competitive benchmarking data. They all had clear goals to improve rates of customer visits by 15% for the current six month period and to cover 95% of assigned hospital pharmacists. Overall, Monique’s district was achieving 85% of sales targets so far and, seeing what was happening in other districts, it wasn’t bad at all!

The missing connection
The meeting ended and Monique drove back home, stopping for an extra visit to the local hospital. She had promised to bring some scientific papers on new drugs to the head pharmacist and she thought she would do that. In the waiting room of the hospital pharmacy, she had a sudden revelation, thanks to the peace and quiet of the place and to the unexpected delay in the pharmacist’s availability. What was the connection between the two-week Advanced Sales Training and this morning’s Distr

At her latest Advanced Sales Training course, Monique has been given very clear messages. Things need to change! She has been with this pharmaceutical company for almost five years during which she has worked as a medical representative in a specialist niche market where the company had leading market share. One of the reasons for the advanced course is the rapid change in the competitive forces in that market. New entrants from companies of significantly greater critical mass have seriously destabilized the old dominant position of Monique’s firm. The ‘old ways’ of doing things need to be replaced with ‘new ways’. This is a clear message.

In a series of modules and sessions spread over an intensive week, Monique has been told that they all now need to change and adapt to the new competitive environment. Today we need - Monique’s notes said - a different attitude. Complacency is gone; a sense of urgency is required, big time! We need a ‘will to achieve’, ‘will to surprise’ and ‘will to succeed’. What is now needed more than anything else - Monique’s notes continued - is an ‘esprit conqu?rant”, as the French affiliate says, a ‘spirit of conquest’ coupled with more confidence in dealing with the customers, which for this Sales Force means mainly physicians and pharmacists. Also, more than ever, one of the company’s old values, ‘entrepreneurship’, is required and needs to be revived. Entrepreneurial spirit is key, particularly at local district level where they have now been given more flexibility in the use of resources. In this ‘new mindset’, conviction and confidence ‘should be seen’ - Monique had highlighted it on her notepad.

The main theme in the second week of the Advance Sales Training course was ‘culture’. Monique’s bundle of notes grew bigger and bigger. There was more group work this time. A consolidated output of many hours of work with colleagues, some of them more experienced than her, pointed to very clear directions. Monique’s accurate notes read: we need to create a solid ‘winning culture’, where dynamism, creativity, optimism and confidence in the future are in everybody’s mindset. We need to project a new image, living the values of the company: integrity, excellence and customer-centric mentality. This new mindset of self-belief, ‘conquering spirit‘ customer effectiveness and entrepreneurship - Monique wrote down - is the key to the new culture, the only way to face the significant new challenges.

Monique was very excited. She said the course was excellent and that it lifted everybody’s spirits, which had, quite frankly, been a bit down after having been confronted with the new hard realities. A couple of weeks later, her district manager held a regular meeting with his small group of sales representative specialists. This was a routine meeting but an important one because a new electronic Territory Management System (TMS) had been recently introduced and they were all trying to make the most of the new tool on their personal laptops. HQ had just released the new benchmarking and market data as well. There were new updated lists of ‘A’ and ‘B’ doctors, and quite a lot of new information on local hospitals, where many of the sales visits take place.

During the meeting, Monique and her colleagues looked at sales targets, individually and as a district, ‘call rates’, efficiency ratios, completion of input/feedback into the TMS and some competitive benchmarking data. They all had clear goals to improve rates of customer visits by 15% for the current six month period and to cover 95% of assigned hospital pharmacists. Overall, Monique’s district was achieving 85% of sales targets so far and, seeing what was happening in other districts, it wasn’t bad at all!

The missing connection
The meeting ended and Monique drove back home, stopping for an extra visit to the local hospital. She had promised to bring some scientific papers on new drugs to the head pharmacist and she thought she would do that. In the waiting room of the hospital pharmacy, she had a sudden revelation, thanks to the peace and quiet of the place and to the unexpected delay in the pharmacist’s availability. What was the connection between the two-week Advanced Sales Training and this morning’s Distri

- a different attitude. Complacency is gone; a sense of urgency is required, big time! We need a ‘will to achieve’, ‘will to surprise’ and ‘will to succeed’. What is now needed more than anything else - Monique’s notes continued - is an ‘esprit conqu?rant”, as the French affiliate says, a ‘spirit of conquest’ coupled with more confidence in dealing with the customers, which for this Sales Force means mainly physicians and pharmacists. Also, more than ever, one of the company’s old values, ‘entrepreneurship’, is required and needs to be revived. Entrepreneurial spirit is key, particularly at local district level where they have now been given more flexibility in the use of resources. In this ‘new mindset’, conviction and confidence ‘should be seen’ - Monique had highlighted it on her notepad.

