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  • Why Customers Leave Good CROs, and How High-Performance Teams Earn Repeat Business 

    THE SHORT ANSWER 

    High-Performance Science Teams™ helps service CROs , study directors, project managers, laboratory teams, QA, report writing, and business development, operate as one team from quote to final report. It targets the behaviors that cost repeat business: timelines sold before operations validates them, late bad news, unmanaged scope change, and sponsors hearing different answers from different people. 

    Why do sponsors leave CROs whose science is good? 

    Sponsors rarely switch CROs because the data was wrong. They switch because the experience was: a study start that slipped after the contract was signed, a report that arrived three weeks late with no warning, a scope change that became a billing dispute, a study director who was the only person who knew what was happening. 

    Every one of those is a team failure dressed up as an individual one. In a services business, the sponsor experiences the seams between your functions as your brand. 

    What does team dysfunction look like inside a service CRO? 

    • BD sells a timeline operations didn’t validate. The quote goes out on a study-start date the lab schedule can’t support, and the study director inherits the credibility problem. 
    • The study director as single point of failure. Scientific, client, and operational decisions all route through one person, who becomes the bottleneck. 
    • Blurred study director and project manager roles. Sponsors don’t know who owns the timeline versus the science, and neither do the teams. 
    • Scope creep absorbed instead of managed. Added endpoints, extra timepoints, and protocol changes get done without change orders, margin leaks and resentment builds. 
    • Late bad news. A failed run, a QA audit finding, or an animal-availability issue waits until it can’t be hidden. 
    • Report turnaround drift. The handoff from in-life or bench teams to report writing and QA review has no shared deadline owner. 

    What does team science say about fixing it? 

    Two of the most cited findings on team effectiveness apply directly. Gallup’s research on managers found they account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement across business units. And Google’s Project Aristotle found psychological safety whether team members feel safe to take risks and raise problems to be the most important factor distinguishing effective teams. 

    Neither was studied in CROs specifically. But both describe exactly the conditions under which bad news travels early and scope changes get raised instead of absorbed. 

    How does High-Performance Science Teams™ work for CRO teams? 

    The program applies Guttman Development Strategies’ horizontal high-performance team model to CRO site leadership and study teams, working on live sponsor programs. 

    Client-risk pattern Root behavior What HPT installs 
    Timelines sold that ops can’t hit BD and operations goals misaligned A quote-to-study-start protocol with operations sign-off before commitment 
    Study director bottleneck Hub-and-spoke decision-making Explicit decision rights across study director, PM, and lab leads 
    Unmanaged scope change Avoidance of difficult sponsor conversations Shared norms and scripts for raising scope and change orders early 
    Late bad news Low psychological safety An early-warning protocol: raise risk within a set window, no blame 
    Report turnaround drift No shared owner across handoffs Peer accountability for report milestones across lab, writing, and QA 

    How does this connect to the customer-facing side of the CRO? 

    High-Performance Science Teams™ aligns the team behind the study. Bench to Business™, our companion program, builds the customer-facing skills of study directors, scientific project managers, and BD scientists,  discovery conversations, sponsor updates, and handling objections. CROs that run both close the gap between what is sold and what is delivered. 

    Who is it for? 

    Presidents and general managers, VPs of Operations, heads of study direction and project management, and BD leaders at discovery, safety assessment, DMPK, bioanalytical, and specialty service CROs — especially organizations growing site headcount or consolidating after acquisition. 

    How do we get started? 

    Start with the Science Team 360™, a short, confidential team-level diagnostic that shows exactly where decision rights, alignment, and accountability are breaking down inside your CRO site or study team. You get a readout before anyone commits to a full engagement. 

    Request a Science Team 360™ conversation at bench2business.bio. 

    Frequently asked questions 

    Why do sponsors switch CROs? 

    Sponsors commonly switch because of the service experience rather than the science: missed study-start dates, late or surprising updates, unmanaged scope changes, and inconsistent communication across the CRO team. 

    How can a CRO improve client retention? 

    By aligning BD, study direction, project management, lab operations, and QA on shared commitments to each sponsor, validating timelines before quoting, raising risks early, and managing scope changes openly. 

    What is the difference between a study director and a project manager in a CRO? 

    Roles vary, but typically the study director owns scientific conduct and GLP compliance of the study, while the project manager owns timeline, budget, and sponsor logistics. High-performing teams make these decision rights explicit. 

    Does High-Performance Science Teams™ replace project management tools or GLP processes? 

    No. It improves how the team works within them, how it decides, escalates, and holds itself accountable. 

    How do we start? 

    With the Science Team 360™, a confidential diagnostic that shows where your study teams’ alignment, decision rights, and accountability break down. 

