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.
Work is an obligation. Even if I really like my job (so much of the time of inclined to do it) I'm obliged to do it regardless of any momentary preference.
When our weekends and holidays 'feel like work' it's because we find ourselves obliged to do things during time we'd mentally put aside to pursue our inclinations. We like our friends because they're similarly inclined to us; time spent with them doesn't feel like an obligation.
I'm visiting Australia again in a few weeks and there's nothing like a trip home to focus the mind: which activities and engagements am I obliged to do, which am I inclined to do and which ones sit happily in the centre zone of a simple Venn Diagram?
This trip will be far more complicated because my wife and I are traveling together. As our separate and collective diaries fill up we're negotiating a much more complex Venn Diagram: there are things that are inclinations for one but obligations for the other, things that are obligations for us both and happily a few things that we're each inclined to do.
Travel alone and the trade-offs are purely internal. Travel with someone else and the negotiations need to be overt and honest otherwise we end up dragging the other person to events that we're only attending out of obligation anyway.
Adult life is a lesson in compromise and never more so than when returning to the sites of your childhood.
My 'To Do List' program, Things for Mac, crashed on Saturday morning. At first it was a simple failure to synch between desktop and iPhone but the usual solutions as suggested by the user forums not only failed to fix the fault but made things much, much worse. In trying to copy my database to back it up I managed to delete it altogether.
I've been ambushed by my beloved technology and I approach the week with a woefully imprecise idea of what needs doing.
I live in London and mostly work in Europe. I have a few North American clients and would like more and I have one in Asia. The rest of the Asia-Pac business is handled by an erstwhile business partner who lives in New Zealand. I'd like to think I'm pretty good at long-distance collaboration.
This week I've been dealing with two quite different men who want to do me the favour of taking my work to new clients. One is setting up a consultancy in the Middle East and reckons that he can generate a demand for our IP in the region and the other needs my skills to round out a product offering that he's making (speculatively) to a Canadian company. Both men are entrepreneurs who have identified potentially lucrative opportunities that would never come across my radar. But each has inserted himself between me and a client and I'm unsure how I feel about that because like most Headcount: 1 types I'm a control freak. If anyone's going to be in front of a client or an audience it will be me.
This control freakery has been going on so long that I've learnt to treat it as a strength rather than the flaw it is. Being unable to delegate means that my business will never, ever be scaleable, ergo it will never be saleable. And as I've said before on these pages, when I get down about this I feel trapped. If I can't relinquish control of the marketing interactions with clients in far-flung places that I'd never meet otherwise then when can I?
Isn't this just 20th Century Thinking? Wasn't one of the key learnings from the life of Saint Steve Jobs that an overweening sense of control is a positive thing? Merlin Mann recently described success, apropos of Apple, as: -
You get to decide who pays you
I suspect that my erstwhile partner doesn't care who pays us for our residual IP. He sees this incremental (and essentially unearned) income purely as a bonus, as an undiluted good, and especially in markets like Egypt and Saudi and the Gulf. I'm not sure I agree. I want my collaborations to enhance not diminish what I do. I want to finish a project with a stronger brand, a more interesting product and a new set of experiences.
And before we've even gotten to a proper pitch meeting each relationship has gotten bogged down in a separate legal morass. I've spent the last week proofing licensing agreements and drafting cautionary emails. The last seven days' efforts have been about protecting what's mine now instead of creating a better, cooler something for tomorrow.
My business is such that I can't license my way to wealth and I certainly can't sue my way there. A week spent neither developing new ideas or delivering existing ones is a week wasted
At a dinner at a European pharma meeting last night the conversation couldn't escape the financial crisis. Budgets slashed. Health ministries paralysed by the turmoil. Every hospital, therapy area, patient group and drug company desperately seeking an ever-larger share of a shrinking pie just to keep up.
"My dog's blacker than yours" in twelve European languages
Part of me wants to stress over flight connections and the like. For the amount of emotional energy I expend in this way it's the only viable explanation.
Air travel: a procession of small humiliations.
