Shift in Focus, Shift in Results

I had a huge “ah ha” during a tandem with one of the reps on my sales team.

Our first call of the day was with a doctor based in a small town in northern Quebec. He had a large practice of elderly patients and was very busy. Reps were allowed only two appointments per year so when you saw him, you really had to make it count.

He liked to see you before he started his practice so we arrived early. Despite being the first appointment, his waiting room was already filled with patientswho did not look very happy with us when we were the first to be escorted in to see him.

My rep was launching a new product to this physician and according to what she had been taught at the launch meeting, did an amazing detail. She talked about the product features, half-life, dosing, how it was metabolized etc. She spoke of it’s benefits and side effects. She presented published articles backing up what she had said and reinforced the product messaging exactly as she had been taught.

For all intents and purposes, it was the perfect product detail.

Given that the product was a great one and could really help some of the patients in his practice, we expected a lot of interest in it from this physician. After presenting the product, my rep asked if he had any questions.

The doctor smiled, said no, goodbye and opened the chart of his first patient of the day.

We walked out of there knowing that we had not made an impression on this important physician.

Thinking it over on the drive home later that day I realized that despite giving the perfect detail from the company perspective, we had not connected on any level with that physician.

By first launching into a long and complicated story about the product, we lost his attention early in the call and he switched to thinking about his waiting room full of patients.

Fundamentally, the mistake was that our discussion had been about ourselves and our product and not about him and how we had something that could really help the patients in his practice.

It is just human nature.Our first instinct is to talk about what is important to us. This often means that when we speak to our customers, our central focus is about our products and ourselves. Naturally, our customers lose interest in what we have to say because what we are talking about is not of great interest to them.

How much time do you spend listening to or reading advertisements for products that you don’t thinkcan help you?

I started to change the way that I was coaching my team. Instead of having our product be the center and subject of the conversation, I encouraged my reps to make the customer and their needs the center and then bring in how we could help.

A lot of sales models are built on this principle but there is a world of difference (and pain…) between getting a PowerPoint on the idea and making it work in the real world.

I tried a few of those PowerPoint presentations followed by workshop sessions where the reps detailed each other. Pretty much a total failure. Once they got back into the field, the reps quickly forgot what we worked on and fell back into old habits.

It is hard to shake years of training and habit.

What eventually worked for us, and I will not say that it was easy, was to really focus down on each individual customer. I would have monthly one-on-one sessions with the members of my team and go through each of their top customers. What did they know about them?What did they need to learn?What are the next questions for this customer?

Knowing all this, what should the next presentation to them focus on so that it resonates with them?

When we did tandems, we would discuss what we had just learned about the customer and how we needed to adapt the next presentation to recognize that.

Some people got it after a couple of sessions. Some took longer. But, over time, the change in approach really made a difference. Better conversations, more engagement from the customer and eventually, more patients helped by our medications.

Bottom line, the customer is always going to be more interested and engaged in what we have to say, if what we have to say is about them and not us.