A few years ago, I worked with a pharma company that invested significantly in their sales training program from thoughtful onboarding to rigorous product certification and a field readiness assessment they were genuinely proud of.
And yet, performance across the team was inconsistent in ways the training couldn't explain. Two reps could go through the exact same program and come out on completely different trajectories.
When we dug in, the answer wasn't in the curriculum. It was in the managers.
The reps who were thriving had managers who coached – those who debriefed after field rides with intention or who gave feedback that was specific, behavioral, and timely. The reps who were struggling had managers who were busy, well-meaning, and almost entirely untrained to do any of those things.
Research backs this up: a manager accounts for more variance in a rep's performance than almost any other organizational factor. More than territory. More than product. More than the training program the team just spent six months building.
Then, why is manager development still so often an afterthought?
In pharma and life sciences, managers are frequently promoted from the field, and for good reasons: they know the science; they know the customers; and they know what great looks like in a clinical conversation. But being a great rep is about knowing what to say. Being a great manager is about knowing how to help someone else figure that out.
That's a completely different skill. And we can't assume it transfers on its own.
What it looks like when organizations get this right
The companies that invest in their managers as multipliers tend to do three things differently.
1. They teach the coaching conversation, not just the coaching concept. Most manager development programs cover theory: the importance of feedback, the value of development conversations. The organizations that see results go further. They build managers' muscle memory around the specific language of a field coaching debrief:
What questions to ask
How to draw out a rep's own insight rather than just delivering the answer
How to read where someone is in their development and adjust accordingly.
2. They give managers rubrics they can actually use. Vague criteria like "communicates with credibility" or "builds rapport" feel objective on paper but create inconsistent coaching in practice. Two managers observing the same rep call will score it completely differently if their standard only lives in their heads. Clear behavioral rubrics, anchored to observable actions in an HCP conversation, give managers a shared language for feedback that reps experience as fair, consistent, and genuinely developmental.
3. They make calibration a habit, not a one-time exercise. Even a great rubric degrades without regular calibration. The highest-performing organizations build regular touchpoints where managers score the same scenario independently and then reconcile the differences. Not as a performance exercise, but as a way to keep the standard sharp and the coaching consistent across the field.
The question worth asking now
As teams head into Q4 planning, it's worth asking honestly: where is manager development sitting in your L&D investment? Is it a program, or is it an assumption?
Because the rep who gets a great manager outperforms. The rep who doesn't, churns.
At OCTANE, we design manager development programs specifically for life sciences commercial and medical affairs teams, built around your organization's specific performance standards. If this is a gap on your radar, we'd love to compare notes.
