Power Customer Engagement

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe key challenges facing commercial and medical teams in life sciences today.
  
• Explain how Life Sciences Cloud supports commercial planning, HCP engagement, and compliance.
  
• Identify the role of Agentforce in driving intelligent execution across sales and medical teams.
  
• Define the core tools for managing products, territories, accounts, and activities.
  
• Explain how dashboards help managers monitor progress and performance, and improve engagement strategies.
  

A New Era for Customer Engagement

Commercial and medical teams today face mounting complexity. As pricing reforms, access restrictions, and patent cliffs (the sharp revenue drop that occurs when a drug loses exclusivity and generics enter the market) tighten margins, expectations for personalized engagement keep rising. HCPs want tailored, relevant conversations based on their specialty, practice setting, and scientific interests.

At the same time, field reps and medical science liaisons (MSLs) are stretched thin. Reps cover broader territories with tighter controls. MSLs manage complex engagement while operating within strict compliance boundaries. And across both roles, disconnected tools and stale data eat away at productivity.

Traditional CRM extensions can’t keep up. Commercial success now demands strategic planning, precise engagement, and agile, data-driven execution.

Life Sciences Cloud for Customer Engagement (LSC for Customer Engagement) delivers exactly that. It gives commercial and medical teams a unified foundation to plan smarter, act faster, and engage more meaningfully at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

Let’s see how it works.

Distinct Roles, Shared Goals

LSC for Customer Engagement supports a wide range of users working toward shared goals. Each role benefits from purpose-built tools and a unified system of record for stronger collaboration.

By centralizing structure, data, and engagement, LSC for Customer Engagement helps teams remove duplication, align on strategy, and ensure that every HCP interaction is relevant, timely, and compliant.

Structure Products, Territories, and Access

Every successful launch starts with structure. In life sciences, teams must operate within strict boundaries: who can promote what, to whom, and where. These rules vary by product, geography, license, and user role, and they need to be enforced from day one.

With Life Sciences Cloud, admins configure product hierarchies across brands, indications, and messages, grouping them into therapeutic areas with clearly defined rules for promotion, sampling, and consent. Messaging permissions are mapped to user types, license levels, and geographies, so field users work within guardrails at every step.

Territories are equally structured. Using postal codes, specialties, and affiliation data, admins define engagement boundaries, controlling which users can access which accounts, and what product conversations are allowed.

Now let’s see what this looks like in practice. The Cumulus team is preparing to launch a new monoclonal antibody for severe asthma. They begin by building the product catalog and linking it to their respiratory portfolio. Messaging permissions are restricted to specialists with appropriate board certifications, and sampling is allowed only for licensed allergists and pulmonologists in approved regions.

Next, the team defines territory alignments. Using affiliation data and zip code filters, they redraw regions to align with referral networks and provider coverage. Reps are reassigned based on territory strategy, and messaging objectives are configured at the territory level.

In Life Sciences Cloud, this is managed through Product Administration, the capability that lets admins configure product hierarchies, align products with territories, and define messages and objectives. This image shows how admins link product messages and objectives to specific territories, ensuring reps only promote therapies to eligible providers.

With products, permissions, and territories locked in, Cumulus has built a launch foundation that reflects brand strategy, regulatory compliance, and local market dynamics, all before the first visit is planned.

Build a Foundation of Structured Account Data

A strong product isn’t enough. Success in the field depends on knowing who you’re engaging and why.

Life Sciences Cloud brings structure and insight to every account. It supports detailed profiles for both individual HCPs and broader healthcare organizations (HCOs), capturing specialty, sub-specialty, licensure, credentialing, affiliations, and more. Each profile maps to sampling eligibility, product access, territory assignment, and historical engagement, all from a unified data model.

At Cumulus Pharma, the team tailors account types to their business needs. They use Life Sciences Cloud to enrich HCP records with licensing and sampling flags, linking the records to affiliated hospitals and clinics to establish each provider’s referral network and influence.

Here’s the Affiliations tab of an HCP profile, showing how a single physician connects to multiple hospitals, clinics, and referral networks.

To help prioritize outreach, they use the Ratings tab, which presents a consolidated view of engagement signals, scientific interest scores, and activity patterns.

In this example, you can see a physician’s ratings for various measures displayed side by side. This gives the field team a quick snapshot of where the HCP stands, all in one place.

Teams can segment accounts by shared attributes—like specialty, location, or product eligibility—to surface top influencers, identify sampling candidates, or find newly active providers in a region.

Agentforce adds a layer of intelligence for extracting helpful insights from HCP activity. AI-driven summaries flag engagement gaps, changes in prescribing behavior, and shifts in affiliations as they happen. This timely information gives reps the clarity to act fast and focus where it counts.

By investing in accurate, well-modeled account data, Cumulus ensures that every team member starts with a foundation that reflects strategy, enforces compliance, and supports better engagement across the board.

