Your sales team is under pressure.
Regulatory norms are shifting. Tariffs are reshaping supply chains. Government–pharma partnerships are changing how decisions get made. At the same time, reps are navigating constant inputs—news alerts between calls, AI-generated call plans of uneven quality, and a steady stream of notifications competing for attention.
Your team isn’t disengaged. They’re overloaded.
In an environment this noisy, many reps struggle to stay focused on the fundamentals that actually drive performance.
🔥 A Guide Built on 20+ Years of Pharma Coaching Research
We’ve written a new guide, When Everything’s On Fire: 4 Coaching Moves You’ll Need for 2026, grounded in the work we do every day with commercial teams across the life sciences and healthcare industries.
At Echelon Performance, our approach to coaching is informed by more than 20 years of research, including the analysis of over 75,000 pharma field coaching conversations and reports.
The result is a practical guide based on real patterns we see in the field, not theory, focused on coaching practices that hold up when conditions are complex, time is limited, and expectations continue to rise.
The Problem Isn't Effort, It's Focus
The challenge facing pharma sales leaders in 2026 isn’t motivation or intent. It’s focus.
When pressure rises and everything feels urgent, managers often default to what’s most visible: dashboards, call reports, competency checklists, activity reviews. These tools have a place. But when they become the center of coaching, development starts to drift.
Activity gets tracked. Time gets spent. But capability doesn’t reliably improve.
What gets lost is the through-line; clear, consistent development tied to specific skills that actually change performance. Without that focus, coaching becomes reactive. Well-intentioned, but scattered. Busy, but not always effective.
When Confidence Outruns Capability
This lack of consistent development is often compounded by a very human dynamic.
Many managers hesitate to push coaching conversations into truly objective territory. They worry about damaging relationships or undermining confidence. That hesitation becomes even more pronounced when a rep believes they are already highly proficient.
This is where cognitive bias shows up most clearly. When someone overestimates their capability in a skill, vague feedback and generic documentation don’t correct course. They reinforce it.
A rep who believes they’re already “strong” in an area won’t change behavior based on general praise or broad observations. Without specificity, there’s nothing to anchor reflection, nothing to practice, and nothing to build on.
To cut through that noise, coaching needs structure. It needs a system that:
- Creates objectivity by clearly defining where a rep is today versus where they’re developing toward
- Builds momentum by linking each coaching interaction to the last, rather than restarting every visit
- Provides clarity so the manager becomes a consistent signal in an otherwise noisy environment
Four Coaching Practices That Cut Through Everything Else
Through decades of research and direct field observation, we’ve identified four coaching practices that consistently separate high-performing managers from the rest.
When coaching reflects these practices, there is a greater than 90% likelihood that the manager delivering it is recognized as a top performer by their organization. At the same time, fewer than 15% of managers apply these practices consistently.
These four moves are not abstract ideas. They are the connective tissue between corporate strategy and field execution:
- Coach to skills by focusing on observable behaviors that actually drive performance, not just activity metrics
- Set clear skill goals that connect short-term actions to long-term proficiency
- Engage the rep as an owner of their development, making coaching something done with them, not to them
- Leverage high-quality coaching through BASICS —Balanced, Actionable, Specific, Impact-focused, Continuous, and Supportive—to ensure every interaction builds real capability
What Happens When Managers Apply These Practices
When managers consistently coach this way, results follow. Sales representatives show measurable improvement in goal attainment, and coaching quality increases significantly across teams.
These practices aren’t flashy. They aren’t new. But they work.
In an environment full of distractions, competing priorities, and constant pressure, your team doesn’t need more noise. They need you to be the signal.
To see the full framework and learn how to apply these four coaching moves in practice, download the guide.
