April 24, 2026 – 7 min read
by PDG Content Team in partnership with Ed Gutshall
Competitive selling isn’t won with better sales aids. It’s won in the moment a physician brings up a competitor — and whether anyone has coached the rep for what to do next. Most organizations train competitive selling as a knowledge problem. What actually moves share is leader presence and conversation-level accountability in the field.
When a new branded competitor enters a therapeutic class, the market your reps walked into last year isn’t the market they’re walking into this week. Their HCPs now have another prescribing option in the decision, another rep in the waiting room, and another story competing for the 90 seconds your rep gets. This is where commercial leaders find out whether the investment they’ve made in training, messaging, and tools actually translates into a rep who can hold a conversation when the physician mentions the competitor by name. What’s harder to accept is that the teams holding share and the teams losing it have the same data, the same competitive training, the same tools. The gap isn’t resources. It’s whether anyone is accountable for what happens with those resources at the conversation level — the moment a rep is sitting across from a physician who just mentioned a competitor, and what the rep does next determines whether you keep the script or lose it.
That moment is coachable. Most organizations aren’t coaching to it.
The first mistake organizations make is treating competitive selling as a skill problem you can solve in a workshop. Reps get the sales aids, the objection handlers, the competitor comparison deck. And then they walk into a call without a pre-call plan.
Competitive selling begins in the data. Before a rep walks in to see a physician, they need to know exactly where that physician sits on the prescribing continuum. Are they writing your product 85% of the time? That’s a loyalist. The last thing you want to do with a loyalist is introduce doubt by bringing up the competition. The call looks different: reinforce what they believe, ask questions that confirm why they’re using your product, and check in with the staff to ensure that they are not hearing any managed care or pharmacy issues that could create an opportunity for competitors.
But if that physician is writing a competitor’s product 80% of the time, you’re in a different conversation. You need to find the clinical niche where your product has an edge, ask the questions that open the door, and position specifically.
Knowing which mode you’re in before you walk in the door is the foundation of every competitive call. A manager who doesn’t hear a real pre-call plan before the first call of the day hasn’t started coaching yet. Don’t get out of the car until you’ve heard it.
Most VPs assume their managers are having this conversation. Most aren’t.
A manager who doesn’t hear a real pre-call plan before the first call of the day hasn’t started coaching yet.
Even a rep who shows up prepared can lose a competitive call at one specific moment. A physician signals doubt: a raised eyebrow when you cite a study, arms folding when you mention a key claim, or a direct mention of a competitor they’ve been hearing about.
What most reps do is get defensive. It feels like their business is under threat. They’ve been in that office for years, helped that physician build the patient population on their product. So when competition comes up, they react out of that ownership instinct and break trust with someone who was looking for the best option for their patient.
A physician doesn’t look at it like that. A physician looks at a competitive product as another therapeutic option. If something is better for their patient somewhere, they’ll use it there. A rep who reacts to it like a personal betrayal has misread the room.
This is a coachable skill — but only if someone was in the room to see the moment it failed.
In many pharma organizations, performance data is delayed six to eight weeks. By the time a manager sees a rep losing share, the conversations that caused it happened two months ago. The manager can pull the report, flag the trend, and schedule the one-on-one. But the moment where coaching would have changed something is already gone.
Organizations assume their managers know how to coach. Second-line leaders set expectations for field rides and coaching reports but rarely inspect whether those reports reflect what’s actually happening. Consistently reviewing field coaching reports is the discipline that makes coaching visible: whether competitive moments are being named, whether feedback is specific, whether patterns are being tracked across a rep over time. The occasional field ride is the spot-check: you go out with the rep, observe the call yourself, then compare what you saw to the written feedback the rep has been getting. When those two don’t line up, that’s where the gap lives. Most organizations treat that step as optional.
The accountability layer gets built when leaders are present for the competitive moment — before the next call, not two months later on a report.
The prescription isn’t complicated, but it requires presence.
In the car before competitive calls, the manager’s job is to hear a real pre-call plan: confirmation that the rep knows where this physician sits and what the goal is for this specific conversation. If the rep can’t articulate that, the coaching has already begun.
In the call, the manager’s role shifts. You’re in the umpire’s chair of a tennis match, with a view of the whole match: watching the physician’s body language, hearing the questions the rep doesn’t ask, catching the eye roll the rep missed because they were focused on getting to page three of the visual aid. You can see it because you’re not doing anything but watching two people interact. Stay in that role.
Afterward, don’t debrief call by call with a stack of corrections. Hold the observations, find the patterns across the day, and then sit down together with what you’ve written and give the rep room to push back. You’re not infallible, and acknowledging that is what earns you credibility for the rest of the feedback. Connect it to what matters to this specific rep: one person wants to be promoted, another just wants to be the best sales person they can be. The coaching that sticks speaks to where that person is trying to go.
PDG research across more than 200 companies confirms it: top-performing reps receive significantly more coaching on competitive dynamics than their lower-performing peers, and teams with structured coaching achieve 13.78% higher sales goal attainment.
More data won’t close it. Better sales aids won’t close it. It closes when a leader gets in the field, sees the moment a competitive call turns, and coaches to it before the next one.
Show up. Prepare for coaching. Listen more than you talk.
Ed Gutshall is a senior leader at Performance Development Group, where they partner with pharma commercial organizations on competitive selling capability, field coaching infrastructure, and execution systems that hold up in the real world.
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