The drug works. End of story

Of late I've witnessed plenty of angst amongst pharma marketers trying to discern the 'narrative' behind the product they sell.  

I've sat in too many workshops, the purpose of each is to apply The Hero's Journey to the fact that Drug A has an effect on Tumour Type B.  Invariably, inevitably the analogy collapses under the weight of the exercise.  Is it the drug that's the hero or is it the doctor?  If the drug is the hero then doesn't that relegate the doctor to the role of squire to some tumour-fighting knight-errant? Easier to agree that the doctor is hero, which makes our drug Excalibur.  But what about the competition?  Aren't they the ones we're really fighting against, even though it's poor form to describe them as the enemy?  Or is it the patient?  People with cancer can be pretty damn heroic y'know.  After a while the only thing that we can agree upon is that the tumour is the bad guy.

It's around this time that someone jokes that this exact exercise is probably being attempted by a dozen groups somewhere around the world at this exact moment.  So we take lunch.

Afterwards we agree that The Hero's Journey is a bit cliché and we cast around for other narratives and so arrive at Journey From Darkness to Light.  But the medical team shuts that one down immediately because it implies a promise that our trial data won't support.  We are talking about cancer after all.

There is only one successful narrative for pharma products: it works.  If you're lucky you might be able to say it works in a surprising way.  Say this in the right way and let the doctor see for himself (in the right patient).  After which we pretty much lose control of the situation.  The doctor either believes that it works or she doesn't.

Energy spent trying to reframe the customer's relationship with the disease in question is energy wasted.  Doctors know the condition better than we ever will because they live with it every day.  The more poetic amongst them will describe their jobs in terms of warfare ('battle') or travel ('journey') or vigilance ('watch'n'wait') or strategy ('chess game') or problem solving ('cracking the code', 'solving the puzzle') but that's them using metaphor to describe their world to us.  Medicine is all those things and many more and we do well to listen to the words used by the individual.

But it is a mistake for us to gather around a flipchart to concoct some grand narrative that suits our purpose.  In the sales situation it will add a layer of complexity, as metaphor often does, or oversimplify or distort our message in some other way.  Instead, speak plainly and let the facts do the rest.

The Marketers' Dilemma

(what follows is an essay written for my consultancy business)

 

There is a tendency for marketers to see their roles as all-seeing strategists who, because they cannot direct the field force to specific action, abdicate responsibility for the nature of sales activity.  There is a direct correlation between the distance between the ‘flipchart and the field’ and the likelihood of such an abdication.  The negative consequences of this attitude range from the relatively trivial (e.g. time wasted on internal politicking) to the profound (e.g. a failed global product launch).  However, this is not all the fault of the marketers.  Many (most) pharma companies have imposed strict intra-company communications codes to govern the quality, quantity and access of marketing to sales.  The marketer who seeks to take more responsibility is often explicitly forbidden from doing so.

 

Marketers aren't respected because they have a not entirely unfair reputation for wasting salespeople’s time.  Organising time in front of a field force is very expensive prospect.  Getting a team off the road and into a room takes actual money from someone’s budget but this is dwarfed by the opportunity cost of time-off-road.

So why don't marketers always get the respect they should?

• It is perceived that they change their minds too often, both at a departmental and individual level
• A one-size-fits-all dictates of strategy do not gel with the quick-fire think-on-your-feet, at-the-coalface world of selling, especially when global strategy is soon to contradict local selling challenges
• From a field force perspective, marketers choose not to see the whole picture (e.g. P1 / P2 detailing) and tend to speak as if they're the only conversation going on in the room, wilfully ignoring the fact that theirs is only one of many voices that salespeople listen to
• They are sometimes accused of being victims of ‘agency capture’; being too enthusiastic about adopting the slick, overly clever marketing tricks that make doctors immediately suspicious

Furthermore, the context of the actual communication with the sales team is often wilfully ignored.  Sales teams are expensive, local resources (financed out of national budgets) that must first of all answer to local management priorities.  And Marketing is a multi-layered beast that rarely speaks with a single voice.  At every level (local, regional, global) it is staffed by clever, but not necessarily wise or smart, ambitious people looking to make a splash.  Such people aren't great at taking direction: who got into marketing to be a messenger for the regional / global office?

 

Marketing-sales communications are thus reduced to a few highly regulated interactions per year: the sales conference.  Even here every brand initiative is competing for ‘share of mind’ with other brands, marketing projects, training needs, team-building exercises, regulatory presentations, award ceremonies and so on.  The project is also competing with the pet project of the local marketer, which may or may not align with the global or regional initiative, and which may not be at all worthwhile anyway.

