Delve newsletter · Issue 2 · Leadership

Your best RSM may not be ready for your next big job

Sudhir Sharma, founder, Delve Solutions · 22 October 2026 · 6 minutes

Every pharma company has one. The regional sales manager everybody trusts.

His region closes the month. His managers file their reports on time. When a stockist goes quiet or a launch stalls, he is on the road the next morning and the problem is gone by Friday. When a zonal or national role falls vacant, his name is the first one on the list.

And then, quite often, something goes wrong.

The same man who was brilliant at delivering a plan finds himself asked to write one. He is no longer handed a target; he has to decide what the target should be, and defend it. He has to choose which brands get money and which do not, which territories need a new rep and which need one fewer, and explain all of it to finance and to the owner. Nobody taught him this. Nobody had time to.

He does what he knows: he works harder. He travels more, joins more calls, chases more numbers. The zone looks busy. The strategy never gets written.

This is not his failure. It is ours. We promote people for being excellent at execution and assume strategy will arrive with the new designation. It rarely does.

What changes when an RSM moves up

The jump from region to zone, or from zone to head office, is not a bigger version of the same job. It is a different job. Five shifts matter most:

1. From delivering targets to building them.
An RSM receives a number and breaks it down. A leader has to build the number from the market up: potential, coverage, competition, the capacity of the team. Then make a case for it.

2. From this month to next year.
Execution lives in the closing week. Strategy lives in the annual plan, the launch calendar and the three-year shape of the portfolio. The hardest habit to learn is to stop firefighting long enough to think about March in October.

3. From spending to investing.
Samples, camps, conferences, new headquarters, new reps: an RSM asks for them. A leader has to treat each one as an investment, decide what return it should bring, and stop the ones that do not.

4. From my region to the company.
A regional manager fights for his region. A leader has to give money to someone else's region when that is where the growth is, and work with marketing, medical, supply and HR as partners rather than as departments to escalate to.

5. From doing to developing.
The RSM's instinct is to step in and fix. The leader's job is to build managers who can fix it without him, and to have a successor ready.

None of these can be learnt from a slide deck in a two-day programme. They are learnt by doing real work with someone beside you who has done it before.

Why a mentor, and why from outside

Inside the company, your senior leaders are the natural teachers, but they are the busiest people in the building, and the RSM is reporting to them. It is hard to say "I don't know how to build a budget" to the person who will judge your budget.

An experienced outside mentor changes that conversation:

• He has sat in the chair. A former zonal or national sales head has built annual plans, defended budgets and restructured territories. He teaches from scars, not theory.
• He is safe to be honest with. No appraisal rides on the conversation, so the real questions come out.
• He works on your real business. Not a case study from another country: your brands, your regions, your next year's plan.
• He is there for a defined piece of work, not for ever. A quarter, a planning cycle, a first year in the new role.

A practical way to start

If you lead a pharma company, you can begin this month, without a large budget:

1. Pick two or three RSMs you would want in a bigger role within two years. Tell them why.
2. Give each one a real strategic assignment. For example: build next year's plan for your region, with targets built bottom-up, the investment you need, and what you will stop doing.
3. Pair each of them with a mentor for 90 days, meeting every two weeks, with the mentor reviewing the work as it is built.
4. Have them present the plan to you and to finance at the end, as if they already held the job.
5. Decide what you learnt about them. Some will surprise you. Some will tell you they would rather stay where they are, and that is useful to know too.

The companies that grow well over the next decade will not be the ones with the best executors. They will be the ones whose executors learnt to think like owners, early enough.

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