What Sales Coaching Looks Like When You Stop Counting Calls
By Sergio Armani, Founder & CEO, ACG-Clinical
You told your sales team to stop obsessing over call counts and email volume. You bought into the idea that clinical research sales is about relationships, not activity metrics.
Now your sales managers are sitting in 1-on-1s with absolutely no idea what to talk about.
They can't ask "how many calls did you make?" anymore. But they don't know what questions to ask instead. So they're winging it, reviewing pipeline stages, and hoping their reps figure it out on their own.
This is where most sales transformations fail. Not because the philosophy is wrong, but because nobody teaches sales leaders how to actually coach for relationships instead of activity.
If you've shifted away from activity metrics but your managers still don't know how to develop relationship-building skills in their team, you've created a leadership gap that will kill your results.
Here's how to fix it.
The Problem: What Most Sales Managers Are Still Doing
Walk into a typical sales 1-on-1 in our industry, and here's what you'll hear:
"How many calls did you make this month?"
"How many emails did you send?"
"Why is this deal still stuck in contracting?"
The conversation centers on what happened, not why it happened or what the rep learned. Managers review pipeline stages, ask about next steps, and push for commitments. It's transactional coaching for what's supposed to be a relationship-driven sale.
Here's why this happens: most sales managers don't have a mental model for what good relationship-building looks like at each stage of development. They can spot a rep who isn't making enough calls. But can they spot a rep who's having surface-level conversations with a Site Director while completely missing the Principal Investigator's real concerns? Can they identify when a rep is "checking boxes" in discovery instead of genuinely understanding a site's operational challenges?
Usually not. Because they've never been taught what to listen for.
I worked with a technology company founder who's led his business for 11 years with the same BD rep for 10 of those years. The rep is solid: experienced, knows the market, has relationships. But their CRM has no dashboards, no visibility into what's actually happening. They primarily rely on notes in the system.
When I suggested implementing better tracking to create visibility and enable coaching, the founder pushed back hard. He couldn't see the value in tracking any details, whether traditional metrics or relationship-focused KPIs.
Here's the problem: this founder has never sold. He doesn't know how to coach a BD representative. Without any data to help him understand what's working, he's flying blind. His rep might be doing great work, or there might be massive skill gaps. He has no way of knowing.
I ultimately decided not to continue my engagement with this client. If a leader isn't open to evolving how they think about sales leadership, there's a limit to what I can help them accomplish.
This isn't unusual. Many founders in clinical research technology, site networks, and small CROs came up through operations or science. They're brilliant at what they do, but they've never developed frameworks for sales leadership. So they default to "just let them do their thing" because they don't know what else to do.
If you're a founder or sales leader who knows your current approach isn't working but aren't sure what to change, let's talk. I help clinical research companies build the frameworks and visibility they need to coach effectively. Schedule a conversation.
The Shift: What Relationship-Focused Coaching Actually Requires
Coaching for partnerships requires a fundamentally different approach. You're no longer reviewing what your reps did. You're assessing how well they understand the people they're trying to serve and whether they're building the trust required for long-term partnerships.
Your 1-on-1s need to focus on three things:
1. The Quality of Understanding
When your rep last spoke with a site coordinator or CRO project manager, did they leave with a deeper understanding of that person's world? Not just "what they need" in terms of services, but what pressures they're under, what success looks like for them personally, what past experiences shape how they evaluate vendors?
In relationship-focused coaching, you're asking:
"What did you learn about how they're measured internally?"
"What's the political dynamic between the PI and the site operations team?"
"Why is this decision taking longer than usual? What's happening behind the scenes?"
You're coaching your reps to think like anthropologists, not salespeople. To be genuinely curious about the systems they're navigating.
2. The Depth of Strategic Thinking
Activity-based coaching asks: "What's your next step?"
Relationship-based coaching asks: "What's your theory about how this decision will actually get made?"
There's a massive difference. The first gets you a task. The second gets you a conversation about whether your rep actually understands the account.
At a research site, is the decision really about pricing? Or is it about whether the Site Director trusts you won't disappear when enrollment gets tough? At a small CRO, are you selling to the VP of Operations, or do you need buy-in from the CEO who's been burned by vendors before?
Your job is to pressure-test your rep's thinking. To ask the hard questions that reveal whether they're operating with a real strategy or just hoping activity will turn into a deal.
3. The Evolution of Trust
Trust isn't binary. It evolves through stages: early stage might be "they'll take my call." Mid-stage is "they're sharing real challenges." Late stage looks like "they're involving me in internal conversations before making decisions."
As a coach, you should be able to assess where trust currently sits based on how your rep describes interactions, and what needs to happen to deepen it.
What This Looks Like in Practice
I'm not telling you to ignore activity data completely. I'm telling you to use it differently.
When I was hiring business development reps at Advarra, I'd tell candidates: "I don't have the time, energy, or emotional wherewithal to micromanage your daily activities. At the end of the day, you're either hitting your targets or you're not."
But here's the caveat: I did look at the activity dashboards. Every leader should. The question is what you're looking for and what conclusions you draw.
If someone was consistently hitting their numbers (monthly, quarterly, annually), I didn't obsess over whether they made 50 calls or 30 calls that week. I knew they were managing relationships correctly. Maybe they were having fewer but deeper conversations. Maybe they'd built enough trust that deals were coming to them. The results spoke for themselves.