 

Global and regional marketers will always be accused of ‘not understanding the local situation’.  There is always a level of specificity you're accused of misreading.  If a local marketer based in Reading can be accused of ‘not getting it’ by a representative in Scotland then what chance the global marketer sitting in Japan or Switzerland?  And the challenges don't stop once marketing is in the room with the sales team.  Most of the more common objections given by salespeople for not following a marketing strategy can grouped under headings of ‘credibility’ and ‘practicality.

Objections over Credibility Issues

• Not relevant to my doctors
• Too complicated (I don't understand it and I'll lose credibility if I stumble)
• Obnoxiously simplistic (I will lose credibility if I take this approach)
• Too aggressive to the competitor (offends those doctors happy with the competitor product)

Objections over Practicality Issues

• The team doesn't the strategy as we’re successful enough (i.e. making budget) without it
• Conflicts with the ongoing expectations that the company has of the salesperson (complying with the sales model, call rate, strategies for other brands)
• Unrealistic in my selling environment (we work primarily in group selling / time-sensitive environments)

 

Similarly, there are a parallel set of objections that local marketers raise for not following a regional / global marketing strategy.  These include, but are not limited to the strategy not being 100% relevant in this market, being too complicated for ‘our reps’, clashing with a local initiative, been tried already, clashes with sales model, regulatory issues, translation issues, being unrealistic in our selling environment (groups, time sensitive), the imagery is racially wrong and insufficient time at sales meetings to explain it properly.

 

The Dramatic Change process can assist global, regional and local marketers in a number of ways…

1. At the very beginning of the process we co-opt sales training.  This removes all objections around sales models
2. Before meeting the sales representatives we co-opt sales management down to first-line level.  This allows issues around sales team priorities, time-off-road for meetings to be highlighted and positively resolved
3. Our baseline philosophy overcomes ‘credibility’ issues by fully aligning marketing strategy with doctor needs via Single Patient Focus®
4. We offer solutions for all selling environments including group and time sensitive selling
5. We set up a cogent and workable relationship between overarching strategy and local / individual sales tactics via Pre-Call Planning exercises.  A Dramatic Change programme can meet mulitple needs in a sales meeting context
6. We never focus on the competition
7. We don't require globally consistent sales materials to give the appearance that a recognisable global strategy is being enacted
8. Our programmes are fun.  Team-building is a given

For more information visit the company website: www.dramaticchange.com

Pesky verbs

Further to yesterday's thoughts on the descriptive noun (art v. science) this week I've been dealing with an even slipperier conundrum, the verb. To whit: -

What is an appropriate euphemism for 'selling'?

For some quite understandable reasons the client has decided that the guys on the road wot talk to doctors are hereon out to be referred to as 'health solutions managers'. Because nobody likes being 'sold to' right? But there sure as hell are plenty of health solutions out there that need managing: -

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts and solutions in search of problems.

I accept that in much of the world 'salesman' is a tainted word; derisively associated with sharp practices (double glazing in the UK, used cars elsewhere) but excising it from the corporate vocab leaves an glaring absence. Accountants account, researchers research and receptionists receive. Managers either run a team of people or have responsibility for a project or process or else they do... what?

We spent much of the week exploring what it might mean to manage a health solution when the behaviours we want to see exhibited in front of the customer looked consistently salesy.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then why are we struggling so hard to name the damn thing?

As I said, the client has understandable reasons for wanting this rebrand but as the behaviours (the verbs) aren't changing then was it any wonder that we spent the week wading through euphemisms?

The art of selling

The Schumpeter column in the October 22 Economist (no link available) explores the issue of variability amongst sales teams: -

the performance of salespeople within a single company typically varies by a factor of three.  And the difference between the best and worst companies when it comes to selling is far greater than the difference for functions such as supply-chain management, purchasing or finance.

I guess I'm so close to this issue (I spend so much time with sales teams, albeit only in health care) that the cross-departmental comparison surprised me.  An acceptance of such a broad spread in performance within a team undoubtedly leads to this greater variability between teams or companies.  Most of my clients implicitly employ me to improve the performance of the middle 70%; the thinking being that the top 15% are alchemists who we do well to leave undisturbed and the bottom 15% are heading out the door anyway.

