Every pharma field team has reps who aren’t yet meeting the full expectations of their role. That’s normal. A rep moves into a new therapeutic area, or a strong performer drifts a little at a time. What most commercial leaders underestimate is what underperformance in pharma sales costs the team, and who covers it.
At PDG, we use the Performance Matrix to help leaders see where each person on their team stands. It measures two things: whether a person is able to do the job the business needs from them now, and whether they’re willing to do it. Across our client work, about one in four people on a pharma field force are not yet meeting what the role requires at any given time. I call the cost of that gap the performance tax. It’s the extra work and lost sales a team absorbs when part of the team isn’t fully contributing.
A first-line manager can’t tell their regional director that the district will deliver 25% less this year because a couple of reps are struggling. So they close the gap themselves. They lean on their strongest reps and take on work that belongs to someone else. The district’s numbers look fine, and the cost never reaches senior leadership.
A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business shows why this is easy to miss. People consistently gave more work to the colleagues they saw as most reliable, and they underestimated how much effort that work took. The reliable employees felt the burden. On a pharma field team, those reliable people are your top reps.
As the year closes, first-line managers rate each rep’s performance. A rating is feedback. It looks back at the year that just ended and marks where a rep stands today. That’s useful, and it leaves out two things.
First, the job changes. In our client work, we see reps with 15 strong years move into a new therapeutic area. The new role asks them to learn a new disease state and a new competitive market, and many end up doing “okay” at best. A rating based on the old job misses that.
Second, a rating can miss part of the job, because managers naturally give more weight to the parts of the job they see most.
I once coached a manager who spent 10 minutes describing problems with one of her reps. His expense reports were late and had errors, and he was behind on required training. She had still rated him high, because he was great in front of customers. Customer time is a few minutes of his day. Because she saw him as strong, she missed the rest of the job.
Coaching fills both gaps, because coaching looks forward. It prepares a rep for what’s coming, such as a new competitor. The Performance Matrix supports that coaching. It shows where each rep stands against the whole job they’ll need to do next, and whether they’re moving toward it during the year.
A first-line manager can’t tell their regional director that the district will deliver 25% less this year because a couple of reps are struggling. So they close the gap themselves.
When numbers fall short, companies often buy a new selling model, coaching model, or AI coaching tool and train the whole field team on it. I used to sell coaching models. The vendor is paid for the rollout, and nobody is paid on whether reps perform better afterward.
In our experience, top reps pick up a habit or two they’d let slip. Reps in the middle leave excited, and within about three weeks most are back to their old routines. Reps who are struggling tend to see the training as time away from their territory. A rep who doesn’t know there’s a gap needs a direct conversation with their manager first.
Most managers know which reps need a direct conversation about their performance. It’s uncomfortable, so it slides to next week.
When a manager does have that conversation, change can come fast. One first-line manager we coached finally sat down with a rep whose performance had declined gradually over a long time. Nobody had ever told her. Once she saw how she was coming across, she re-engaged, and the next day she was working differently. That manager kept going until every rep on his team was fully meeting the expectations of the role. Some people left the company. Territory performance in his district went up, and he told me he’d never let someone fall that far again.
What made it work was a clear measure of where each person stood and an outside coach holding him accountable for acting on it.
As ratings are finalized, ask your first-line managers to take these four steps:
The fourth step is where most good intentions fade, so decide who follows up before the new year starts.
There’s a line we use at PDG: people fall all the time, but good leadership catches them and lifts them back up. A year-end rating shows who has slipped. Regular coaching through the year is how managers catch them, and how the performance tax comes down.
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