Heathrow Express: your air travel experience starts here
Kevin Kelly recently posted a great essay entitled What You Don't Have To Do. He sets out hierarchy of ascending levels of 'working smart': -
- Doing what is required
- Doing more than is required
- Trying as many roles as you can in order to discover what you are smart at
- Making sure you are spending your time on jobs that are effective or that need to be done at all
- Do only jobs (that really need to be done) that you are good at doing
- Doing that work that no one else could do
This is a profoundly elegant understanding of what success looks like. It's how a good careers have always unfolded: apprentice then journeyman then master.
When I think about those around me in unhappy careers (which is not the same as being in an unhappy workplace) oftentimes there's a disconnect between where someone believes he sits on this ladder and what the employer believes. You won't be paid a premium to do something only you can do until you prove you can do the things anyone else can do*. A clear sign that you've gotten this wrong is when your veiled threats about quitting are met with bemusement. Or relief. You will only extract a greater cost from your employer if you're operating at Level 6. The leading lady can shut down production by staying in her trailer. The extra playing Nervous Inmate #3 cannot.
Having a relatively new career in stand-up comedy to compare with longer ones in pharma consultancy and improv provides me with a natural experiment in this. As a consultant I'd like to think I operate at Level 5 and occasionally 6; I deliver good work and many clients reckon that only I can do that work. As a stand-up comic I strive to stay at Level 2 where success on any given night is measured in doing more than simply surviving the show. But perhaps the bitterest pill to swallow is that even though I'm a 20-year improv veteran (i.e. I started this before consultancy) I'm no more than a solid Level 4. Whilst I can be relied on to deliver a solid performance, I've never been indispensable to the long-term success of a show.
My proof that this is more than an unusually piquant blend of my standard brew of self-pity and smugness is that whereas I often get unsolicited approaches to do consulting work that is interesting, specialised (and therefore lucrative) in the comedy world I'm just another name on a list. Without a constant effort keeping my name in front of promoters I don't get gigs.
Nevertheless though hard work and luck I have one aspect of my working life, consulting, where I'm seen as a bit special. Regardless of what the motivational bloggers say, not everyone has or will ever have that. The brutal fact is that even sweat and ego-free dedication do not guarantee progression in an adult life. This is why a late-life career change scares us so: what if we run out of time to actually get good at the new thing?
* Freelancers: replace the phrase 'the employer' with 'the market'.
Monday morning. Manila. I'd asked the group for any opening thoughts. A Filipino sales manager stands up and recites an obscure passage of my book verbatim.
I'm big in Mindinao. No one can take that away from me.
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: -
- Taking total ownership of my ideas, which is of course fine by me; or,
- 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.
Last night's sleeplessness, Manila traffic and the ambient chaos of Niño Aquino International Airport had me arrive at the departure gate chock full of bile and venom.
Of the myriad vestigial rituals clinging to 'luxury' travel the procession of interruptions that are supposedly the hallmark of good service pisses me off the most. As pointless as airline safety demonstrations may be I accept that a legal logic is in play. But tell me why I must hear from multiple crew members on other topics? Why is the captain as well as the purser compelled to make an announcement before take-off then again 'once we're airborne'? Why interrupt the inflight entertainment (wishfully claimed as a USP) to tell me that you're going to interrupt me again later?
Am I alone in measuring good service in terms of the least number of staff intrusions? Who was the last person actually pleased by hotel turndown service? I don't understand the logic: if I'm out I most likely won't notice the alteration in bedlinen when I return. If I'm in then whatever I'm doing is interrupted whilst I answer the door and say, "No thanks". Not all porn channels have a pause function you know.
The threat of a hovering proprietor is the main reason I shun the English Bed & Breakfast. Once you price in the energy expended gushing over the farm fresh eggs and the wasted ten minutes being shown the frankly troubling collection of objets d'art on the mantlepiece that country house hotel down the road looks like a bargain.
But whereas creepy B&B's can be avoided air travel is inevitable. Scripted platitudes droned out in multiple languages (I've been on Korean Air lately) and of course the seatbelt sign is illuminated before it starts so we can't even bury our ears in headphones. Any airline that starts from the assumption that I don't need to know by name the captain, first officer, whoever else is assisting them on the flight deck, the person heading up 'my' cabin service team and the rest of the crew will get my business.
