COACHING

Why Your Pharma Sales Coaching Training Didn’t Work

By Sean Frontz, Performance Development Group 

I’ve spent years watching pharma and biotech organizations make the same investment twice and get the same result twice. They invest in a sales methodology. Training doesn’t stick. They correctly diagnose the problem — managers aren’t coaching — and invest in a coaching workshop. That doesn’t stick either.

Then they come to PDG ready to buy a new methodology.

Here’s what I tell them: the model isn’t the problem. It never was. What’s missing is the system that makes the model work. Until that exists, you can swap out methodologies indefinitely and end up in the exact same place — with a field force that passed certification and a commercial leader asking why nothing changed.

Pharma sales coaching training fails not because the content is wrong, but because the system required to sustain it — leader accountability, field observation, and reinforcement — was never built around it.

This isn’t a training problem. It’s a leadership and accountability problem. And the sooner organizations name it that way, the sooner they can actually fix it.

Why pharma sales coaching training fails: the pattern that repeats everywhere in pharma commercial organizations

I want to give you some context for why this pattern repeats so reliably — because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

We ran quiz questions through a major life sciences organization’s field force two years after they’d invested heavily in a sales methodology. Their people knew nothing of the model. Not the framework, not the language, not the structure of a call. Two years. Significant investment. Zero retention.

Rather than selling them more capability, we took the model they already owned and brought it back to life — this time with leaders coaching to it in the context of an immediate competitive threat. Same model. Different infrastructure around it. Different results.

Here’s why the first attempt failed, and why it fails the same way almost everywhere. Roll out a new methodology and watch what happens. Your A players take a couple of golden nuggets — that’s what they always do, that’s why they’re A’s. Your B players leave excited and fall right back into their habits within 25 days. Your C players say it was the least valuable thing they’ve sat through all year. The outcome is entirely predictable.

What changes that outcome is leadership driving the transformation — holding people accountable and actively coaching to the new system. Without that, training has a shelf life. 87% of sales training is forgotten within 30 days without reinforcement coaching. That isn’t a content problem. It’s an accountability gap — and filling it requires leaders who understand that their primary job isn’t results. It’s the people who produce them.

Why pharma sales managers struggle to coach: the promotion problem

There is a direct correlation between a leader’s involvement, commitment, and accountability, and how any performance initiative takes hold. I’ve seen it across enough engagements to say without qualification: the leader is the single biggest factor in whether transformation happens.

And so when I look at why training doesn’t stick, I look at the leader first. Not the content. Not the vendor.

Here’s what makes this complicated. Most pharma organizations promote their best sellers into leadership roles and expect them to become coaches. It’s a fundamental mismatch. Think about Michael Jordan — one of the greatest basketball players of all time, famously not a great coach. He knew how to score 45 points. Getting someone else to do it was a different skill entirely. The same dynamic plays out in commercial organizations every day.

High-performing salespeople carry a strong sense of individual drive — that’s exactly what made them great. But to be an effective leader, you have to make a fundamental shift: this is no longer about you. Your people are the job. You are not responsible for your district’s results — because you don’t sell. You can be accountable for them, and you should be. But what you’re actually responsible for are the ten people on your team.

That shift — from doing to developing — is one of the hardest transitions in commercial leadership. Most leaders don’t fully make it. They stay in execution mode, they stay in the whirlwind, and they drag their teams in with them. The demands are real — the email, the pipeline reviews, the quarterly pressure. But when those things consistently crowd out time with their people, they stop being reasons and start being EFFs: excuses for failure.

A-level leaders create A players. B-level leaders create B players. The ceiling of the team is the ceiling of the leader. When organizations don’t invest in developing their leaders — building real sales manager coaching skills, not just promoting on quota attainment — that pattern just perpetuates — and they wonder why performance plateaus.

What leaders think coaching is — and what it actually is

The most fundamental gap in commercial coaching isn’t effort. It’s definition.

Researchers asked a large group of leaders: are you actively coaching your people? 84% said yes. When those same leaders’ direct reports were asked whether they were receiving coaching, only 44% agreed. That’s a 40-point gap between what leaders believe they’re doing and what their teams are actually experiencing — and it lives entirely in the definition of coaching.

Most leaders think coaching means telling someone what to do. It’s understandable — they know how to do the job. They were great at it. But telling is the polar opposite of coaching. Effective coaching requires observation, questioning, and accountability — not instruction.

