For years, pilots pushing the limits of high-speed flight believed there was an invisible wall—a force that made it impossible to break the sound barrier. Their planes rattled. Their controls froze. It was a barrier that was quite literally slowing them down.

Then, in 1947, Chuck Yeager shattered that belief, proving that with the right design and technology, the sound barrier wasn’t a barrier at all. In the years that followed, aircraft technology evolved, making supersonic flight not just possible, but routine.

We believe life sciences could be at a similar moment of technological revolution—not about flight, but about the business systems we rely on. Our industry is at a defining crossroads—a moment where agentic solutions and the shifts in the CRM vendor landscape allow us to flip the script on the CRM.

Some may focus solely on business continuity in CRM upgrades and migrations, but that’s not enough. Now is the time to drive disruptive value by solving long-standing industry challenges like cross-functional coordination.

Just like engineers redesigned planes for speed, we can design CRM systems to help teams work faster and better together in service of the customer, which is essential for any business working to deliver personalized experiences to drive better patient outcomes.

As the spectrum of customer needs has grown, the life sciences industry has created more and more roles to address these needs, however these roles often operate in silos, devoid of the customer context that the other functions bring.

This function-led model makes everything harder than it needs to be. It paralyzes teams as each function focuses on its own customer tasks without understanding the full journey of engagement from the organization—what came before and what follows. Ownership of some tasks are unclear, abstracted in a RACI playbook on a shelf somewhere. Each function optimizes its own slice of the process, leveraging data, technology and insights—but missing the bigger picture. In using the CRM itself, too often the insights are limited in their utility and engagement falls short.

When we started talking to pharma and life sciences CDIOs and CIOs, we heard all of this and more:

• “The real value is tying CRM all the way through the enterprise and making it about the customer. We need to get to an orchestrated outcome that is beyond the sales rep and appropriately integrates medical and commercial.”
• “Like COVID-19, the CRM vendor decisions are forcing us to rethink. We cannot be constrained by the old approaches—separation of commercial and medical. We must innovate and think holistically about this opportunity and make CRM a differentiator.”
• “Thinking of the end-to-end value chain, there is relevant R&D information that isn’t used on the other end, and vice versa. We would like to create a holistic experience using all data and currently sitting in multiple siloes.”

They want to drive technology that enables what the entire business is trying to do, not just parts of it.

These leaders clearly see how we’ve only begun to address the barriers life sciences customers face. To date, we’ve largely focused on addressing customer barriers related to unmet medical and clinical needs—explaining why a product should be considered.

But the “how” of navigating the healthcare system is becoming just as critical. We’re in a world of complex specialty therapeutics, convoluted market access landscapes, regional and local variations in decision making and healthcare. Customer barriers are now about things like the availability and infrastructure of the office to handle prior authorizations, injection training and monitoring, pharmacy overrides, diagnostic protocols, system pathways and many more. These hurdles have little to do with the clinical efficacy or safety benefits of a product, yet still hinder the customer journey.

In our minds, the solution is clear: It’s time to map customer journey barriers first, then let the CRM run the right plays, deploying the different roles, channels and content at the right time, for a seamless, compliant way to truly become customer-first.

A customer-first CRM isn’t about incremental improvements, it’s about a bold shift that brings together multiple benefits to create real change:

• Clarity and focus in the operating model: Cross-functional teams operate with clarity of plays, aligning efforts around barriers instead of tackling isolated, functional tasks without seeing the big picture. This streamlined approach simplifies execution and strengthens coordination.
• Faster time to value: With the right context and content in hand, every role or channel executes its plays more effectively, accelerating outcomes. Modular, agentic solutions adapt in real time, ensuring smooth adjustments as needs evolve.
• Experiences that work for customers: A unified approach allows the CRM to orchestrate actions across teams with effective plays, eliminating friction, addressing the specific customer barrier and creating more seamless, personalized and dynamic customer experiences.
• Experiences that work for your people: With this approach, we’re providing actual utility in the CRM for every user by providing the necessary plays and orchestrating among the teams. The technology does it for you, avoiding the need to reengineer every functional process and workflow.

When it comes to execution, this method is based on a simple way to run the right plays regularly, using technology as an enabler. Here’s a snapshot of how it feels in practice:

Traditional CRM

1. Focus the CRM on roles or “jobs to be done” in sales, medical, patient or access functions
2. Wait months for changes to the CRM
3. Try to implement
4. Watch teams fumble
5. Get little or no change in removing customer barriers
6. Repeat

Customer-first CRM

1. Focus on the specific barriers each customer faces
2. Create “plays” consisting of the answers to five simple questions to help overcome the barriers
3. Deploy agents to orchestrate the play via the CRM
4. Learn continuously until the barrier is removed

To get there, the answer is not to bolt new functionality onto the hull of existing CRM platforms, which balloon both capital and operating expenditures in the process. The key is to rethink the CRM platform as an ecosystem that integrates core CRM capabilities with an agentic system, delivering proactive and reactive intelligence, enhanced productivity and a consumer-grade experience.

A modular, yet scalable approach can reduce complexity in the design, making today’s system of context a system of context, intelligence and engagement (see Figure 1).

Aligning your CRM strategy to remove chosen barriers requires answering just five key questions. These questions span both your workforce and CRM, offering a holistic view of how to work smarter, not harder.

And while your given barriers may include traditional medical and clinical challenges, they will also stem from the complexities of the healthcare system itself.

See Figure 2 for the questions that form the basis for organizational plays to address customer barriers.

The combined answers to the five questions form the foundation for executing the play with human-machine collaboration. They help technologists determine how data and AI can support each role by identifying barriers for customers, triggering workflows, surfacing relevant context, routing content and enabling compliant practice and learning through agentic support.

In Figure 3, the organization has identified several customer barriers for their brands. One of these barriers is that HCPs believe there’s no need to treat beyond the standard of care for most patients. This barrier is flagged for Dr. Jain. Once it is flagged, it allows the CRM to run the play, deploying the primary roles, channels and content at the right time.

Pilots didn’t break the sound barrier by flying the same old planes; they had to rethink how planes were built. The same is true for businesses today. The systems we use can’t be what prevents us from moving at the speed we want.

The vision for your CRM shouldn’t be to just store information—it should help teams move faster, work together and adapt to whatever comes next. In a world that’s always changing, companies have two choices: keep struggling with functional siloed tools or build something that breaks barriers and propels us into a new age.

Questions? Reach out to your ZS team or join our webinar explaining more about our customer-first approach to commercial success.