech organizations to unify clinical, medical, and commercial interactions.
While LSC is purpose built to service the demands of the industry, its real potency lies in the additional synergy of three powerful components, each critical for elevating HCP engagement:
Life Sciences Cloud is tightly coupled with Data Cloud. Data Cloud is built to make it easier to connect, unify, and activate customer data from any source for people, processes, and agentic automation at the point of need (local market, field force, marketing automation, agents, etc.). Think centralized governance with decentralized use built to facilitate customer engagement.
With Marketing Cloud add-ons, Life Sciences Cloud powers orchestrated journeys across field force, email, chat, SMS, and beyond, making sure each HCP encounter feels personal, timely, and relevant.
Agentforce opens the doors to unlimited new opportunities to support life sciences engagement. Some digital labor will be built-in, and a platform development tool enables organizations to scale digital labor across their unique workflow needs.
Life Sciences Cloud revolutionizes the HCP relationship, moving away from traditional channel-focused strategies toward innovative, persona-based coordination powered by AI agents. This transformative approach combines known attributes, customer preferences, and behavioral indicators to create truly personalized interactions.
Instead of merely acting as a highly influential yet disconnected channel, imagine each field rep is equipped with an Agentforce AI agent. The agent crafts a tailored call-planning guide, offering customized recommendations on content and educational focus for each HCP based on their writing behavior, brand perceptions, and influences from peers. Reps can then enhance details, particularly for non-prescribing doctors, by leaning into the barriers or biases they experience, addressing challenges directly related to that HCP’s office business, and save time retreading less than impactful reasons to believe for the brand to this HCP.
AI agents transform digital assets and email marketing from generic blasts into individually tailored journeys that align with business objectives and with the needs of each specific HCP. For instance, prescribing doctors might receive resources for their office to expedite PA or access elements that slow office staff and create redundancy. Additionally, they could be kept apprised of other HCPs like themselves leading the charge in their therapeutic area and identify opportunities for deep peer-to-peer interactions beyond simple brand benefits. No email is sent without a deep understanding of the in-person rep detailing experience, removing the disconnect from NPP and personal interactions.
Instead of viewing media as another channel, AI agents radically enhance its strategic deployment. Using advanced hyper-targeting, digital advertising can be selectively engaged or suppressed based on the AI’s interpretation of HCP signals—whether from prescribing behaviors, event participation, content consumption, or even influential HCP network cues. Technologies such as Publicis’ CoreAI allow seamless integration with Salesforce, optimizing media spend and engagement with precision.
Migrating to Life Sciences Cloud naturally brings platform modernization, a simplified tech stack, unified data sources, and improved workflow efficiency. Those benefits alone can be instrumental in driving operational agility. However, a migration to LSC isn’t simply about “doing digital better.” It’s about transforming engagement into something HCPs value through interactions that feel coordinated, timely, and tailored to their clinical and professional context, which may ultimately facilitate better care for patients.
While the migration reduces technical debt, the greater ROI will come from rethinking engagement altogether. Reimagining the HCP experience through Salesforce LSC is a strategic opportunity, but it requires deliberate, well-sequenced execution:
As a leading Salesforce implementation partner, Publicis has been working with Salesforce on several co-innovation workstreams, including an expanded partnership to incorporate Salesforce AgentForce into our CoreAI platform, creating an end-to-end Connected Media and CRM solution. This integration combines Publicis Groupe’s Connected Media assets from Epsilon and Lotame with Salesforce’s Connected CRM platforms. Through agentic integration between Publicis CoreAI and Salesforce AgentForce, clients will be able to connect identities across both client and CoreAI tenants, facilitating precision PESO planning and execution.
This new capability will generate previously unavailable insights, expand audience intelligence, and optimize segmentation across all channels. Shared clients will be able to scale their data and customer-serving processes through agentic integration.
HCP engagement strategies must evolve if life sciences companies are to remain competitive in today’s data-centric and AI-driven environment. Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud offers an integrated, intelligent ecosystem capable of managing everything from data analytics and content strategy to compliance and field operations.
For organizations prepared to do the upfront planning—especially around data migration, change management, and content optimization—the payoff can be enormous: faster adoption of new therapies, stronger relationships with key opinion leaders, and a more agile response to market shifts. The healthcare landscape will only grow more complex in the coming years, and those who proactively harness AI and connected data strategies will be best positioned to thrive. If modernizing your commercial operations is a priority, now is the prime moment to consider all that Life Sciences Cloud has to offer.
JACQUE ROSSI
jacque.rossi@publicissapient.com