Key Takeaways
India has one of the largest pharmaceutical field forces in the world. By most estimates, over 600,000 medical representatives are on the ground today, with some leading companies employing more than 10,000 reps each. For decades, scale has been the industry’s primary lever. Wider coverage, more visits, more visibility among doctors.
And for a while, it worked.
But today, many leaders are seeing that adding more activity is no longer delivering proportional impact. Sales teams often operate at only 60-70% effectiveness, with visit adherence falling as low as 30-40%. Why? Because the conditions under which field execution happens have fundamentally changed.
Why field execution is breaking down at scale
Pressure on pharma field teams has been rising, even as room for engagement continues to shrink. In India, this is increasingly visible in large institutional and public hospital settings, where in-person meetings between doctors and medical representatives are increasingly constrained, and information is often expected to move through more controlled or digital channels.
And even when access is granted, time becomes a limiting factor. A senior physician may meaningfully engage with only a small number of representatives in a given week, with every interaction competing against patient load and administrative pressure. Industry indicators reinforce this reality. Physicians find only about one-third of sales interactions valuable, and nearly 90 percent of engagements last less than 2 minutes. In such conditions, any lapse in relevance or preparation carries immediate and irreversible cost.
Yet many field execution models are shaped by leadership decisions made away from the field, with easily visible activity such as meeting counts treated as a stand-in for effectiveness.
The assumptions behind this approach no longer hold at scale:
- That more calls and higher frequency naturally translate into impact
- That attention can be spread evenly across interactions
- That inefficiencies can be recovered later in the cycle
The result is a growing mismatch between how field execution is designed and how engagement actually works. Healthcare organisations continue to manage field activity as if effort were the limiting factor when, in reality, attention has become the constraining resource. It cannot be increased by doing more. It can only be concentrated. As effort is spread across too many interactions, relevance weakens, context fragments, and execution loses effectiveness even when activity levels remain high.
The solution: Designing field execution for attention
If attention is the true constraint, then field execution cannot be designed as a throughput problem. It has to be designed as a concentration problem. The central task for leaders is no longer to push more effort into the field, but to ensure that effort is focused on the few interactions where it can actually make a difference.
In practical terms, attention-optimised execution requires shifting work upstream:
Before the field day begins
Relevance is decided, so reps know exactly where focus matters most.
Before the conversation starts
Context is assembled, so engagement time is spent discussing, not reconstructing.
During the interaction
Coordination work is removed, protecting moments where attention is most fragile.
After the visit
Outcomes are captured, follow-ups are created, and context is shared across teams.
Designed this way, attention stops being something reps fight for in real time and becomes something the organisation prepares in advance.
What attention-optimised execution looks like in practice
Translating this shift into action requires systems that actively support how field work is prioritised, prepared, and carried forward.
Agentforce Life Sciences for Customer Engagement is built to enable this approach, combining unified engagement data, agentic AI, and mobile-first workflows to support attention-optimised execution across the field journey.
Here is how that approach takes shape across the field journey.
1. Move from route coverage to relevance-led planning
To operate under attention constraints, planning must shift from optimising routes to prioritising relevance. Leaders need to ensure that reps start each day with clear direction on which HCPs matter most and why, based on current context rather than static cycles.
Attention-optimised planning does this by using real-time signals to guide focus, preparing reps with conversation-specific insights, and reducing cognitive load before the first visit begins.
This is where Agentforce Life Sciences for Customer Engagement steps in. With unified data, agentic AI, and a mobile-first design, it helps reps move beyond generic schedules. Agentforce-powered visit planning, smart account summaries, and data-driven recommendations guide reps toward higher-quality interactions throughout the day, improving both efficiency and engagement outcomes.
2. Design execution for low connectivity and long field days
Execution must be designed to hold up under real on-ground conditions, not ideal ones. Leaders need to ensure that field work continues seamlessly across clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, and semi-urban locations, regardless of network reliability.
Agentforce Life Sciences allows reps to capture visit notes, sample requests, and follow-up actions directly on their devices, even when offline. Once connectivity is restored, updates sync automatically and accurately to the correct HCP or account, without duplication or rework.
This ensures that critical information is not lost to connectivity gaps. Reps can review recent activity, record outcomes, and prepare for upcoming visits using cached data, allowing execution to continue smoothly rather than breaking under operational friction.
3. Ensure context is assembled before the interaction
Leaders need to eliminate situations where reps reconstruct history mid-interaction and instead ensure that every visit is supported by a complete, current view of the HCP. That requires a unified view of each HCP, including past interactions, therapy interests, samples provided, order patterns, and any open medical or service-related inquiries, with confidence that this information is current and complete.
Agentforce Life Sciences addresses this at the data foundation level through Data 360. Using zero-copy integration and MuleSoft connectors, it brings together HCP, account, territory, service, and engagement data from across the organisation without delays or duplication. Built on this foundation, Agentforce enables field, medical, and support teams to act on shared insights, with analytics and workflows connected across Salesforce applications and collaboration embedded into daily work.
4. Surface the right content at the right moment
For attention to be sustained during high-pressure interactions, content must support the conversation rather than interrupt it. Leaders need to ensure that reps can immediately access compliant, relevant materials without searching, second-guessing, or risking misalignment.
Agentforce Life Sciences brings structure and control to this complexity. Approved medical content is managed in a governed environment, with assets tagged by product, indication, audience, and usage rules. Before a visit, the platform surfaces the most relevant materials based on prior interactions, therapeutic focus, and the purpose of the meeting.
This allows reps to focus on the conversation rather than content navigation, presenting information with confidence that it is current, compliant, and appropriate to the moment.
Turn attention into advantage
At scale, the advantage no longer lies in doing more, but in deciding better. Organisations that can consistently focus effort into the moments that matter will be the ones that sustain influence as access tightens and complexity grows.
See how Agentforce Life Sciences supports attention-optimised field execution at scale