The article speaks to the problem that it is so difficult to first standardise, then reproduce, the behaviours of the high performers that companies are left frustrated, reduced to describing selling as an 'art' as opposed to a 'science'.  I have no problem with this frustration (in fact it benefits me) because I don't see science and art as polar opposites.  Furthermore the better metrics that science requires are often fool's gold: -

Firms are starting to track reps much more closely, usually to their dismay.  Salesforce.com sells tools which allow sales managers to track on a daily basis what their minions are up to.

A number of clients of mine have been taken in by salesforce.com and similar tracking systems and after nine or so months the same 70-30 rule applies: 15% are unreplicably good, 15% aren't suited to the gig and then there's everyone else.  The problem with tracking that middle 70% and the rewarding them on measurable behaviours is that, as the old sales axiom has it, you should expect what you inspect and alas, the measurable behaviours of the alchemists aren't the ones responsible for their success.  Furthermore, systems like salesforce.com only work at all when the reps themselves enter the information about what they're doing into the system.

I like salespeople.  It's isn't hard to like people whose job it is to be likeable.  The immeasurable that I recognise in the good ones is the same as with high-performing actors, improvisers and stand-up comics, all of whom say words aloud for a living: when they are on the job they are present.   This translates into a wonderful ability to slow time such that the thing they say is the only thing that needs saying.

Part of my job is to encourage my clients to see their employees as artists of sorts (we're called Dramatic Change after all).  Too much salesforce.com has the effect of turning them into data entry clerks of their own behaviour, which isn't science so much as drudgery.

Not an elephant. Not in the room

I finished up in Seoul on Friday afternoon and will be back in London for dinner with friends on Saturday night. The programme, a 'how to coach' session for a sales team's first line managers (FLM's), went better than I dared expect.  The translation on slides and workbook wasn't risible and whilst interpreters unavoidably lessen my impact this one, despite an unedifying pre-game battle of wills, wasn't too bad.

The long-term efficacy of the session won't be determined by the guys in the room but by the one who wasn't.  The newly appointed National Sales Manager (NSM) didn't grace us with his presence for more than a few minutes over the two days.  The subliminal damage to the supposedly high priority given to my project is potentially fatal.  As engaged as the actual attendees were, some corner of their collective brain registered the absence as commentary of sorts.  When I ran into him in the corridor (the session was staged in the client's offices) he didn't look especially busy and his English was certainly on par with anyone's in the room.  He declined the offer to close the session on Friday afternoon even before the General Manager, a far more assured character, jumped on the opportunity.

I'd say that he's either totally contemptuous of my project or shit-scared of his FLM's.  Manipulating your new boss such that he's wary of you is a necessary skill in many organisations and low-ranking sales managers often hunt as a pack in this regard.  Korean sales teams have an uber-masculine sensibility and the NSM missed the perfect opportunity to assert the necessary alpha male status by either: -

1. Taking total ownership of my ideas, which is of course fine by me; or, 
2. Openly challenging the foreign 'expert' over how little he understood the local market. This would have been less fine but nothing I'm not paid to deal with

Instead he stayed in his office down the hall whilst his subordinates challenged me anyway.  He stayed away, seemingly unnoticed, as his boss loped in and claimed the last word.  To be fair, his is a lovely office.  He should enjoy it while he can.

Authoritative rapid Spanish

Some jobs lurch so far outside my control that any pressure to perform simply evaporates.

The other week I was booked to deliver an afternoon workshop for a Spanish sales team that was running two hours behind schedule after two hours.  I was due to follow the presentation of marketing plans for the rest of the year, which was essentially the centrepiece of the entire meeting.  As the morning dragged on it was obvious to everyone in the room that short of wrapping up around midnight something in the agenda would have to give.  And as often happens in such situations the client was forced to choose between delivering vital information (the marketing plans) and recouping a large sunk cost (my workshop).  The big boss chose me and instructed the marketing guys to 'just talk faster'.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I speak no language other than English.  Even under normal circumstances I find Spanish a daunting language to listen to; staccato and without the tonal range of French or Italian.  To my ears the demand that a Spanish speaker speed up was like putting a machine gun on fast forward.

For me at least, the effect was extremely compelling.  In the words of Elisa, Selma Hayek's wonderfully sexy nurse character on 30 Rock: -

I find that authoritative rapid Spanish subdues white people

A segment of one

The old cliche has it that the world can be divided into two types of people: those that divide the world into two types of people and those that do not.  Typically marketers fall into the former category and salespeople into the latter.  We pay marketers to make sense of the big wide world whereas salesmanship rewards an intense focus on the individual customer.

Much of the time I find that the segmentation strategies operate in much the same way as horoscopes: a point of post hoc analysis more interesting than useful from a sales perspective.