Wow. One solitary solid week of travel and I'm whining like Tyler Brûlée.
1am in Ortigas City, the affluent precinct of Manila where I've been staying since I arrived in the Philippines exactly 72 hours ago. I'm wide awake and out of Stilnox (aka Ambien). I've only eaten lightly, used the hotel gym and self-medicating with red wine will only make the waking hours harder. I'm 50% through the project. Tomorrow I fly to Seoul to repeat what I've just delivered only this time via a (client-sourced) interpreter who claims, but only when chased, that she still hasn't received my slide presentation. Interpreters are often hard to deal with and this augers poorly for the rest of the week.
I tell myself to suck it up. Self-employment means that in the end every problem belongs only to you. The only sane response is to price interpreter angst and the inevitability of jetlag into the fee.
It's 5am in Manila.
This is the time I usually wake up but jetlag has had me in its throes for about 90 minutes already. I've doing the calculations: two hours until breakfast with the client, three and a half hours until we start the session and at least 12 hours until we wrap up Day One of this two-dayer.
'Twas always going to be thus. I got to the Philippines at midnight Saturday and spent all Sunday sleeping and searching out the least sweetened food the hotel had to offer. I went to the gym and I reviewed the programme. I gave the project my complete attention. I was the epitome of professionalism.
This is what business travel is: an exercise in discipline. And the rules are as obvious as they are simple: don't go crazy at the starch'n'sugar-laden buffet breakfast, say no to (at least some of) the free alcohol, decline those Sunday night drinks with ex-pat pals, don't kid yourself that you can get away with being a tourist for a day. And never complain about the horrors of the flight or its attendant jetlag. The job can only really begin once you've made a connection with your audience. Why would go out of your way to remind them that you live on the other side of the world?
I have been brought here because I am the best person to communicate certain specific ideas to their people. If they believe they could achieve the same thing with a local or even Asia-based speaker then I wouldn't be here. So my goal is simple: minimise all the factors competing for my attention and concentrate all available energy on being present.
Harder than it sounds. I'll let you know how I get on.
Summer is done and I'm traveling again: Madrid, Edinburgh, Manila, Seoul and Zurich to begin with. No complaints: if I'm not on planes I'm not getting paid.
Travel means packing and packing always makes me feel stupid. Specifically, packing is an exercise in imagining my future self and experience has taught me that that guy is an idiot. Indeed most travel planning could be described as 'negating your inner idiot'.
These oh-so-unimpressive alternative selves exist inside each of us. Stress brings them out. As does fatigue, distraction brought on by overwork and alcohol.
I've learnt to mitigate these minor demons with low-level paranoia. Printing out and filing the limo pick-up instructions for Ninoy Aquino airport now means one less thing for the idiot-me to forget to do later.
In pre-travel mode I become a parent to myself. Lists are made and checked off. I run semi-conscious wargaming exercises like, 'If the programme was pulled forward to tomorrow would you be ready?' I update the weather app on my iPhone to flag destination cities (Manila, 30C, thunderstorms, if you're wondering).
And don't pack drunk. Turning up in Toronto in January equipped for summertime Sydney taught me that. Not unless you want fur-hatted Canadians pointing you out in the street.
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
As this next, even scarier phase of the Global Financial Crisis takes hold it appears that Big Pharma is much of its implicit losing political patronage.
The Spanish government is looking to cut its drug bill by €1.3B by demanding price reductions in both the off-patent and soon-to-be-off-patent medications. By hitting branded drugs as well as generics (i.e. those already off-patent) a signal is being sent by the Minister for Health & Social Policy: -
The pharmaceutical bill rises to nearly €15 million annually and the government becomes the largest customer in this sector... We demanded a lot to the industry and we believe enough is enough
In the UK the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has decided that
none of three leading treatments for metastatic colorectal cancer are good value at their current pricing. This will effect Roche (Avastin), Amgen (Vectibix) and Merck Serono (Erbitux). The NICE statement said that it was: -
Disappointed not to be able to recommend cetuximab (Erbitux), bevacizumab (Avastin) and panitunmumab (Vectibix) for this stage, but we have to be confident that the benefits justify the cost of the drugs
This is especially bad news for Roche as Avastin, the world's largest selling cancer medication, is under ongoing FDA scrutiny as a treatment for metastatic breast cancer in the US.
