Suzy Ffrench can tell within the first few minutes of a coaching session whether someone is there to grow or just there to get through it.
Most are there to grow. Out of nearly 100 one-on-one sessions she's led in the past few months, only a handful of managers were going through the motions. The rest leaned in. Many asked to keep going after the engagement ended.
Leaders in pharma and life sciences want better coaching. What they often lack is a structured path to get there. That's the gap Suzy fills as an Echelon Certified Coach and Lead Analyst.
Suzy didn't start in pharma. She started in financial services as a sales trainer, running role plays, giving feedback, and coaching reps on their sales skills. The work that stuck with her wasn't the training itself. It was watching people change afterward.
That experience led her into management development, working directly with managers on how they coached their teams. She spent years in that space before stepping away to raise her kids, then figuring out what came next.
About six years ago, the answer arrived through a familiar voice. Margie Gozdiff, a colleague from financial services and fellow Echelon coach, told Suzy about Echelon's analysis work: studying field coaching reports, identifying where managers were strong, and pinpointing where they needed help.
Suzy “got it” immediately. Analysis wasn't just an entry point. It was the foundation. By studying real coaching conversations at scale, she could see patterns no single ride-along would reveal: where managers defaulted to directing instead of developing, where feedback lacked specificity, and where coaching plans existed on paper but never translated into behavior change.
That analytical lens still shapes how she coaches today.
Suzy’s experience spans multiple sales environments, including financial services and real estate, where she developed a deep focus on how managers coach and how behavior change actually takes hold.
Six years working inside pharma organizations has reinforced her conviction that the core coaching challenges are not unique to life sciences. Managers across industries struggle with the same issues: giving feedback that is specific enough to act on, staying with a skill long enough for it to develop, and resisting the urge to hand someone a to-do list instead of helping them think differently.
What does change is the context. Pharma teams operate in highly regulated, technically complex environments with seasoned reps. Coaching in that setting requires the ability to meet experienced professionals where they are and still push them forward. That is where Suzy’s approach consistently delivers.
Ask Suzy what she sees most often when she starts with a new organization, and two patterns come up immediately.
The first is what she calls rudderless sailing. "You don't really know where it is that you want to get to. But you know you want it to be different."
Managers can feel that performance should be better, but they haven't defined what better looks like in specific, observable terms. Without that clarity, coaching conversations drift and progress has no benchmark.
The second is the one-hit wonder. A manager rides along, observes a call, and delivers a list of things to do differently. The rep checks the boxes. Nothing changes. Because a to-do list isn't development. It's task management dressed up as coaching.
Real development, in Suzy's experience, means identifying one or two specific behaviors and coaching them consistently until they're not just performed but mastered. Not checked off. Internalized.
Most coaching engagements stop too early. A manager shows improvement, the organization declares progress, and the engagement wraps before the new behavior has become automatic. Without reinforcement, people drift back to what's comfortable.
This is why she believes so strongly in defining skill goals at the start and sticking with them through to genuine competency. It's the difference between coaching that creates a temporary bump and coaching that produces lasting change.
The engagement Suzy is currently wrapping up was a first for the client: dedicated one-on-one coaching sessions for every frontline manager and regional vice president, with a structured handoff at the end so development doesn't stop when the coaching does.
In just four months, the shift has been clear. Managers are coaching with more specificity. Conversations have moved from rehashing the day to developing targeted skills. And most participants have asked to continue.
What excites Suzy most is the leverage. The changes aren't dramatic overhauls. They're small, focused adjustments repeated over time. One better question in a debrief. One clearer skill goal on a coaching plan. One manager who stops giving answers and starts asking them instead.
Individually, those shifts are modest. Across a team, over months, they compound into something the organization can measure.
Echelon Performance has spent nearly 20 years analyzing what separates great coaching from good intentions. If your organization is ready to build coaching consistency that lasts beyond the kickoff, get in touch.