Every pharmaceutical company has its regular sales force convention, where the reps get together, listen to a series of internal presentations from their management and product managers, celebrate their victories, and then put lampshades on their heads and dance all night.
Or maybe not.
Either way, with reps spending the vast majority of their time working in isolation, the importance of conventions to create a sense of team and company culture should not be underestimated.
Nevertheless - even given the importance of PowerPoint presentations from product managers and dancing with lampshades on your head - the question often arises as to whether there aren’t other, perhaps more directly productive, ways of leveraging sales conventions?
But what can you do with hundreds of people at once? Surprisingly, one answer is to train them.
Training may not be the response that immediately comes to mind. It is usually focused on enhancing skills, and the more direct interaction between participants and trainer, the better. Needless to say, with five hundred people in the room and the trainer up on a stage, there isn’t much scope for direct interaction.
It’s true, these venues are far from ideal for the kind of skills-based programs that characterize a lot of training. But when it comes to the behavior modification aspects of training, they come into their own.
Fostering new behavior
Let’s say you want the reps to use a new CRM system, or perhaps adopt some principles of closed-loop marketing, or even just adhere more closely to your KPIs. They might already have an idea of how to do these things, but they aren’t yet doing them, or at least not up to your expectations. You may well need some behavioral change initiatives to accelerate acceptance of your new approach.
So, why a sales convention?
Conventions, or any type of large, event-based program, are a stellar opportunity for behavioral-change training – where you’ll concentrate on just one or two key messages in terms of new knowledge and skills, but where the principle objective is to foster new behavior.
To appreciate why this is so effective, you’ll have to remember some basics about change management. The key point here is that people generally don’t change because their bosses want them to – they change when they see their peers employing new behaviors. As we’ve often noted, this is a major problem in pharmaceutical sales forces, where reps do not observe their peers at all in their day-to-day job. This slows down behavioral change enormously.
The only time reps are in the presence of large numbers of their peers is exactly during these conventions. So, in order to accelerate change, you need to take advantage of the chance to let them observe their colleagues exhibiting new behavior.
On the surface, that might seem just fine if the new behavior entails some innovative lampshade-assisted dance move, but (I imagine you saying) we were talking about work-related¬ behaviors. That’s where simulations come in.
Testing decisions, encouraging change
Simulations put teams of participants in situations where they must make business decisions. Granted, it’s not the real world, but in certain respects it is better – a controlled simulation of the real world. During a simulation, the participants gain access to “windows in the minds” of their colleagues: they see how they reflect, how they analyze, how they act in a given situation. Some of those colleagues will be “change champions”, people who believe in the new behavior and exhibit it in the simulation. If the simulation-based event is well-constructed and designed then they will reap the rewards of this behavior.
Furthermore, it is the teams that have successfully implemented the new behaviors that will win, and a good instructor will highlight this in the debrief, and ask the winning teams to comment on their strategy. In this way, it is not the instructor or management extolling the virtues of the new behavior, it is the reps themselves.
IMS Learning Solutions & Change Management has carried out numerous events of this type, ranging from fifty participants to well over a thousand. Even with a thousand reps in one (very large) room, working in groups of four or five, it can be quite remarkable to witness the excitement and the impact of such a half-day or full-day event. Typically, in situations such as these, the first-line managers are well briefed beforehand, and serve as facilitators roaming the floor and encouraging their reps to reassess their behavior.
To a certain degree, the more the merrier. Again, the objective here is not so much to teach your people new things, but to convince them to do the things they’ve already learned. As such, the greater the number of positive examples, the more inspired they’ll be. Furthermore, the sheer mass enthusiasm of being involved in such a rich and unusual event can generate a dynamic that is almost impossible to achieve otherwise.
And, of course, it’s great fun. It will be an event they’ll always remember…which may be more than can be said for nights spent dancing with a lampshade on their head.