The activity data became diagnostic in two scenarios:
High activity, low results. When a rep is making tons of calls, attending every event, sending countless emails, but nothing is converting, you've got a skills problem, not an effort problem.
Are they having surface-level conversations? Prospecting to the wrong people? Failing to qualify properly? So focused on activity that they're not building actual relationships? This is coachable, if you catch it early.
Low activity, low results. This led to "career counseling conversations." If someone wasn't putting in effort and wasn't getting results, they either didn't want the job, didn't understand it, or weren't capable of doing it. That's performance management, not development.
Activity metrics aren't useless. They're just not the goal. They're a diagnostic tool. When you combine activity data with outcome data, you get a clearer picture of where coaching is needed and what kind will actually help.
I'm seeing this transformation happen right now with another client. He's a newly promoted Head of Sales at a patient engagement company who came up through the organization. He knows the product and market cold, but had never led a sales team.
The difference? He's been extremely open to looking at things differently. He implemented new dashboards that give him real visibility into what's happening. Not just pipeline stages, but the quality and depth of activities. Now he can see patterns. He can identify when conversations aren't progressing or when relationships are staying surface-level.
Because he has that visibility, he's coaching and leading strategically. He's not guessing. He's making informed decisions about where his team needs development, which accounts need senior involvement, and what skills gaps exist.
That's what good diagnostic leadership looks like.
So in your 1-on-1s, you're not asking "how many calls did you make?" You're using activity patterns to ask smarter questions:
"You've had lots of conversations this month but nothing's progressing. Walk me through what's happening in those meetings."
"Your activity is down but your pipeline is strong. Tell me about the relationships you're investing in."
"I'm seeing tons of first meetings but few second meetings. What's breaking down after the introduction?"
These are coaching questions designed to surface what's actually happening so you can help your reps get better.
Building diagnostic leadership capabilities doesn't happen overnight. Whether you need help implementing the right dashboards, training your managers to coach differently, or stepping in as fractional support while you build this capability, reach out and let's explore what makes sense for your organization.
The Real Work: Developing These Skills in Your Team
Most sales reps in clinical research come from transactional backgrounds or were promoted from operations and taught to sell through activity. They don't naturally think like strategic partners. You need to develop that capability intentionally.
Coaching Through Debrief, Not Just Pipeline Review
After every significant interaction (site visit, CRO executive meeting, challenging email exchange), your reps should debrief with you. Not reporting what happened, but processing what they learned.
"What surprised you in that conversation?"
"What did they care about that you didn't expect?"
"If you could do that meeting over, what would you do differently?"
This builds reflective practitioners, not just activity executors. You're training them to learn from every interaction, to get better at reading rooms and people, to develop judgment.
Teaching Consultative Selling, Not Just Needs Analysis
Real consultative selling in clinical research means helping prospects think through problems they didn't know they had. It means asking questions that make a Site Director rethink their patient recruitment approach, or helping a CRO operations lead see inefficiencies in their vendor management.
In your 1-on-1s, ask: "What questions did you ask that made them pause and think?" If your rep can't answer that, they're not being consultative. They're being compliant.
Building Comfort with Complexity
Clinical research sales involves navigating matrixed organizations, conflicting priorities, and stakeholders with different definitions of success. A site coordinator cares about smooth execution. A PI cares about data quality. A Site Director cares about revenue and efficiency.
Your reps need to hold all that complexity simultaneously. Coach them through it by asking:
"Who's the economic buyer versus the user? Who has veto power? Whose problem are we really solving, and does everyone agree it's a problem worth solving?"
These questions separate reps who close transactional deals from those who build long-term partnerships.
The Leadership Challenge
If you're thinking, "This is a completely different skill set than what I was hired to do," you're right. It is.
Most sales leaders in clinical research were promoted because they could sell, not because they could develop others. The coaching model they inherited (pipeline reviews, activity checks, forecast calls) was built for a different era.
What you're being asked to do now is harder. It requires more emotional intelligence, more patience, more comfort with nuance. You need to be a teacher and strategist, not just a manager.
And here's the reality: not every sales leader can make this transition alone. Some need training. Some need frameworks they've never been given. And some need a partner who can either teach them or step in alongside them.
The clinical research industry is moving toward longer partnerships and deeper relationships. The vendors who win won't be the ones with the most aggressive activity. They'll be the ones whose teams genuinely understand customers, think strategically about complex decisions, and build trust over time.
But none of that happens without leadership that knows how to coach for it.
If you've stopped counting calls and emails, congratulations. You've taken the first step. Now comes the harder part: building a coaching culture that develops the skills your team needs to succeed in a relationship-driven market.
That's the work. And it's worth doing.
Making this transition requires the right leadership. I work with clinical research vendors to transform sales organizations from activity-driven to relationship-driven. Whether that's training your current team, implementing coaching frameworks, or bringing in fractional CCO support, let's build a sales organization designed for partnerships, not just pipelines. Let's talk about what's possible.
Disclaimer: The information in this publication is for general informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, financial, or regulatory advice. Armani Consulting Group, LLC, doing business as ACG-Clinical, disclaims any liability for errors, omissions, or actions taken in reliance on this content. Please consult qualified professionals for advice specific to your situation.