Very soon across pharma, brand teams and training teams are locking the agendas for the POA and national meetings that will launch next year’s strategy. Most of those agendas will be finished before a single first-line leader sees them.
This piece is about how pharma POA meeting planning gets done, and the one group of people who can make it work better: your first-line leaders.
Your first-line leaders are the ones who turn a strategy into what actually happens in the field. They can tell you today, before you build anything, which parts of your plan will land in their areas, which parts won’t, and what their reps will say when they hear it. In most companies, nobody asks them.
Asking costs a few hours of your first-line leaders’ time. What you get back is a plan your field has already pressure-tested, a group of leaders who will carry it because they helped shape it, and a year spent executing the strategy instead of pitching it. You will get their read either way. The only choice is whether you get it while the plan can still change.
What follows is what those leaders see that your national numbers can’t show you, what changed at one company that brought its first-line leaders into planning, and the opportunity that awaits if you do the same.
Say your brand makes market access the focus of the coming cycle. At the national level that’s a sound call. The coverage gaps are real and the opportunity is big enough to build a meeting around.
Take the same call down to an area. A first-line leader can tell you that pushing a rep harder on commercial payers might convert three or four more scripts this month, while putting that same time in front of physicians who aren’t clinically convinced yet might convert 10. That leader isn’t arguing against access. The leader is telling you what the return looks like in their territories.
Both readings are accurate. One is a national forecast. The other predicts what will happen when a rep walks into an office in Vermont, and it costs you nothing but a conversation.
Most companies skip that conversation for a practical reason. The plan has to be finished before anyone can build a workshop against it, and 30 area managers in planning sessions is real selling time. So the plan gets built, the meeting gets delivered, and the first real test of it happens after the money is spent.
When it doesn’t work, the diagnosis usually lands in the wrong place. The conclusion is that the managers aren’t coaching to it, and the next investment goes to more reinforcement and another workshop at the mid-year. A first-line leader can tell you in one conversation what a national meeting will take a quarter to find out.
A commercial team I worked with brought its first-line leaders into planning, and the plan got sharper before anyone spent a dollar building against it. They did not set out to work this way. A restructuring removed a layer of leadership, and the brand, marketing, and every first-line leader ended up reporting to one senior sales leader. With nobody left in between to translate strategy into field direction, she brought the leaders in herself.
Involvement meant four specific things. First, the leaders helped design the POA workshops for the coming cycle. Second, they said which selling skills their teams actually needed. Third, they were trained as coaches and then measured on whether they coached. Fourth, their plans for developing people moved into the quarterly business review, next to their numbers.
A first-line leader can tell you in one conversation what a national meeting will take a quarter to find out.
That changed what the meeting was built on. The trainers and the marketers heard the field’s hard questions about market access months before the meeting, so the workshop and the pre-work were revised before anything had been built. The leaders helped write the case for the strategy, and some rewrote it outright. Because the message was partly theirs, they defended it with their reps instead of distancing themselves from it.
The results are showing up in the field. Reps are selling better. The team is holding to the marketing strategy rather than drifting from it. More of the behaviors that turn scripts into revenue are happening in more territories. These are early indicators rather than final sales numbers, and all of them point the same direction.
The payoff lands in two places: the strategy itself, and the leaders you are counting on to carry it.
The strategy holds. Because the people who deliver it helped write it, it survives from the kickoff to the mid-year instead of resetting every time the field gathers. Your message stops competing with the quiet version your managers tell their reps in the parking lot.
The leaders get better at leading. Most were promoted because they were good at selling, not because anyone had evidence they would be good at coaching a rep, reading a business, or deciding where to spend a team’s time. Those skills get built by being asked to use them, and the planning conversation is where that starts.
Getting to that payoff takes work, and the objections are real. The one you will hear out loud is time. First-line leaders are busy, second-line leaders are busier, and their hours are owed to reps and to physicians. That is partly right. But the time doesn’t disappear when you skip the planning conversation. It moves to the back half of the year, where it gets spent on resistance that has already set.
The objection you won’t hear out loud is the bigger one. Bringing first-line leaders into strategy means letting people who were selling two years ago challenge your assumptions in front of an audience. Nobody says that. What they say is that this is a lot of process.
Your first-line leaders will raise a fair question of their own. They are glad to give feedback on how a workshop is framed, but when that turns into building it, delivering it and coaching against it for six months, a reasonable person asks what the training team is for. Answer that before you start. The training team still builds the work. The leaders decide what it is for and where it will meet resistance.
Before you lock the agenda for your next POA or national sales meeting, sit down with your first-line leaders and ask them two questions. Where will this strategy land in your areas, and where will it stall? And what will your reps say when they hear it? Then change the plan based on what they tell you.
That conversation costs you a few hours, and it buys you a year spent making the plan work instead of re-selling it. If nothing about the plan changes after that conversation, either you have an unusually good plan or you didn’t really ask.
New research, coaching practice, and launch capability thinking for life sciences commercial leaders. About once a month.
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