Segmentation strategies, predicated on the assumption that a market can be divided into discrete, identifiable, predictable (and thus exploitable) blocs, are like catnip to marketers.  There's nothing a product manager wants to cultivate more than an aura of prescience, omniscience if that can be managed.  There are plenty of strategic research consultancies who will happily take your money whilst promising you that aura.

Things are different in pharma.  Because the major comms channel available to marketers in most markets is the sales team, broad-brush segmentation models often clash with the salesperson's worldview wherein each prescribing doctor is unique.  Imposing a segmentation strategy on a sales team often adds an unneeded element of complexity into the mix and I'm often brought in to assist translating the marketing speak into sales action.  My question for marketers is this: -

A segmentation model implies that different customers will respond to different messages.  How many conversations do you want the sale rep to carry around in her head?

At the moment I'm involved in several such segmentation projects of varying degrees of sophistication.  The most unfortunate of these went live with the sales team recently.  A ham-fisted marketing presentation managed to be patronising of the sales team, which was in attendance, and contemptuous of the doctors, who were not.  It's generally a bad idea to portray a segment of your customer base as "just wanting a quiet life and more interested in his golf game than his patients".  It's an even worse idea to illustrate your point with cartoon imagery usually associated with Covent Garden street artists.

The sales team in question took it with a grain of salt, which is what experienced sales teams do when confronted with overwrought marketing efforts.  If each customer represents a segment of one then the return on effort for fashioning a plan for an individual is far higher than that for memorising 4-5 separate conversations that will apparently 'push the buttons' of the different types before deciding into which segment each customer belongs.

The unspoken challenge in all of this is that even if the strategy is correct and the market can be broken into four or five segments the salesperson still has to dumb down her knowledge of the customer so that he or she conforms to a certain segment.  If you can close your eyes and visualise an individual doctor then a cliched overview is going to be of partial value to you at best.

Don't ask me, I'm just a girl

The Placebo Effect site carries details of a gory wrongful dismissal suit in the US that has mutated by way of a bizarre sexual harassment suit into another massive overtime claim for American drug reps.

The company in question, Endo, has done neither itself nor the wider industry any favours.  The plaintiff, a rep named Susan Quinn claims that her boss, Melissa Phillips, coached her with the following advice: -

Ms. Phillips also stated to Ms. Quinn that she should be familiar with the physicians she called on by, for example, sharing details about her private life. Ms. Phillips also told Ms. Quinn that she should use smaller words to appear less intelligent.

Ah, the Malibu Stacy school of pharmaceutical selling.

Identifying the scarce resource

Most definitions of economics stick pretty close to that of Lionel Robbins: -

The science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses

The debate over how to best allocate finite resources amongst infinite demands is a commonplace and nowhere more so than in in the health care arena.  We're all going to die of something so the expense of sickness will always outstrip funds available for cure.

Successful pharmaceutical marketing is the process of ensuring that the condition treated by your drug enjoys as high a priority as possible in the system in question; be it the WHO, the NHS, a Strategic Health Authority (SHA), a Hospital Trust or the patient cohort seen by the individual GP.  The truth is that resources (time, money, beds) given over to HIV is a potential denial of diabetes treatment.  HIV wins so diabetes loses.  Or vice versa.

At an intellectual level we generally accept that quasi-objective measures like the QALY (quality adjusted life year) are necessary yet they seem wholly callous when applied to the treatment of people we love.  Tabloid papers thrive on stories condemning the cruelty of the 'postcard lottery' which is just the shorthand for the situation whereby different parts of a country have different health priorities.  For example, it is far better to get cancer in the southeast of England than west Scotland because Glasgow's cardiovascular issues are (still) a higher priority than cancer.

Doctors are trained to react subjectively (i.e. in the best interest of the individual patient) which often puts them in opposition to the objective needs of the system (NHS, SHA, Trust).  Pharma selling exists in part to exploit this gap.  This is not unethical per se; the representative is trying to promote the interests of the patient whose health needs will be best met by her drug.  Win-win.

The scarce resource most important to the pharma company is not the drug budget (although this is of course vital), but rather the motivation of the individual doctor to fight for the individual patient / drug.  Every day almost every doctor in Britain is faced with the prospect of having to fight for access to a treatment for a particular patient.  Not every doctor takes up every patient's cause as it would be impossibly exhausting to do so.

Identifying which customer has the energy to take the fight to the system on your behalf is a vital task for any salesperson selling into a complex system, especially when that system uses inertia as a cost control mechanism.

