August 10, 2026 – 6 min read
by Chris Phillips, Solutions Architect
Why do so many drug launches underperform despite months of readiness work? The readiness that gets scheduled is materials, certification, systems, and territories. What decides the launch is whether reps can actually sell the drug. That has the longest lead time of anything on the plan, about a year, and on most plans it is the last thing to start. This article covers how that mistake happens, what to build in the year before launch, and the order to build it in.
Your launch is 12 months out and the readiness plan looks done. Every item has an owner and a date: materials, certification, systems, hiring. What no line on that plan builds is the ability of your reps to sell the drug, and that is the longest piece of work on the whole calendar. Start it where most plans start it, in the final quarter, and you will not finish it. Reverse the order and you change the launch.
I have spent 15 years on the vendor side of life sciences, much of it helping small and emerging pharma companies bring their first or second product to market. The pattern almost never varies, and the cost is real: McKinsey finds about two-thirds of new drugs miss their first-year sales expectations, and the ones that miss keep missing for the next two years. The trajectory gets set early. So does the mistake.
Watch how a launch organization gets built. Home office leadership comes first. The medical team follows quickly, because thought leader relationships and publications cannot wait. The sales team gets built at the point of need: second-line leaders, then first-line leaders, then reps, closest to launch. By the time reps show up, launch is a quarter away, and they are drowning in clinical education and brand messaging. Nobody is teaching a selling framework or helping leaders build territory and district plans. Coaching, business planning, and quarterly business reviews get filed under later.
The economics explain why. A company spends enormously to bring a product to market and holds exclusivity for a limited time, so it has to hit the ground running to win the scripts that justify the investment. At that pace, the natural priority is technical: people who know the disease state, deliver the approved messages compliantly, and can run the tools. All of that is necessary. What gets crowded out is the set of abilities that makes those people effective, probing, listening, closing, and the manager’s ability to coach. The plan measures what the organization can produce on a deadline. Selling ability has no deadline, so it waits. And it cannot be rushed at the end, because interpersonal skills are built by doing, with feedback, over months. There is no workshop that produces them on demand.
The fix is to treat the launch as a system you build over a year, not an event you prepare for in a quarter. Start 12 to 18 months out with a roadmap for how the team gets built through each layer of leadership. You will be standing up medical, market access, and other functions on their own timelines, and those teams will have deadlines that are hard to argue with. The risk is that the commercial organization slides down the list every time one of them needs something. What matters is having a clear-eyed plan for how each layer gets onboarded, developed, and made ready to develop the next.
Treat the launch as a system you build over a year, not an event you prepare for in a quarter. Have a clear-eyed plan for how each layer gets onboarded, developed, and made ready to develop the next.
Then reverse the usual order of skills. Before clinical education takes over the training calendar, build the things that take time to take hold: the selling framework and the skill to use it in a live call, leadership alignment with each other and with the strategy, coaching and accountability, and territory and district business planning. Do them in the year before launch, when nobody is worrying yet about reach, frequency, or time on territory. That is the only stretch when the time to breathe exists. Build these first and each new layer of the team arrives into a structure ready to grow them, rather than one scrambling to install them.
The goal is a launch that opens with a well-oiled machine, a team already aligned, already accountable, already able to sell, turning its attention to performance and growth. The energy of a launch meeting is worth having, and it goes further when it lands on a team that can already execute.
The year of work only pays off if it survives the chaos of launch itself. That is where coaching comes in. The first-line manager has to run coaching as a genuine one-on-one growth relationship, not performance management or whack-a-mole. Where that holds, the selling behaviors, the alignment, and the accountability carry through the fast, punishing months after go-live, when the people you built are just showing up and going to work every day. Where it does not, the team reverts to reciting the brand message and chasing call counts.
Launch will be chaotic no matter how well you plan, and nothing you defer into that final quarter will get done. The teams that perform through it made their foundational investments early, while there was still room to breathe. Reverse the order. Build the ability to sell first, put the coaching in place to hold it, and let the logistics hang on a team that can already do the job. Do the legwork now. You will not have time later.
Chris Phillips is a Solutions Architect at Performance Development Group, where he designs launch and selling-capability programs for life sciences commercial teams.
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