There are plenty of places to hear new ideas about training. What's harder to find is a place where those ideas get tested against how teams are actually operating. That's the role the LTEN annual conference tends to play.
On paper, it brings together life sciences learning and development professionals for several days of workshops, labs, and networking. In practice, it functions more like a working session for an industry trying to figure out how to turn learning into something measurable and repeatable.
The numbers are impressive, but the value is in the conversations. When that many people responsible for field training and performance are in the same room, the gaps between what's assumed and what's actually working become hard to ignore.
LTEN tends to surface the operational realities that don't make it into strategy decks. When you spend time in those conversations, patterns emerge
These aren't hypothetical scenarios. They come up repeatedly because they reflect the day-to-day friction most organizations are navigating right now. Seeing them side by side is what makes the conference useful. It gives you a reference point for where your own approach is working and where it might need a second look.
The expectations placed on coaching have changed in a meaningful way. What was once considered a necessary part of the role is now expected to drive performance, develop talent, and create consistency across teams, often all at once. At the same time, leadership teams want to understand not just whether coaching is happening, but whether it is working and what specifically is making the difference.
That is where many organizations feel friction. Not because managers are unwilling or unprepared, but because there is no shared definition of what effective coaching looks like when it is done well. Without that clarity, it becomes difficult to measure anything with confidence, and even more difficult to improve it in a systematic way.
Echelon’s co-hosted workshop this year, “The Missing Metric: Why Coaching Belongs at the Center of Commercial Learning Strategy,” is designed to move past ambiguity around coaching effectiveness and focus on what can be observed, measured, and repeated.
The workshop will take place on June 16 at 3:30 PM. It will feature Ed McCarthy, Echelon Founder/CEO, Ted Power, iCoachFirst GM Field Enablement, and Dan Listemann, Botanix VP/Marketing Operations.
The premise is straightforward. Coaching is a core driver of commercial strategy, not a peripheral support function. It is where strategy is translated into action in the field. Organizations that treat coaching as a measurable discipline see faster, more sustainable results.
The session will explore why coaching quality belongs in the same strategic conversations as revenue metrics, market share, and sales productivity. It will also examine how organizations can measure coaching effectiveness and use technology, including AI, to make coaching more consistent, repeatable, and scalable.
Drawing on practical examples and field coaching data, the speakers will show how coaching can move from a routine activity to something more deliberate and strategically aligned with commercial performance.
Participants will come away with a clearer understanding of how to define coaching quality in practical terms, how to use technology in a way that supports rather than distracts from the work, and how to focus managers on the behaviors most likely to lead to measurable improvement.
What makes LTEN useful is not that it presents entirely new ideas, but that it creates the conditions for honest evaluation of the ones already in place. When you see how other organizations are approaching the same challenges, it becomes easier to identify where your own approach is effective and where it may be falling short.
In most cases, what people take away is not a completely new strategy, but a more precise understanding of where to focus and what needs to change. The thinking becomes less broad and more specific, which is often what leads to better decisions once they return to their teams.
For anyone responsible for training, coaching, or field performance, that level of specificity is where the real value tends to sit.
To ensure you connect with the Echelon team at LTEN, you can schedule a meeting at the show HERE.