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AstraZeneca: Using Artificial Intelligence Coaching Models to Improve Sales Performance
July 08, 2020 | Brief
AstraZeneca: A Sales Coaching Culture
This global pharmaceutical organization aims to push the boundaries of science to deliver life-changing medicine. As the pace of change in health care (including pharmaceuticals) continues to accelerate—through legislation, how medical practices are organized, and how employment has changed over the years—managing through those changes is critical to the success of the organization and the individual. Within the chaos of change, AstraZeneca has turned to coaching as a strategy to help manage through it. For its US-based salesforce of 4,000 people, AstraZeneca focused on elevating the coaching expertise of its 600+ field leaders, whose reach can influence thousands of others through their daily interactions with customers, managers, and sales representatives.
As AstraZeneca began its coaching approach, it clearly defined what coaching means in its environment and rolled out an implementation plan. As the coaching approach gained traction, the company focused on how to coach well and measure how well it was working for coaches in the field. The most straightforward way, directly observing a conversation, is difficult to do with managers and sales representatives in the field.
Beyond Field Coaching Forms
Like many sales organizations, AstraZeneca uses a field coaching form that’s designed to capture each day between the manager and sales representative, documenting what went well, what could be done better going forward, how each is feeling, what the coaching focus is, and more. As a result of this continuous documentation, thousands of field coaching forms are submitted each year. Leaders want to analyze all the forms and find ways to help their salesforce improve, but their own daily demands make it difficult.
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