The US Supreme Court agrees with your claim that your job is pointless

Drug reps working for Novartis in the US have won a case in the Supreme Court that awards them a share of over $100,000,000 in back pay for unpaid overtime.  Merck and Boehringer Ingelheim face a similar bills.

The case, which has been working its way through the American legal system, revolves around a question of whether a drug rep was a salesperson (in which case ineligible for overtime) or something else.  The reps in question were calling on Primary Care physicians (GP's).  They testified that the nature of their work was robotic: -

One Rep testified that Reps were expected to act like “robots” because of the limitations on what they could say during sales calls.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed:-

The Reps, inter alia,

• have no role in planning Novartis's marketing strategy;
• have no tole in formulating the "core messages" they deliver to physicians;
• are required to visit a given physician a certain number of times per trimester as established by Novartis;
• are required to promote a given drug a certain number of times per trimester as established by Novartis;
• are required to hold at least the number of promotional events ordered by Novartis;
• are not allowed to deviate from the promotional "core messages";
• and are forbidden to answer any question for which they have not been scripted.

Novartis' defense against the robot claim was so weak as to be laughable: -

Novartis argues that the Reps exercise a great deal of discretion because they are free to decide in what order to visit physicians offices

Talk about letting go of the reins.  My favourite aspect of this comes from the ruling made by a lower court which had actually ruled in Novartis's favour: - 

They do not begin to answer why or how a robot or an automaton could or should earn an average salary of $91,500 per year.  Nor do they explain why NPC (Novartis) would employ 6,000 Reps at a cost in excess of half a billion dollars per year.

It defies logic to accept that, in such a situation, Reps are expected to do nothing but chant slogans and mouth platitudes.

So the argument that Novartis made was, "Why would we pay them so much if they were robots?  Do you think that we're that stupid?"  In overturning the decision the Second Circuit Court in effect said, "Yes.  Yes we do" and the US Supreme Court agreed.

The restrictive sales processes adopted by American pharma companies are built around an overriding medico-legal strategy.  The worry is that a misspoken word from a rep might lead to one of those law suits that would cost them millions of dollars.

Oh, the irony.

Niching

"The danger with your approach is that we risk niching the product with the individual customer."

As it usually does the comment came from a sales manager at the back of the room.  Salespeople are paid to be ambitious (let's not say greedy) and, practical souls that they are, tend to view the contributions of external consultants like me with a suspicion that regularly crosses over into contempt.

Niching, in the marketing sense, is one of those words that stupid people toss into a discussion to seem more intelligent.  Apparently we are all marketers now, which creates endless frustration for those of us who actually know what we're talking about.

Let's start with the definition: -

niche (n) a specialised but profitable corner of the market: [as adj.] important new niche markets.

When did having a profitable corner of a market become a Bad Thing?  Somehow owning a corner isn't ambitious enough.  We could have an entire wall or even half a room if only we weren't so conservative.  The confusion stems from the differing outlook of sales (where the aim is to have the customer do something specific, usually in the short-term) and marketing (which attempts to get the customer to think or feel a certain certain way over time).

For action-focused salespeople, the worth of a customer should only be determined by his or her current and future actions: either buying our products or not.  To say that an individual has 'niched the product' is meaningless.  Yet in many sales teams there is a strange, pervasive sense that we can remedy this non-existent threat by asking it away.  This is how we get those horribly jarring questions at the end of bad sales calls: -

Why are you staying just one night at our hotel?  Why don't I put you down for five?

The logic is that by demanding that the individual customer do more for us we can't be accused of niching ourselves.

Marketers, who should think deeply about such things, know that a niche (aka a 'segment') is a description of an aggregation of customers that have a certain, consistent set of needs.  If we can meet those needs and make a profit then we just need to communicate this in a meaningful way.  If not then turn your attention elsewhere.

Salesmanship requires passion and persistence.  A big part of marketing is dispassionately doing the maths and being prepared to walk away.

A bullet dodged

Recently I endured one of the strangest meetings of my consultancy career.

It began with an email from an ex-client who was now an account manager with one of the most successful pharmaceutical advertising agencies in Europe.  She had a client whose product was facing some specific strategic challenges that she felt I could help resolve.  Given our history I was confident she had a realistic idea of what my company does and specific thoughts as to how I might be able to help her help her client.  Could I come in for a pitch meeting?

When an agency this big calls you take the meeting.

