Generic CRMs fail Biopharma: The Need for a Specialized Life Science CRM

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What is a life science CRM, and why does it matter for biopharma partnering?

Life science R&D spending has continued to grow rapidly over the last decade, with total global expenditure on R&D in the pharmaceuticals sector projected to reach $272bn in 2024, compared to $137bn in 2012.

Therefore, it is no surprise that companies in the biopharma sector are constantly looking at ways to increase their operational efficiency when it comes to search and evaluation, managing opportunities and alliances, as well as in due diligence and security.

So, what is a specialized life science CRM and how does it improve pharmaceutical partnering?

A fundamental differentiator is that a life science CRM is a relationship and opportunity management platform designed for R&D collaboration rather than sales. Unlike generic CRMs that focus on customer pipelines, a life science CRM helps pharma and biotech teams track research partnerships, licensing opportunities, and innovation assets across the full business development lifecycle. It connects internal stakeholders with external partners, ensuring every collaboration, molecule, and milestone is captured in one secure, compliant system.

A good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is the beating heart at the center of research and development for life science companies big and small. A well-functioning CRM is fundamental in optimizing and streamlining operations and driving business growth in an increasingly complex landscape.

In relation to the initial software cost, alongside the outlay for implementation and integration into team processes that may have previously relied on our old friend, the spreadsheet, it is crucially important to make the right choice from the start and the chosen life science CRM needs to possess many capabilities for the juice to be worth the squeeze.

One such capability is the streamlining and automation of workflows, the specifics of which vary from company to company. The automation of manual tasks and integration of disparate systems saves time and minimizes the chances of errors occurring. These outcomes are both central factors in calculating Return-on-Investment (ROI) in relation to the adoption of the life science CRM for the biopharma organization.

Secondly, it is imperative that a life science CRM enables simpler and more effective collaboration in both alliance management and deal evaluations. Prompt and thorough communication between internal and external stakeholders is key to ensuring that research projects and their commercialization continues to progress, and huge threats to alliances and good deals can ensue if the system responsible for these conversations is allowing information to slip through the cracks.

For the highly regulated life sciences industries, compliance, security, and data protection are non-negotiable and these aspects of a CRM are the foundations that all-singing and all-dancing product features must be built upon.

This article will first explore the limitations, pinch points and inefficiencies of using an off-the-shelf CRM to manage partnerships, alliances, and a commercialization pipeline.

We will then explore why the needs of modern life science have moved beyond the functionality of a traditional CRM, looking at how specialized biopharma CRMs are helping biopharma leaders to source innovation, evaluate pipeline opportunities, as well as manage alliances and deliver due diligence.

Finally, this article will examine other CRMs available on the market and evaluate these solutions in terms of their suitability to companies in the life sciences.

Limitations of generic CRMs in life science partnering

Scattered and unreliable data challenges for Biopharma

Unreliable, scattered data in biopharma R&D operations is often at the heart of many companies’ issues.

Time is wasted searching for information, and worse, precious data is easily lost through staff turnover or simple misplacement. This is mainly a symptom of not having a centralized system that builds and retains corporate memory. Aside from losing information, it is often very difficult for biopharma companies to aggregate the vast quantities of data that they have managed to generate and maintain.

Without a specialist life science CRM solution, data is likely spread across multiple sources and the integration of these sources can be incredibly time-consuming and complex. Suppose there is a lack of industry-specific insights in CRM software. In that case, the company must try and force a CRM to suit its needs, consequently leading to further issues down the line – much alike trying to build a piece of flatpack furniture without all the necessary parts.

Scattered and unreliable data causes problems across the entire operational process, from technology searching and triage, all the way through to managing CDAs, negotiation and long-term alliances.

If data is lost or poorly aggregated, there is often a lack of visibility for stakeholders because of data silos. It becomes extremely difficult to have a clear overview of partnering opportunities and visibility into what your team members are working on. It’s slow, inefficient, and makes fast, informed decision-making impossible.

Furthermore, with multiple team members on the move, collecting feedback becomes painstaking. Information is scattered in emails, instant messages, or on spreadsheets. Thus, ensuring appropriate follow-up is difficult with no easy way to assign tasks or to track what has been done, resulting in duplicated effort, misalignment and worse - missed objectives.

Generic CRMs lack essential life sciences industry knowledge and context

Perhaps the most obvious challenge for life science companies using a consumer-facing CRM is that these solutions lack the required knowledge of the sector, and therefore don’t possess the capabilities to maximize efficiency and drive growth for a specialist operation.

Not having access to industry best practices, such as standardized and configurable templates for opportunity summaries and evaluations, makes it challenging for biopharma and life science companies to act quickly and decisively. In the biopharma industry, where new innovation is so lucrative, companies simply can’t afford to be slow to evaluate new opportunities and to close deals.

