Another Salesforce.com vendor enters the pharma field-sales arena

The cloud-based Salesforce1 software platform has proven popular with pharma sales teams, notably for being the foundation of Veeva (Pleasanton, CA), now a major player in sales support and multichannel marketing throughout the pharma industry. Along the way, there have been other vendors deploying solutions based on the Salesforce platform, notably 360Vantage, the system now being marketed by IMS Health (Danbury, CT). Now another player is entering the field: CustomerTImes, a New York firm with substantial operations in Europe.

According to Alexey Patsko, VP of business development at the firm, although it already has clients wins for its CT Pharma solution with the non-US operations of major firms like Abbott Nutrition and Takeda, its sweet spot is small or emerging drug firms, or companies opening new operations in emerging markets of the world. “We believe that we have a better, more affordable cost proposition to make to generics companies, and manufacturers working in emerging markets,” he says. In addition, its technical expertise, especially with cloud-based solutions that run on mobile devices, “is better than iRep,” Veeva’s sales-automation solution.

CustomerTImes has been certified as the only Salesforce1 independent software vendor (ISV) operating in life sciences, but it’s hard to discern how significant that is. Veeva has a multi-year partnering agreement with Salesforce; and it and IMS Health, among others, are listed in the AppExchange store at Salesforce’s website.