Of the 44% of people who said they were receiving coaching, only 14% said it was adding value. So even when coaching is happening, it often isn’t working. Gallup research found that managers who receive strengths-based coaching training see a 10-19% increase in sales performance — underscoring that the quality of coaching, not just its presence, is what drives results.

What accounts for the gap between leaders who coach and leaders whose coaching actually works? In most cases, it’s simple: nobody has coached them on coaching. Only 34% of sales leaders have received any coaching training themselves. They’re doing what they think coaching looks like, with no external observation, no calibrated feedback, no accountability for their own development as coaches.

Here’s a cautionary example of what happens without that infrastructure. A client came to PDG after purchasing a well-regarded coaching methodology — one most people in this industry would recognize by name. The installation was a two-hour session. Two hours for a system designed to fundamentally change how leaders develop their people. You need days of practice with that kind of methodology — and more importantly, you need someone watching you use it, giving you specific feedback: you went right back into tell mode, you asked one question and didn’t go deeper, it felt like an interrogation instead of a conversation. Without that feedback loop, leaders leave knowing the model exists. They have no idea how to execute it under pressure.

Training combined with coaching produces an 88% productivity improvement, compared to 23% from training alone. That gap doesn’t come from knowing the model. It comes from being coached to use it.

What effective pharma sales coaching actually requires: the five-element system

A coaching workshop is the first element of the system. It is not the system.

Sustained behavior change in pharma sales requires all five elements working together:

• Skill-building — the workshop where leaders learn the model and practice it in a safe environment
• Field application with observation — someone watches leaders coach in the real world and gives specific, calibrated feedback
• Reinforcement — ongoing practice and feedback that builds fluency over time, not just in a single event
• Accountability — coaching quality is measured and inspected, not assumed
• Measurement — outcomes are tracked against rep behavior and business results, creating a feedback loop that sustains the system

66% of companies don’t believe their leaders have the skills to coach and manage effectively. That number exists because most organizations build only the first element and move on.

The clearest example I’ve seen of the full system working involved a major life sciences organization facing a competitive entry with no defined selling model. PDG built one with them — highly customized, not off the shelf. When we launched it, the opening slide had 92 names on it: every person from inside their organization who had been involved in building the model. That’s what real buy-in looks like. Not a polished rollout. Ownership.

Alongside the selling model, they built a performance coaching system — the second railroad track running in parallel. The result was both elements reinforcing each other: the model gave leaders something concrete to coach to, and the coaching system gave the model a mechanism for actually changing behavior in the field. Leaders were held accountable for coaching quality. Outcomes were measured against HCP engagement results.

The numbers were some of the best they’d seen. They’re still running the program. They launched version 2.0 this year, refined based on what they learned in year one — which is what a real system does. It improves.

The active ingredient wasn’t the methodology. It was all five elements, built together, with a senior leader who drove accountability from the top.

How to get sales managers to actually use the coaching model you already have

The most common question I get after describing this system: we already have a coaching model. How do we get leaders to actually use it?

The answer is almost always the same: stop asking the model to carry the accountability. The model tells leaders what good coaching looks like. It cannot make them do it. That’s the leader’s manager’s job — inspecting coaching quality, observing real coaching conversations, and holding leaders accountable for the development of their people, not just the results of their territory.

If your organization has a coaching methodology and leaders aren’t using it consistently, the diagnostic question isn’t “what’s wrong with the model?” It’s “who is accountable for coaching quality, and how is that being inspected?”

What you can do about it

If your training investments aren’t translating to field behavior change, the path forward isn’t a new model. It’s being honest about which elements of the five-element system you’ve actually built — and which ones you’ve skipped.

Start with the hardest question: are your leaders being coached on their coaching? If no one is watching them in the field, giving them specific feedback, holding them accountable for development conversations — then the 84%/14% gap is almost certainly yours too. 60% or more of reps are more likely to leave when their leader isn’t an effective coach. That’s not just a performance problem. It’s a retention&bnsp;problem.

The investment you’ve already made in training and methodology isn’t wasted. It’s waiting. What it needs around it is the accountability infrastructure that turns knowledge into behavior — inspection, observation, reinforcement, and a leader at the top who treats their people as the job.

Build that, and the model you already own will work.

Sean Frontz is Sales Performance Global Leader at Performance Development Group (PDG), where he works with pharmaceutical and biotech commercial organizations on coaching capability, sustained behavior change, and performance transformation.