As we have briefly touched upon, a CRM often partly provides RoI through saving time on processes and procedures, but this is unlikely to be the case if the solution requires regular and extensive customization and reconfiguration to make it suit the organizations’ many evolving partnering needs. Thus, the general one-size-fits-all nature of a household CRM rarely fits the needs of biopharma companies who have more specific requirements.

Limited technology integrations lead to siloed workflows and ineffective reporting

Similarly, with a lack of industry-specific knowledge generally comes limited capacity when it comes to integrating the required data sources or technologies to connect your everyday tools. When these integrations don’t form part of the CRMs package, the customer then must turn to yet another piece of integrative software like Zapier to stitch everything together.

This costs time and money and requires extensive management and maintenance of the integrations. Having to manually set-up integrations through external software undoubtedly increases the risk for the company and simply represents another opportunity for operations to go wrong.

Without integration to proprietary and third-party databases, pulling in rich data from pipeline and dealmaking databases, as well as to the companies’ own tools, it is a challenge to have all the relevant and up-to-date data needed to provide concise and reliable reports. Good reporting is fundamental to progressing the right pipeline opportunities and demonstrating value to stakeholders, so a lack of specialized life science CRM represents many strategic challenges.

What makes a tailored CRM for Biopharma collaboration

In this section, we will take a deep dive into how specialized life science CRMs go beyond the limitations of generic CRMs, including technology sourcing, opportunity management, due diligence, and alliance management. To demonstrate this, client testimonials have been included.

Streamline Scouting, Search & Evaluation to accelerate partner discovery

In biopharma BD, early-stage scouting often happens across disconnected channels, such as conferences, emails, spreadsheets, and internal notes. Generic CRMs can’t capture or connect these fragments, leading to duplicated outreach and missed opportunities.

A CRM tailored for life science partnering centralizes scouting and evaluation in one place, allowing BD teams to map external assets, technologies, and research groups against internal priorities. By linking opportunities to therapeutic areas, mechanisms of action, and scientific fit, teams can identify high-potential collaborations faster and focus on what matters most.

Inpart Deal has the advantage of direct feed-in from Inpart Connect. Inpart Connect is a global network of industry professionals, academic organizations, biotechs, pharma companies, R&D companies, and investors verified for their interest and ability to commercialize research.

The network contains over 6,000 R&D professionals alongside over 8,000 academic researchers spread across over 2,600 institutes worldwide. Companies run campaigns on Inpart Connect to source new solutions for their requirements and technical challenges. Results from these campaigns are directly created in Inpart Deal without any manual data entry.

"Using Inpart’s established vast and global network has allowed us to streamline the search process, save a lot of time, and allocate internal resources to analyses of assets."

- Scientific Innovation Scout, InvIOs

Manage partnering opportunities seamlessly from discovery to deal

Traditional CRMs treat every interaction as a sales lead, but in life sciences, partnerships evolve through complex scientific, legal, and strategic stages. From initial contact through confidentiality agreements and term negotiations, each step requires coordination across BD, R&D, legal, and alliance functions.

A specialized life science CRM captures this full journey. Tracking documents, discussions, and decision points in one secure and cohesive environment. This ensures continuity and visibility for every stakeholder, reduces handover friction, and keeps your entire pipeline organized and auditable.

A purpose-built life science CRM streamlines opportunity management by unifying every step of the partnering workflow. Teams can easily track project status and next actions through centralized activity streams, ensuring complete visibility of each collaboration.

Standardized workflows for in-licensing, out-licensing, asset acquisition, M&A, and R&D partnerships bring consistency and compliance to complex pipelines.

Custom evaluation templates and shared review spaces enable scientists, BD managers, and legal experts to collaborate effectively, while integrated commenting and feedback features keep discussions transparent.

With instant reporting and dashboard insights, leadership teams can monitor progress in real time, reduce administrative effort, and make faster, better-informed decisions.

To support confident, data-driven decision-making, Inpart Deal integrates with leading information sources. Inpart Data enriches every opportunity with up-to-date profiles of companies, assets, and partnering activity drawn from global biotech ecosystems and major industry events. The Evaluate Pharma integration adds therapeutic, clinical, and commercial intelligence, linking scientific opportunities to market potential. And through Power BI, teams can transform this data into tailored dashboards and visual reports, giving leadership real-time insight into pipeline health, progress, and performance.

"Inpart bridges the challenge of two externally-facing functions within AstraZeneca, R&D and Business Development, and gets them operating in a seamless fashion: The right hand knows what the left hand is doing."

- Business Operations Manager, AstraZeneca

Strengthen alliance management for sustained, meaningful partnerships

Once a deal is signed, effective alliance management determines whether the collaboration delivers its scientific and commercial potential. Yet most CRMs stop tracking at contract signature, leaving teams to manage critical milestones in emails and shared drives.

A purpose-built life science CRM extends beyond deal execution. Inpart Deal enables alliance managers to monitor joint milestones, track obligations, share updates with partners, and maintain institutional knowledge even as team members change. This continuity ensures partnerships stay aligned, compliant, and productive.

