Useless Truths
We all know (and sometimes still laugh about) the old joke of the lost hot air balloon pilot.
Asking a passerby about his whereabouts, he is told something like: You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 40 feet above ground. You are between 46 & 48 degrees N. latitude and between 52 & 56 degrees W. longitude.
The punch line, of course, is that the passerby must be a consultant (or some other similar profession, depending on the variation of the joke). But how did you know? Because everything you have told me is correct and precise, but I have no idea what to make of your information and the fact is I am still lost."
In some variations the joke continues with a comeback, but the short version is sufficient to illustrate the fallacy of facts that are TBU - true but useless.
Here are a few of my favorites TBUs:
On average the human eye blinks once every five seconds.
A bowling pin only has to tilt 7.5 degrees to fall down.
One square yard of a rug can contain as many as 100,000 dust mites. Your bed may be housing as many as 10 million.
One phyllobates terribilis (Golden Poison Frog) has enough toxin to kill >10 people or 10,000 mice.
TBU appears to be rampant in sales effectiveness, as well. There must be thousands of business books and even academic studies out there attesting that the most successful sales people "are intensely goal-oriented and have the will to win, take responsibility for results, have above average ambition, empathy, willpower and determination, etc.
All true. But how can anyone act on these insights? Pointing out having the drive to win as a success factor is a bit like saying somebody won the race because they ran faster than the others, or telling the ad agency team that the commercial will be better if they are more creative.
A pharma company I worked with recently had conducted analysis about what distinguished the best reps from the merely average ones. They felt quite good about having identified factors like superior motivation, having clear objectives for each call, being a partner to the physician instead of a seller, etc. It confirmed intuition.
But now they were stuck. It seemed that in spite of communication and exchanges of experience, not many reps were actually adopting new behaviors. How could we motivate them to do so?
In fact it was not a problem of motivation at all. The sales reps did not resist the change. They had just not been shown the how.
Heres an example: We often hear that the more successful sales reps are better at listening and asking questions. So we tell everyone to listen better and ask more questions. This results in lots of weather reports and "what I did over the weekend" stories (I am exaggerating, of course).
It would be more useful to know that the best reps consistently opened with a personal question but spend no more than 20 seconds on this opening, then referred back to the last visit to see if there are any open points, then ask the following specific question (...) about the doctors patients or the experience in using the product, then link the answer to the detailing message in the following way, etc. (these details purely fictional, just to illustrate).
Another example: we may hear that the best reps are good at closing. So everybody in the field, please finish the call by asking the doctor for the business. Now there may be different techniques to do that - ranging from "Dear doctor, will you be using the product for your patients (answer: sure...if you would just get outta here)" to "Please prescribe the product for the next patient that comes with this condition (answer: who do you think you are meddling with my patients)". If we tell the reps to close each call, without any further tips regarding how, some will do it well and others don't.
But if we learn that the most successful reps ask the physician to think back to the last time they prescribed the product and were really satisfied and why (to create positive associations), then ask if the doctor sees many of these patients and what products s/he will likely use and why/why not, this provides a nice menu of available tactics that can be taught, practiced and coached (again, these details are fictional, just to illustrate).
To avoid TBU, we should always ask the questions of how and how frequently. Instead of declaring that reps should be a "partner" to the physician (and who would disagree with that?), we need to describe exactly what it is it that a "partner" does with his customer, when its done, and how often. How is it different from not being a partner?
If we are clear about these details, we may find that we are actually better at implementing changes than we thought.