May 6, 2026 – 5 min read
by PDG Content Team in partnership with Sean Franz
Why does sales training fail to improve field force performance in pharma? Most pharma commercial organizations treat underperformance as a skill problem and prescribe more training. But research shows roughly 9 in 10 performance failures trace back to attitude — coachability, motivation, and drive — not technical ability. Training addresses the 11% while leaving the real performance drag in place. The first job of a sales leader isn’t to develop the business. It’s to correctly diagnose whether each person on the team has an attitude problem or an aptitude problem, and coach accordingly.
If you’re a commercial leader in pharma right now, you already know the feeling. You’re pushing harder than you should have to. Your field force has the training. They have the tools. And yet a quarter of your results feel like they’re being dragged underwater. You can’t name the source, but you carry the weight of it every day.
Most leaders respond to that feeling by prescribing more training. Refine the selling model. Add a certification. Run another workshop. It feels productive because it’s visible and you can point to it. But roughly 9 in 10 performance failures trace back to attitude, not skill. Coachability. Motivation. Drive. The things no certification has ever fixed.
The problem isn’t that your reps don’t know enough. It’s that you haven’t diagnosed what’s actually keeping each one from performing.
That misdiagnosis plays out the same way in almost every pharma sales organization I walk into.
Last year I sat down with the executive team at an organization that had built an internal coaching model and a proprietary sales methodology. They were under pressure from a recent acquisition and had invested real money to develop both models and train the entire field force. When results didn’t come, they trained again. Still nothing.
I asked basic questions about their own models. Not a single executive could answer. If the people at the top don’t know what it is, nobody underneath them is using it. The training happened. The doing never did.
The training was never the problem. Leaders were allowed to go back to doing exactly what they were doing before the intervention, and nothing in the system required them to do otherwise. Training gets prescribed because it lets leadership externalize the problem. The rep is underperforming, so it must be a skills issue, so it must be someone else’s job to fix. That logic is comfortable. It is almost always wrong.
When leaders keep prescribing training for problems training can’t fix, the cost isn’t just the wasted investment. It’s the performance gap that stays in place while you’re looking the other way.
I call it the tax: the percentage of your team that is not willing or able to execute, and is actively pulling your results backward. Our data across thousands of measurements inside commercial organizations puts it at 25%. One in four people on any given sales team is creating a drag on results. That means if you want your number, you need 25% more time, more budget, more effort just to compensate. You don’t have it. That’s why it feels like pushing a rock up a hill every single day.
One district leader I coached decided to identify and address his tax directly. His district attainment went from 88% to 133%. The territory where his underperformer had been sitting went from 84% to 122%. He tracked the day he reached what I call zero tax, everyone has the attitude and aptitude to perform, and sent me a message: “I am hoping this tax, once paid, will be the last for a long period of time.” That leader stopped managing and started leading. Everything became forward-looking.
But he couldn’t get there until he could see his team clearly. And that’s the part most leaders skip. Not because they don’t care, but because the instinct to overrate the people closest to you is almost universal.
So how do you know whether you’re dealing with an attitude gap or an aptitude gap for each person on your team? How do you see past your own assumptions?
This is the problem the Performance Matrix was built to solve. It’s a diagnostic tool we developed at PDG that plots every person on your sales team across two axes: attitude and aptitude. Not a ranking. Not a performance review. A forced clarity exercise that makes you answer one question for each person: where do I need to focus my attention, on their attitude, their aptitude or both?
Every leader I’ve worked with overrates their people on the first assessment. Every one. If someone has been on your team for years and they’re not performing, admitting that means admitting what your own coaching produced. So the rating stays high, the real conversation gets postponed, and the tax keeps compounding.
When a leader can finally see the difference between an attitude gap and an aptitude gap, and coach to the right one, the tax starts to lift. The rock gets lighter. The results follow. Not because the team got smarter, but because the leader got honest about what was actually in front of them.
Sean Frontz is the Sales Performance Global Leader at Performance Development Group, where he partners with pharma and biotech commercial organizations on coaching capability, leadership development, and field team performance.
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