Built-in collaboration tools streamline meeting preparation and follow-up. Governance teams can access shared documents in advance, record minutes, and assign actions that automatically feed back into the system. Automated reminders help ensure that no commitment, financial or operational, is overlooked.

Meanwhile, comprehensive alliance reporting provides leadership with a clear, up-to-date view of partnership health. PowerPoint one-pagers and integrated alliance health checks make it easy to review performance, gather partner feedback, and identify emerging issues early. Together, these capabilities help organizations maintain transparency, strengthen relationships, and realize the full scientific and commercial potential of every partnership.

"Inpart is a valuable resource for UCB Alliance Managers, providing them with accurate information that helps maximize the value of our alliances..."

- Alliance & Operations Manager, UCB

Reduce risk with accelerated and enhanced Due Diligence processes

Despite the obvious need to safeguard confidential information and maintain the highest level of data security, a well-designed biopharma CRM can help ensure proper due diligence.

Due diligence in life sciences involves evaluating not just the business opportunity, but demands a deep understanding of the underlying science, data integrity, and regulatory landscape. Generic CRMs lack the flexibility to manage these layers of evidence or the multi-stakeholder review process that comes with them.

With a tailored life science CRM, due diligence workflows become structured and traceable. Teams can attach scientific data, flag compliance issues, and record expert feedback in context, speeding up evaluations while reducing risk. The result is a clearer, faster path from opportunity assessment to confident decision-making.

Inpart Deal streamlines the process with configurable templates and robust access controls. Built-in assessment frameworks cover areas such as small and large molecule reviews, legal compliance, and pre-diligence checks. Customizable reporting and automated notifications keep contributors aligned, while role-based permissions protect sensitive data and ensure regulatory compliance.

By centralizing information and creating a clear audit trail, Inpart Deal enables BD and R&D teams to complete comprehensive due diligence faster — reducing risk, improving collaboration, and providing the confidence to advance only the strongest opportunities.

“Through due diligence, investors and pharma companies take a closer look at their potential partner, the asset, and the deal itself to validate claims and evaluate risks. With many millions of dollars riding on the success of licensing and acquisition activities, a deal gone wrong can mean significant debt and wasted resources.”

William Vickery - Due Diligence Director, Global Business Development at Servier

Real-world impact: How Inpart Deal transforms Biopharma partnering (case studies)

Across the biopharma sector, adopting a CRM built specifically for life science partnering has driven measurable improvements in business development performance. Companies using Inpart Deal have accelerated their deal-closing rate by more than 30% and increased their opportunity-to-deal conversion by 23%. The following examples illustrate how organizations are transforming their scouting, due diligence, and collaboration workflows with a tailored CRM designed for scientific partnerships.

Ferring Pharmaceuticals: Boosting biopharma scouting & external technology discovery

This case study demonstrates how one large pharma firm is using Inpart Deal to improve their scouting outputs.

Context

Ferring wanted to create a central function for scouting new drug delivery technologies. They were looking for a solution that would help their newly established ‘External Technologies’ team be more efficient, agile, and well-integrated with Ferring’s overall R&D processes.

Approach

Ferring worked with Inpart to create and implement a workflow perfectly adapted to their new team’s scouting processes. Ferring’s R&D, BD, and AM teams were already using Inpart, which made the onboarding and infrastructure setup faster to implement and allowed all functions to work cohesively together.

Impact

With standardized processes and shared visibility, Ferring can now monitor scouting performance, track progress at the project level, and generate insights that directly inform technology assessments and development priorities.

Eli Lilly: strengthening due diligence & secure collaboration

Context

Eli Lilly had a well-defined due diligence process but was struggling to manage it with legacy technology. They needed a solution that would help optimize collaboration with subject matter experts, securely share confidential data, make assessments easy to complete, and create clear, consolidated reports.

Approach

Eli Lilly worked with Inpart to create a modern and secure module for due diligence that would seamlessly integrate Inpart into their internal systems and workflows. It featured a wide array of assessment templates, secure storage for documents and emails as well as full control of user management and access.

Impact

The new system provided complete visibility across all due diligence activities. Lilly’s teams can now track progress, identify bottlenecks, and maintain a clear audit trail for every review. The platform strengthened the company’s established processes, improving efficiency while maintaining the highest standards of security and compliance.

"Inpart has enabled Lilly to standardize processes, enable more consistent data across the entire External Innovation community and place data more directly into the hands of business development leadership."

- Senior VP, Corporate Business Development at Lilly

Inpart Deal life science CRM vs. generic CRMs: A comparative advantage

Every partnership starts with potential, but realizing that potential depends on having the right tools behind the scenes. The table below compares the capabilities of generic CRMs with Inpart Deal, a platform created to give biopharma teams the clarity, structure, and confidence they need to turn promising opportunities into lasting collaborations.

To speak with our team about how Inpart Deal might be able to work with your company to scout new breakthroughs, manage alliances and/or due diligence, request a demo using the button below!