Boehringer-Lilly have been scared off launching diabetes medication in Germany due to legal-administrative changes that place a greater onus of the company to ensure that a new drug is value for money: -
Reorganisation of the Pharmaceutical Market (AMNOG), (which) was established in January this year to regulate the pricing of newly approved drugs within their first year. This means that Germany's NICE equivalent IQWiG and a new Federal Joint Committee (G-BA) now assess a drug's cost-effectiveness against a suitable comparator and if the drug fails to demonstrate its cost-effectiveness, then its manufacturer may be liable to refund the government's Statutory Health Fund, which originally paid for the treatment.
It looks as if the German government called Boehringer-Lilly's bluff.
And all of this in the (somewhat) solvent north of Europe. As I've mentioned previously, further south the picture is different. In Greece the government is issuing zero-coupon bonds to pay its pharma bills. Roche said that the conversion of their debt to a bond amounted to a loss of 26% when the bonds was converted to cash.
Of course as Greece racks up more debt a 26% 'haircut' might look like good value. Assuming that Greek bonds of any value are still deemed to be assets in the months ahead.
In the early 90's I once worked on a project to establish a sales/marketing culture for a mid-tier pharma company establishing it's own Australian operation for the first time. Their products were important, if a little mundane and somewhat limited in scope. The company had identified that as the size of the business meant that there was almost no scope for career advancement it was going to struggle to recruit effective salespeople.
Their solution was to staff the sales force with experienced women looking to reenter the industry after having children. Prima facie it was a good fit. The company needed solid experienced performers but who weren't interested in promotion and the women wanted to rejoin the workforce but on more sympathetic, less careerist terms. With the right HR attitude to flexible working hours it looked like a 'win-win'.
For a while it worked well enough. The new team was highly energised and quickly established a healthy, credible presence in the marketplace. Sure, the job-sharing and ongoing maternity leave coverage issues required additional Head Office and sales manager admin but no more than had been anticipated.
About nine months later, after the initial euphoria of launch had died down, the mood changed abruptly. Both management and the individual salespeople were suddenly, totally disenchanted. The company expected the women to still be grateful for the opportunity to rejoin the workforce on such sympathetic terms and that gratitude to manifest itself as greater attention to detail. The women couldn't see what the problem was: they were turning up and doing the job (sick kids who needed early collection from child care notwithstanding) weren't they?
The women were selling time only whereas the company thought that their (complete) attention came as part of the package. Within a year the complexion of the team had shifted back to the usual blend of unambitious old stagers, thrusting careerists and a few women with young children but decent family support to allay the early-pick-up-from-child-care-issue.
No pregnant person can give an employer his or her complete attention. Ditto for anyone with a new baby. It doesn't matter of that baby is real or metaphoric (i.e. a nascent IOS app, a comedy career or a that business you're starting up on the side) and it's no less true if both you and your employer buy into the fiction that selling only your time will be sufficient.
Something you love more than your job is always going to take attention away from that job. Because in part that's what love is.
Thinking further about this need to earn an audience's attention reminded of a phenomenon that Grainne Maguire, a stand-up comedian friend of mine, calls 'blue chin syndrome': -
The gig isn't going well when out in the darkness you see all these blue chins; audience member's faces uplit by their mobile phones as they text their friends
This is bad enough when the device in question is a Nokia. If they bring out the iPads it's probably time to vacate the stage.
At his non-rambling best Merlin Mann is one of my favourite contemporary online writer-thinkers. Lately he's been energetically promoting the idea that what counts in life is not so much where we spend our time or money but rather where we focus our attention.