It was scheduled for 930am a few Friday's ago at the agency’s lovely Home Counties offices and to run for ‘ninety minutes, two hours at the outside’.  As requested I customised my basic credentials presentation to hone in on the product’s current needs by highlighting some successful work with other products facing similar challenges.

In a pre-meeting she’d stressed that Charlie, the client in question, was sometimes a bit unpredictable and hard to handle.  That she’d insisted on a formal pre-meeting should have been red flag enough.

I arrived my usual fifteen minutes early to be told that Charlie, also travelling out from London, would be about thirty minutes late.  I chatted with my ex-client and her colleague when a few minutes after 10am a secretary announced that Charlie had arrived but was outside having a smoke.  The other account manager was describing a long overdue beach holiday she is taking next month when he appeared,

Holiday?  Who said that you could take a holiday?  I never signed off on that.

 Charlie wore a golf shirt, jeans and ancient trainers.  Without shaking hands or acknowledging me he threw himself in a chair and announced that he was late because he’d been up all night watching the General Election.  We got a short yet impassioned lecture about the inequities of the first-past-the-post electoral system and then turned on me, 

What’s he doing in a suit?

Before I could respond he waved his own comment away.  I handed over a business card which he tossed unread on the table next to his BlackBerry and cigarettes.  My contact said a few words and handed the meeting over to me.  I began to begin when he interrupted, 

Is he going to stand the whole time?

I was. 

I’d really prefer it if you’d sit down.

I declined.

I’d be using flipcharts and so on and he’d get a far better idea about what my company offered far more easily if he just let me do what I normally do.  He snorted but let me get on with the presentation.

I made it as far as Slide 2 before he interrupted again.  This time he wasn’t objecting per se but rather commenting on the way I was constructing my argument, 

I can see what you’re trying to do here.  It’s not going to work.

He lasted two more slides before declaring that he ‘got’ what I was trying to do but what was I going to do for him?  I negotiated my way through another six or so slides to the point where I move from what my company offers to hone in specifically on the client’s challenges.  And I really do mean ‘negotiate’; after each slide Charlie had to be told to hold his question as the issue raised was addressed always on the next slide.  Finally I picked up a marker pen, turned to the flipchart and asked my usual question, 

So, who is the correct patient for your product?

Charlie immediately left the room for a cigarette.  When he returned ten minutes later I repeated my question,

So, who is the correct patient for your product?

There isn't one.

All I'm trying to understand is where the product should be positioned and define that in terms of the patient that the product will help.”

My next slide outlined a few parameters to help the discussion. 

You don’t understand.  No one knows where to position the product.  I've been in pharma for twenty-five years and I’ve never see anything like this.  It’s impossible.

I’d read the research and it didn’t seem impossible to me.  The product was currently getting low-level usage in one major European market but not in the right type of patient to sustain long-term growth.  I told Charlie I wasn’t talking about how to position the product; we’d get to that later, but simply where it should be positioned.  That is, for which sort of patient.

 That’s the problem.  It’s a extremely complicated area of medicine and no one can say where it should be positioned.

What does the clinical data say?

It says we can be used anywhere in the disease area.”

Okay let’s start with this; how many prescriptions do you need a year to make budget?

He named a figure (which I knew already). 

Then as I understand the disease area, that means we have to avoid pigeonholing the product for last line use because the epidemiology shows us that there aren’t enough eligible patients in that ‘last line cohort’?  Coincidentally this is the only place you’re currently getting sales.

I see what you’re trying to do.  You’re trying to say where we should tell the market where the product should be used.

That’s what positioning is, Charlie, that’s exactly what I was trying to do. 

There’s no point.  The sales team isn't smart enough to follow a strategy as complicated as that.

Let’s leave the sales team out of the mix for the moment and start with the customer; where do the doctors want the product used?

I obviously didn’t understand enough about the product.  That was certainly true; at the start of the meeting I’d given myself permission to ask naïve questions.

Charlie responded by likening the challenges he faced in his market to the launch of the blockbuster antidepressant Prozac.  I told him I found analogies to be of limited benefit.  Why didn’t he instead walk me through the actual issues facing his own product in a way that I could understand and we’d take it from there? 

I find it easier to use this analogy when explaining to people about my product as it keeps things simple.  It’s not just you.  I do this all the time with our sales team.

The point of his Prozac analogy was that the drug represented a game-changing technological advance that created a multibillion-dollar market overnight.  He felt strongly that his product should do the same.  Prozac hadn’t been niched, which was why it was so successful.  And wasn’t that what positioning was?  Niching by another name?  He suggested that we dwell on this wisdom whilst he stepped out for another cigarette.