    Sources 

    1. Gallup, State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders (2015) — https://www.gallup.com/services/182138/state-american-manager.aspx 
    1. Google re:Work, “Guide: Understand team effectiveness” (Project Aristotle) — https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness/ 
    1. Guttman, H.M. Great Business Teams: Cracking the Code for Standout Performance (Wiley, 2008) — https://www.guttmandev.com/great-business-teams 

    Figures from third-party studies are cited as published. Cross-industry data is presented as directional for life science. Program outcomes described are targets teams track against their own Science Team 360™ baseline, not guaranteed results. 

  • What Corning’s Field Application Scientist Story Reveals About the Bench-to-Business Gap

    A recruiting profile from Corning Life Sciences is, read the right way, one of the clearest public illustrations of why technical hires stall in customer-facing roles and what it actually takes to fix it.

    Corning Life Sciences recently published a profile of Sascha Kiesslich, a field application scientist (FAS) on their team, alongside the account manager he partners with, Chris Sheen. On its surface, it’s a career story aimed at scientists weighing a move out of academia. But if you run a commercial organization that sells to researchers, read it again. It is one of the clearest public descriptions of the exact gap we built Bench to Business™ to close.

    The credential opens the door. It doesn’t close the deal.

    Kiesslich holds a PhD in biomedical engineering, and Corning is explicit that his technical depth is what lets him understand what customers actually need. That is the part most companies already believe: hire the scientist, get the credibility. And it is true, deep expertise is what earns a researcher’s attention and opens the conversation.

    But the profile is just as clear that the credential is the entry ticket, not the job itself.

    The job is customer-facing, full stop.

    Read what the role actually involves in Corning’s telling: acting as an information hub alongside the account manager, delivering scientific seminars and product demonstrations, presenting at conferences, and troubleshooting both on-site and remotely at customer facilities. Corning even frames the scientist-and-account-manager pairing as a “dynamic duo” that looks after the whole customer relationship.

    Strip away the lab coat, and that is a commercial motion: discovery, presentation, team selling, and account management. The science gets you into the room. What happens in the room is a different skill set entirely.

    Trust is the currency, and it is learned.

    The account manager in the story is blunt about what makes the partnership work: communication, the ability to speak the customer’s language, and above all trust. He describes every business relationship as built on trust, and explains that a scientist sharing genuine expertise is precisely what earns it.

    Notice what that is, and what it is not. It is not the PhD. It is the ability to translate expertise into a relationship, to be credible and consultative at the same time. That is coachable. It is also, for most scientists new to a commercial role, almost entirely unpracticed.

    The quiet tell: Corning trained him.

    Here is the line commercial leaders should not skim past. Kiesslich describes receiving substantial onboarding to prepare for the role, including direction on how to integrate business with science, and the chance to rehearse presentations internally and get feedback before he was ever in front of a customer.

    In other words: even at a company with Corning’s resources, customer-facing competence did not arrive by osmosis with the diploma. It was deliberately built. Corning has a world-class internal enablement engine to do that building.

    Most companies selling into pharma, biotech, academic, and government research don’t have that engine. In the $10M–$500M-revenue tools, CRO/CDMO, and diagnostics segment, the usual pattern is: hire the PhD for credibility, hand them a territory, and hope commercial fluency develops on the job. Sometimes it does. Often it costs 6–12 months of ramp, a thinner pipeline than the headcount promised, and, worst case, the loss of an expensive, hard-to-replace technical hire who was never given a path to competence.

    The lesson for commercial leaders

    The Corning story is a validation, not a contradiction. It shows a scientist thriving in a customer-facing role precisely because someone invested in building the commercial half of the job. And the competencies involved are nameable and teachable:

    • Commercial identity & executive presence
    • Territory & account strategy
    • Discovery & consultative selling
    • Value communication & presentation
    • Stakeholder management & team selling
    • Objection handling & negotiation
    • CRM & pipeline discipline

    Those are the seven domains we measure and coach in Bench to Business™. None of them ask the scientist to stop being a credible scientist. All of them are the difference between a PhD who can explain a product and a professional who can move a customer.

    Start with a diagnosis, not a curriculum

    If Corning’s story resonates, if you’ve hired brilliant scientists into customer-facing roles and watched some of them ramp slowly or retreat to the technical comfort zone, the first step isn’t a training program. It’s a diagnosis.

    The Commercial Readiness 360™ baselines your team across all seven domains before you spend a dollar closing the gap. Lead with the diagnostic. What it surfaces is almost always more specific, and more fixable, than “they need sales training.”

    See the gap before you close it. Request the free Commercial Readiness 360™  •  bench2business.bio  •  steve@bench2business.bio

    Source: Corning Life Sciences, “Exploring the Role of a Field Application Scientist,” corning.com. Role details and characterizations are paraphrased with attribution; the phrase “dynamic duo” is quoted directly. Quotations and specifics are drawn from Corning’s profile of Sascha Kiesslich, Ph.D., and account manager Chris Sheen.