Every professional performer has endured the experience of a paying audience getting bored and talking through your act: -
Even after they've given you their time and money you still have to earn your audience's attention
The signals that you've yet to earn that attention are pretty blatant if you know what you're looking for. My first corporate theatre gig, which was also my first paid work after I quit the marketing department of Coca-Cola, was a morning of team building for some long since subsumed Sydney freight company. The maiden outing of
Alternative Corporate Training Services (aka 'ACTS')
* was in mid-December 1991 and the job had been a long time coming. Our show used improv techniques to teach teamwork to corporate types but we'd really just been hired to make the group laugh for an hour whilst they set up for Christmas lunch in the room next door. I have three distinct memories of that afternoon: -
- There was no air conditioning so it was stifling. It was Sydney in December and our hour was the only thing between the group and a fridge full of icy beer
- We took the 'stage' (read: walked to the space at the front) to the Emerson, Lake & Palmer version of Fanfare to the Common Man. The idea was the entrance would be epic but as the venue had no sound desk we'd brought along an old boom-box, which I had to clunk on then hold above my head from the back of the room
- As we started the MD, who hadn't signed off on our appearance, sat at the foremost table took out a massive mobile phone and ostentatiously placed it in front of him
The signal was as clear as day:
you have my attention but only for as long as no one (anyone) from the outside world wants it. The amateurishness of our entrance, our visible lack of self-belief and even our dumb company name meant we hadn't earned the right to ask him to switch off his phone. Everyone in the room knew it and our gig went downhill from there.
There's a moment with every audience when you have to 'get them'. If that point in time passes without you earning the room's attention you will struggle thereafter. The same rule applies with absolutely every kind of audience; a target market of prescribing doctors, an electorate or an online community.
That day in 1991 we stumbled through the hour by dropping the team building message and playing for laughs, which is all they wanted anyway. They paid us in cash and we went directly to the Chinese restaurant up the road and spent the entire fee on our own boozy Christmas lunch. Late that afternoon our pager beeped (we shared the one between us) and a booking agent offered us a gig at a January kick-off event. At that second, boom-boxless, gig we earned the attention of the room and ACTS-CORPRO-Instant Theatre-Dramatic Change went on from there.
* Because we were a theatre group. Geddit? No? Anyone? This was the first of our dumb company names. After that we went for CORPRO Productions ('Corporate Impro') before getting to Instant Theatre then Dramatic Change
The question of whether American drug reps are salespeople or robots is back to the Supreme Court. If the suit is successful then the pharmaceutical industry will owe its (former) employees many millions of dollars in unpaid overtime.
This is a natural consequence of Big Pharma viciously downsizing its sales teams at the end of the blockbuster era. The companies have no choice but to shed all these jobs but as the entire industry is contracting their laid-off employees can pursue this overtime claim with impunity. There aren't enough new jobs emerging in the industry so there's no reward for not being labelled a troublemaker who went after this additional cash. If you're not going to get another gig anyway you might as well try for whatever you can get?
Structural change. Boy, I don't know...*
* With apologies to Aaron Sorkin
I'm in California catching up with friends. Last night my wife and I dined with them at a busy family restaurant (pizzas, burgers). The atmosphere was buzzy and the wait staff were as friendly as the portions were huge. So to my banal observation of the week:-
American restaurant food loses its flavour at the third mouthful
The plate looks great when set down in front of you and that first bite is amazing. As are the next two. You find yourself thinking that America is the greatest country on earth. Then almost immediately your palate jades. You start reaching for the salt and pepper and hot sauce. You start picking out the protein and vegetables and leaving the starch. You start breathing heavily. Your sense of struggle is heightened as you realise that you're not yet halfway through the obscene pile of food on your plate. You find yourself thinking that it's no wonder that America is the fattest country on earth.
But look around you. No one else at the table is even attempting to finish their serving. Only a gluttonous fool eats much past that fourth mouthful. No big deal. The busboy appears and removes the Americans' unfinished meals. Only we two Australians, raised in a different eating culture, doggedly persist. We plough on, well past the point of discomfort and mocked by the knowledge that what we're now doing is actually unhealthy. Eventually we concede defeat and the accusing plates are taken away.
"Now, I hope you folks have all left enough room for desert?"
And it begins again.