The main theme in the second week of the Advance Sales Training course was ‘culture’. Monique’s bundle of notes grew bigger and bigger. There was more group work this time. A consolidated output of many hours of work with colleagues, some of them more experienced than her, pointed to very clear directions. Monique’s accurate notes read: we need to create a solid ‘winning culture’, where dynamism, creativity, optimism and confidence in the future are in everybody’s mindset. We need to project a new image, living the values of the company: integrity, excellence and customer-centric mentality. This new mindset of self-belief, ‘conquering spirit‘ customer effectiveness and entrepreneurship - Monique wrote down - is the key to the new culture, the only way to face the significant new challenges.

Monique was very excited. She said the course was excellent and that it lifted everybody’s spirits, which had, quite frankly, been a bit down after having been confronted with the new hard realities. A couple of weeks later, her district manager held a regular meeting with his small group of sales representative specialists. This was a routine meeting but an important one because a new electronic Territory Management System (TMS) had been recently introduced and they were all trying to make the most of the new tool on their personal laptops. HQ had just released the new benchmarking and market data as well. There were new updated lists of ‘A’ and ‘B’ doctors, and quite a lot of new information on local hospitals, where many of the sales visits take place.

During the meeting, Monique and her colleagues looked at sales targets, individually and as a district, ‘call rates’, efficiency ratios, completion of input/feedback into the TMS and some competitive benchmarking data. They all had clear goals to improve rates of customer visits by 15% for the current six month period and to cover 95% of assigned hospital pharmacists. Overall, Monique’s district was achieving 85% of sales targets so far and, seeing what was happening in other districts, it wasn’t bad at all!

The missing connection
The meeting ended and Monique drove back home, stopping for an extra visit to the local hospital. She had promised to bring some scientific papers on new drugs to the head pharmacist and she thought she would do that. In the waiting room of the hospital pharmacy, she had a sudden revelation, thanks to the peace and quiet of the place and to the unexpected delay in the pharmacist’s availability. What was the connection between the two-week Advanced Sales Training and this morning’s Distr

ales Training course was ‘culture’. Monique’s bundle of notes grew bigger and bigger. There was more group work this time. A consolidated output of many hours of work with colleagues, some of them more experienced than her, pointed to very clear directions. Monique’s accurate notes read: we need to create a solid ‘winning culture’, where dynamism, creativity, optimism and confidence in the future are in everybody’s mindset. We need to project a new image, living the values of the company: integrity, excellence and customer-centric mentality. This new mindset of self-belief, ‘conquering spirit‘ customer effectiveness and entrepreneurship - Monique wrote down - is the key to the new culture, the only way to face the significant new challenges.

Monique was very excited. She said the course was excellent and that it lifted everybody’s spirits, which had, quite frankly, been a bit down after having been confronted with the new hard realities. A couple of weeks later, her district manager held a regular meeting with his small group of sales representative specialists. This was a routine meeting but an important one because a new electronic Territory Management System (TMS) had been recently introduced and they were all trying to make the most of the new tool on their personal laptops. HQ had just released the new benchmarking and market data as well. There were new updated lists of ‘A’ and ‘B’ doctors, and quite a lot of new information on local hospitals, where many of the sales visits take place.

During the meeting, Monique and her colleagues looked at sales targets, individually and as a district, ‘call rates’, efficiency ratios, completion of input/feedback into the TMS and some competitive benchmarking data. They all had clear goals to improve rates of customer visits by 15% for the current six month period and to cover 95% of assigned hospital pharmacists. Overall, Monique’s district was achieving 85% of sales targets so far and, seeing what was happening in other districts, it wasn’t bad at all!

The missing connection
The meeting ended and Monique drove back home, stopping for an extra visit to the local hospital. She had promised to bring some scientific papers on new drugs to the head pharmacist and she thought she would do that. In the waiting room of the hospital pharmacy, she had a sudden revelation, thanks to the peace and quiet of the place and to the unexpected delay in the pharmacist’s availability. What was the connection between the two-week Advanced Sales Training and this morning’s Distr

ich had, quite frankly, been a bit down after having been confronted with the new hard realities. A couple of weeks later, her district manager held a regular meeting with his small group of sales representative specialists. This was a routine meeting but an important one because a new electronic Territory Management System (TMS) had been recently introduced and they were all trying to make the most of the new tool on their personal laptops. HQ had just released the new benchmarking and market data as well. There were new updated lists of ‘A’ and ‘B’ doctors, and quite a lot of new information on local hospitals, where many of the sales visits take place.

