The Resonance Test 103: The Modern Life Sciences CRM with Dinesh Salvi

Innovation in life sciences is accelerating; the way companies manage their customer relationships is not. That gap — between the speed of science and the pace of commercial relationship-building — is the uncomfortable starting point for this Resonance Test conversation with Dinesh Salvi, Former Vice President, Head of Digital & IT Customer Engagement Platforms at Bristol Myers Squibb and Markus Hinderberger, Global Head of Commercial Advisory at EPAM.
These two practitioners have spent considerable time thinking about what modern engagement requires. Hinderberger names the core problem plainly: Too many organizations are still running "a CRM that behaves like a glorified call-recording tool." The system exists, the fields get filled in and the boxes get checked, but the intelligence never compounds and the experience never improves.
Salvi agrees and identifies the real obstacle. (Spoiler: It’s not the technology.) "The biggest difference is adoption and use," he says. Features don't matter if the people who use the tool don't trust it. For that to happen, the CRM has to earn its place — becoming something closer to a "companion" that supports work… and doesn’t add friction to it.
Both men say volume is no longer the metric that matters. Access to customers today is selective. "The doors are open," says Hinderberger, "but they're only open to a few" — the companies that show up with something genuinely useful every time. That raises the stakes on each and every interaction, and it changes what good preparation looks like across the commercial organization.
Meeting that bar requires more than a motivated sales rep. It requires personalization and orchestration across channels, and it can't live inside a single function.
Salvi and Hinderberger talk through what it means to create a genuine "red thread" connecting every touchpoint: the reimbursement specialist, the nurse educator, the sales representative, the medical science liaison, the call-center staffer. When those people operate as disconnected nodes, the customer experience feels episodic. When they share context, it feels consistent — and that consistency is what builds the kind of relationship that survives a crowded market.
Of course, modernization has to survive reality, too. The conversation doesn't shy away from the practical constraints that most of the health ecosystem is working with: limited budgets, legacy platforms, and what Salvi describes as the "patchwork" that defines most commercial tech stacks.
So should life sciences orgs pursue "big T or little T" transformation? And how is momentum kept alive while working toward something more ambitious? Hinderberger's approach is pragmatic: Define the ideal end state, work backwards from it, and make sure near-term wins are real enough to sustain organizational belief in the project.
When it works, the payoff isn't prettier dashboards or cleaner pipeline reports. Salvi argues that a CRM that becomes a true "copilot" can deliver value "tenfold" — finally giving organizations the ability to capture real field data and activate it in an intelligent ecosystem. That's the version of CRM that justifies the investment.
That's also the version most life sciences companies haven't built… yet.
Host: Jonathan Swersey
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Gabrielle Semon
Executive Producer: Ken Gordon