Plan and Prioritize Engagement

Once products, territories, and accounts are in place, field teams need a clear, intelligent plan of action. Commercial operations use Life Sciences Cloud to define structured activity goals while empowering reps to focus their daily efforts where they’ll have the greatest impact.

KAMs create strategic engagement plans tailored to institutional accounts. These plans outline target stakeholders, messaging goals, and expected touchpoints. Field reps receive territory-specific activity plans that translate long-term brand strategy into everyday execution.

At Cumulus Pharma, each rep supporting the asthma launch receives an activity plan that specifies target visit frequency by specialty, guidance on using in-person versus remote channels, and product sampling goals. These plans are preloaded into each user’s workspace, eliminating the need to juggle spreadsheets and external trackers.

Tools like Next Best Customer and Next Best Action help reps focus their efforts by surfacing prioritized targets. Recommendations are based on prescribing trends, recent engagement history, and current eligibility status. Each recommendation includes a short rationale, so reps understand why a visit matters.

The image displays a calendar of upcoming HCP visits, organized by day. Activities are color-coded, helping reps balance account coverage and brand objectives throughout the week.

Once priorities are set, reps use the planner view to organize their week. They drag suggested accounts into their calendar, review access permissions and visit history, and finalize objectives, all from one screen. This structured, intelligent planning flow helps ensure every visit is timely, strategic, and aligned to brand goals.

Execute High-Impact HCP Visits

Life Sciences Cloud gives field and medical users the tools to deliver confident, compliant HCP engagement, whether in person or remote.

Before a visit, reps open the mobile workspace to review key HCP details, including specialty, sampling eligibility, consent status, territory alignment, and recent interactions. Agentforce generates a concise pre-call summary, flagging engagement gaps, content recommendations, and sampling opportunities.

At Cumulus Pharma, a rep preparing for a visit checks the visit engagement record and discovers that the provider is eligible for samples. Cumulus has not yet received the new messaging sequence, so it’s an ideal moment for targeted outreach.

During the visit, reps present approved content filtered by license and territory rules. If the healthcare provider gives consent to receive samples or future communications, the rep records it on the spot. When handing out product samples, the system automatically checks eligibility rules, applies quantity limits, and logs the fulfillment.

And if the provider asks a scientific question the rep isn’t authorized to answer, the rep can easily route the inquiry to the appropriate medical team.

After the visit, reps log the interaction, including what was discussed, what content was shared, and any agreed-upon next steps. All records feed back into the account profile, supporting future planning, compliance reporting, and continuous refinement of engagement strategies.

Deliver the Right Content, Anywhere

Whether in person or remote, every HCP interaction should be structured, compliant, and relevant. Life Sciences Cloud ensures users have exactly what they need, when and where they need it.

Field reps and MSLs have a curated library of approved content directly at their hands in the visit interface. Content visibility is filtered by territory, product assignment, and account restrictions, to prevent off-label or noncompliant sharing.

This example shows the Content tab, with recently viewed materials at the top, personal collections in the middle, and quick access to favorites and training along the side. From here, users can filter, sort, and open the latest approved content directly within their workflow.

Consent and communication preferences are captured natively in the workflow. If an HCP opts in to follow-up communications by email, SMS, or virtual session, the system records those choices automatically, keeping outreach compliant and personalized.

Remote engagements are also fully integrated. Users can launch audio or video sessions, share content, and capture digital signatures in one seamless flow. If the conversation shifts mid-visit, they can switch channels without losing context or traceability.

Track Outcomes and Refine Strategy

Each engagement adds to the full commercial picture. Life Sciences Cloud captures those signals and transforms them into actionable insights across both commercial and medical teams.

Field users and MSLs can view visit history, sample disbursement, and inquiry status directly from the account record with no need to jump between tools. Managers track performance by product, region, or team using real-time dashboards, identifying trends, gaps, and coaching opportunities.

Dashboards are fully configurable, enabling teams to monitor key KPIs such as reach, frequency, visit mix, and content utilization.

Built-in compliance checks flag outliers automatically, to keep organizations audit-ready without slowing down the field.

For deeper analysis, teams can extend insights with Tableau or integrate external data using MuleSoft or Data Cloud.

This flexibility ensures that execution stays sharp—even as market conditions evolve.

A Smarter Commercial Operation

Life Sciences Cloud for Customer Engagement helps organizations deliver more connected, compliant, and impactful HCP experiences. With structured product and territory controls, accurate account data, and intelligent planning tools, teams spend less time managing complexity and more time advancing access.

In the next unit, you learn how Life Sciences Cloud supports clinical teams as they design studies, activate sites, enroll participants, and deliver complex therapies like cell and gene treatments. Follow the Cumulus team as they apply the same connected foundation to bring innovation from lab to life.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Use Life Sciences Cloud for Customer Engagement Features
• Salesforce Help: Set Up Life Sciences Cloud for Customer Engagement Basics