Need I say that his product was no Prozac?

Around we went.  Every time I proposed a positioning Charlie rebutted it with either another ridiculous analogy, by ‘reminding’ me of a piece of data that he’d hitherto neglected to mention or just by leaving to smoke.

At 1230pm I said I was mindful that it was now Friday afternoon and that I had enough information to put together a costed proposal which he’d get by the middle of next week.  I started to pack up my things, as did the account managers. 

Wait a minute.  What's going on here? I didn’t say that anyone could leave.

I said that had a teleconference scheduled with another client. He demanded that I postpone it, which I duly managed to do (thank god for sane clients).

I don’t have anything else on this afternoon so I want us all to stay here and keep going until we work this thing out.

After we went around the analogy/previously unmentioned data/cigarette loop another time I’d had enough, 

Charlie, I think that three hours is more than long enough for a pitch meeting.

Pitch meeting?  Who said anything about this being a pitch meeting?

It said so on my first slide.

(One of only seven you saw you boor.) 

No, you should know that I don’t waste my time with pitch meetings.  If the girls here say that you’re the right guy for the job then that’s good enough to work for me.

Well, we haven't agreed terms yet and I'm not prepared to share any more of my IP until we get that sorted.  Anyway I still have to make that other call.

I said my goodbyes and left.  My ex-client walked me out, apologising the entire way to the car, 

He knew damn well it was only a pitch.  I told him a dozen times.

The following week I fired off a brief proposal that included a ballpark budget that ignored his request for a discount ‘because we’d never worked together before’.

And that, of course, was the end of the matter.

***

Charlie was a walking Petri dish of insecurity.  Everything he said or did amounted to an ironclad guarantee that he would be a nightmare to work with.  Except that in Charlieworld I wouldn’t be working with him, I’d be working for him.

The ways in which Charlie would be a poor client fall into three broad categories: (a) his inability to engage in Marketing 101; (b) his total lack of respect for anyone inside his business, but most of all (c) the aggressive status games presumably played to mask the first two shortcomings.  The specific behaviours that bother me fell under one of those three headings: - 

Deficit in Marketing

• Hypnotised by the complexity of the product and unwilling (unable?) to see that the marketing still needs to be simple


• Overuse of banal analogies to avoid engagement in the actualities of his own market


• Opting to make a show of positioning the product ambitiously if unrealistically but without any real plans to assist the sales team in establishing this in the field 

Lack of Respect

• Seeing the sales team as stupid


• Antagonistic towards the rest of his organisation.  I got a sense that Charlie’s vociferous support for a project would immediately damn it in the eyes of everyone else.  What good would that do my long-term prospects within his organisation?


• Wanting the whole project to be prohibitively difficult as that might excuse the ambiguous positioning and correspondingly poor sales results to follow 

Status Games

• The relationship with the two (female) agency account managers totally ignored their expertise


• Withholding information from a potential supplier (me).  Of course I didn’t know the data as well as he did, but I resented the implication that I was incompetent rather than newer to the project


• Leaving the room to smoke every time the discussion put him under any sort of pressure


• Dressed so casually as to be dismissive of everyone else in the room


• Actually lying about his understanding of the nature of the meeting

***

So like the title says, a bullet dodged.  If there was an upside it was that I got to bond with the account managers over the experience and that just might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Sales v. Marketing

Why is it that the senior sales guy who publicly declares that his company brooks no divide between Sales and Marketing is the one to run down his colleagues in private?

He's also the guy who backs the marketing strategy 100%, unless of course that entails any on-the-ground behavioural change from the sales team.

And he's the man most likely to insist that it takes years to gain credibility as a salesperson but that marketing can be mastered in months.

It's going to be a long week.

The why before the how

Next Monday I'm in Switzerland pitching on a whole-of-region sales training project for a very successful small pharma company. I've done the research and crunched the numbers and written the next-to-last draft of the pitch document yet a single question nags me: -

Why do they want the project?

They're already successful and in no small part this has been driven by a strong if informal HR policy of recruiting experienced salespeople. I could even argue that by taking a successful team off the road they're losing money.

Yesterday I found an article in the latest edition of Monocle (a magazine that keeps surprising me) on European military conscription. Contrary to the 'tough love' blather of the right-wing commentariat, no sane person now sees conscription as a good thing. It is an expensive and dangerous way to staff your military and soldiers have better things to do than play some sort of stern uncle role for a generation of lost youth. One of the few European countries with a coherent justification for universal conscription is in fact Switzerland where the army acts as a transcendent and therefore unifying experience for men who might otherwise identify themselves as 'Swiss-German', 'Swiss-French' or 'Swiss-Italian' instead of simply 'Swiss'.