During the meeting, Monique and her colleagues looked at sales targets, individually and as a district, ‘call rates’, efficiency ratios, completion of input/feedback into the TMS and some competitive benchmarking data. They all had clear goals to improve rates of customer visits by 15% for the current six month period and to cover 95% of assigned hospital pharmacists. Overall, Monique’s district was achieving 85% of sales targets so far and, seeing what was happening in other districts, it wasn’t bad at all!

The missing connection
The meeting ended and Monique drove back home, stopping for an extra visit to the local hospital. She had promised to bring some scientific papers on new drugs to the head pharmacist and she thought she would do that. In the waiting room of the hospital pharmacy, she had a sudden revelation, thanks to the peace and quiet of the place and to the unexpected delay in the pharmacist’s availability. What was the connection between the two-week Advanced Sales Training and this morning’s Distr

competitive benchmarking data. They all had clear goals to improve rates of customer visits by 15% for the current six month period and to cover 95% of assigned hospital pharmacists. Overall, Monique’s district was achieving 85% of sales targets so far and, seeing what was happening in other districts, it wasn’t bad at all!

The missing connection
The meeting ended and Monique drove back home, stopping for an extra visit to the local hospital. She had promised to bring some scientific papers on new drugs to the head pharmacist and she thought she would do that. In the waiting room of the hospital pharmacy, she had a sudden revelation, thanks to the peace and quiet of the place and to the unexpected delay in the pharmacist’s availability. What was the connection between the two-week Advanced Sales Training and this morning’s District meeting?

She struggled for a bit until her mind reassured her (the mind is wonderful at comforting us). “It’s all there,” she thought, “in the background, in the mindset”, as the sales trainer had insisted. ‘Change your mindsets’ seemed to be the unofficial summary of that training! The waiting continued; apologies were given. Monique secretly welcomed the delay because it was rare that she could ‘stop and think’, as she liked to put it. But restless ‘revelations’ seemed to come in waves, like a psychological migraine. “What is the mindset? What kind of mindset do I have? Where is the mindset?” She found it silly at first, but all sorts of other questions started to bombard her, all about the same mindset-thing. And back to “Where is the connection?”

She had her old training notes in her laptop. She went through all of them quickly: esprit conqu?rant, will to succeed, confidence, conviction… She then opened the TMS by mistake: sales targets, call rates and class ‘A’ physicians were all there in front of her. “Where is the connection? Where is the connection?”

Monique’s anxiety was put to rest by the sudden appearance of the hospital pharmacist who went on and on about the ridiculously long and boring management committee meeting she had just attended.

Monique is not unique as a sales force representative of the company. Not too junior, not too senior, she has been around long enough to get through recurrent training programs, most of them around product knowledge and some on selling skills. But this Advanced Course was a bit different because it focused on a series of qualities that were required for success. Like her colleagues, Monique thought highly of the course. It all seemed to make sense but she kept trying to understand ‘the connection’ (as she put it) between the training and its language and the operational targets in front of her. On reflection, Monique thought that ‘the connection’ would have been provided by the District Manager, but the reality is that they spent the time on ‘numbers’, sales targets, sales planning and review of the benchmarking data.

If you work in sales, you may perhaps relate to the above scenario! If you don’t, please bear with me because the problems described are universal and embedded in the majority of ‘change programs’, whether formal or informal. There are two fundamental, and if I may say so colossal, flaws in this very real life scenario:

• Monique is quite right that she has not been given ‘the connections’. First of all, her performance-related compensation and incentives are mainly focused on sales targets and call rates, so these are the themes that occupy the reviews with her district manager. None of the new list of qualities in her notepad has been connected with rewards, although there is some talk about linking ‘will to succeed’, ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ and ‘projecting the values’ next year.
• The advanced training course contains a rich, comprehensive, beautifully-crafted, inspiring, energizing and skillfully organized framework of close-to-useless non-operational concepts. Mindset, attitude, complacency, healthy restlessness, ‘will to achieve’, ‘will to surprise’, ‘will to succeed’, ‘esprit conqu?rant’, confidence, entrepreneurial spirit, conviction, ‘winning culture’, dynamism, creativity, optimism ‘project a new image’, ‘livin