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.
No reader of this site would be unaware of the placebo effect (aka the 'white coat effect') which is usually defined as something like: -
The measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health or behavior not attributable to a medication or invasive treatment that has been administered
Your attitude to placebos is probably driven by your overall attitude to health care. One side of the argument is that that anything that offers a sick person a respite from the effects of his disease has value. People holding this view are renaming the phenomenon the placebo
response; whatever it is that's going on is broadly on our side. The opposing view is that what's being peddled is fraud and false hope; we're tricking the patient into believing that
something substantial is being done and the fact that the patient's own brain is in on the ruse doesn't excuse anyone.
The placebo effect / response is the bete noir of pharmaceutical research. If you've sunk upwards of half a billion dollars into developing a drug then 'no better than placebo' is not want you want to hear at the end of Phase III trials. The brutal logic is that there's no point in subjecting the patient to an expensive treatment that is undoubtedly accompanied by a raft of side-effects when with a little encouragement the patient's own body can achieve the same response on its own.
And apparently we're seeing a strange increase in the placebo effect. A few years ago Wired Magazine ran a great Steve Silbermen article entitled Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate To Know Why. It tracks the work done by Dr William Potter, a researcher at Eli Lilly, who observed that new antidepressant and antianxiety medications were actually being overtaken by placebos in as many as nine out of ten trials. Potter questioned two assumptions that are pivotal to clinical trials: -
- If a trial is managed correctly, a medication will perform as well or badly anywhere in the world
- The standard tests used to gauge volunteers' improvement in trials yield consistent results
It turns out that part of the problem stems from (surprise, surprise) the pharma industry's habit of scouring the globe for the cheapest option to undertake any necessary work; more and more clinical trials are using centres in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, India and Africa. Something that's of great concern to the hand-wringing lefties of this week's
Guardian: -
Places such as South Africa – where mostly vulnerable poor with low literacy levels are recruited and the culture is to accept authority without question – are fertile land for ethical misconduct
I accept that ethical misconduct of every kind is more likely in the less developed world (viz.
Nestle infant formula) but I reject the knee-jerk implication that such exploitation is inevitable. The irony is that the problem of the spreading placebo effect may be a result of exploitation in the opposite direction: -
A patient's hope of getting better and expectation of expert care—the primary placebo triggers in the brain—are particularly acute in societies where volunteers are clamoring to gain access to the most basic forms of medicine. "The quality of care that placebo patients get in trials is far superior to the best insurance you get in America," says psychiatrist Arif Khan, principal investigator in hundreds of trials for companies like Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb. "It's basically luxury care."
When a Big Pharma company grandly states that its mission is to 'improve the lives of people across the world', I strongly doubt that the promotion of the placebo effect is what it has in mind.