Maybe this is what's going on with my client.

Although they wouldn't admit it, or possibly even be able to voice it as such, perhaps the key motivator is less about upskilling the sales team and more about creating a transcendent / unifying experience. I could be overthinking things as usual but unless I resolve this in my own mind before Monday the trip is already wasted.

World class

Recently I was asked to run a session for a smallish sales team of mostly older representatives that was experiencing some morale issues. The root cause of these issues was historical and mostly external but they were issues nonetheless so Marketing brought me in do my shtick, which went pretty well.

I had the group for an afternoon and by the time we finished at 5pm it had been a long day, especially for those who’d been up before dawn to catch flights from Belfast or Edinburgh. There was a clear sense that I was the last speaker of the day and after my thank-you-and-good-luck speech everyone got up to leave.

Not so fast.

The product manager hurriedly announced that there was one final item of business: the agency wanted to make a presentation. That this was greeted with no more than the usual level of passive contempt that salespeople have for advertising agencies was a gesture of remarkable restraint given the fatigue level.

The guy in the nicest suit in the room took the stage and announced that he was excited. Furthermore, in a moment absolutely everyone else in the room was going to be excited too: -

Okay, so who here's on Facebook? Or Twitter? Or maybe MySpace?

Misreading silent disdain for embarrassed ignorance he broke it down: -

What we're talking about is something called 'online networking'. It's the fun and cool way to keep in touch with friends and colleagues.

In a display of spurious ‘adding value’ that rendered me awestruck, the agency had convinced the brand team to invest in their own exclusive version of Facebook. Leaving aside the conceptual flaw in constructing a closed social network in the first place, the dumbness of the idea was apparent even before he’d started taking questions from the floor: -

The use of the site would be 100% voluntary...

You wouldn’t have to go on it at all if you didn’t want to!

Except that information vital to everyone’s job would be posted there...

Marketing can update you without all those boring teleconferences!

It would be a problem-solving forum that would be ‘reps only'...

A great way for you to highlight any problems you’re having so that the rest of the team can weigh in!

Apart from the fact that pretty much anyone in Head Office can log in...

So we can get an up-to-date temperature check of the mood of the team!

And watch you admit that you're no good at your job in real time. As a way of hoovering some extra cash out of a client it was a work of genius. As a way of annoying a sales team of forty- and fifty-somethings it was truly world class.

Presentation as ordeal

This week I was at a sales meeting and shared the stage with the client's new marketing director.  It was a fractious affair, due mostly to the fact that Marketing had seen fit to change the overall strategy without sufficient consultation with Sales (according to Sales at least).  The day morphed into one of those classic Sales versus Marketing scraps where every possible cliche was trotted out: -

• The 'ivory tower' or 'the trenches'
• Next month's budget or long-term success
• Day-to-day thinking or over-the-horizon vision
• The need for a cohesive positioning or doing whatever it takes to get the sale

I'd had peripheral involvement in the decision to change the strategy and believed that the underlying logic was sound.  Still, the sales team was unconvinced.

The Marketing Director had confided in me beforehand that for him sessions like this one were about survival and nothing else, so when he stood up to speak the smell of fear was palpable.  He spoke quickly and made no eye-contact with any of the fourteen or so sales managers in the room.   Upon finishing he made to leave without Q&A but the sales guys were having none of it.  Someone raised a hand, asked a reasonable question and that was that.  Hunting as a pack the audience brutalised him for the next 45 minutes.

Did he survive?  Sort of.

But what's the point?  This guy has a strategy that I know he believes in and yet when placed in a room of the very people he depends on to enact that strategy his only thought is 'survival'.  I suppose he left with his reputation intact (if diminished) but he hadn't done a thing to persuade his colleagues to do something he knows they must be doing to ensure everyone's long-term success.

I suppose that the 'survival' analogy comes from media politics.  You agree to an interview with a Barbara Walters or a Jeremy Paxman because 'you should', it's how the game is played and so on.  Yet once in the chair all you think about is getting out alive.

I can't speak for politicians but I know too many marketers who've watched too much West Wing and so see sales conferences in the same way.  A chance to speak to the sales guys en masse is a 100% good thing.  If you're not attempting to use  the forum to excite and persuade and motivate then why are you even in your job?

Of course, as an 'external' my world is starker: if all I do is survive a session then I ain't going to be invited back.