What's really going on

This is not a pipeline problem. It is a compliant field-force problem. Two hundred reps across three regulators (MHRA, HPRA, FDA), four buying paths (direct, wholesaler, refer-only, online), and overlapping territories where two reps share a postcode but not a customer set. Your bottleneck is pull-through: a consultant refers, a pharmacy dispenses, and nobody can trace the line between them. Public-record and online leads pile up because the sales journey branches before the rep ever knows which branch this account is on.

What to do instead

1. Veeva Vault CRM (enterprise, check pricing) — HCP data with privacy compliance built in, sample distribution audit trails, call reporting templates aligned to regulatory requirements, and compliance-aware territory workflows. It is the de facto standard your wholesalers and regulators already speak.
2. Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud (enterprise, check pricing) — purpose-built HCP/HCO account management, engagement planning, visits, content use, medical inquiry, consent, samples, and field workflows. Worth it if you already run Salesforce and want Agentforce on top.
3. Habit — one call-report template with a required "channel path" field: Direct / Wholesaler / Refer-only / Online. Add that tag to every account in your current system today. One person, 30 minutes, exported list from your customer master.

What you're being oversold

Vanilla Salesforce Sales Cloud or HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise dressed up as "pharma-ready." They aren't. No native sample audit, no MLR-approved content lockdown, no closed-loop from detail visit to pharmacy dispense. A consultancy will bill you eighteen months bolting those on and still miss adverse-event capture. The cost of drifting: one unlogged adverse event or one off-label slide shown by a rep dwarfs any CRM subscription — and every month without pull-through visibility, you keep paying reps to detail accounts that never convert through the wholesaler.

When to revisit this

When a rep cannot tell you whether last month's hospital consultant referral turned into a pharmacy dispense.

The part worth getting right

The fork is your revenue mix. If Rx and hospital consultant detailing drive most of the money, Vault CRM is the safe bet — it is the de facto CRM standard in pharmaceutical and medical device sales, and your regulators, wholesalers, and NHS trusts already work with it. If OTC pull-through through opticians and pharmacies is the bigger engine, Life Sciences Cloud is lighter to staff and better on commerce integration, but thinner on strict Rx sample control. Pick wrong and you migrate in year two or get a regulator letter in year one. So which side of the split is actually paying the bills?