May 30, 2008
Practice The Way That Doctors Practice
Doctors spend years in medical school studying, practicing, and readying themselves to take on the enormous responsibilities of their profession. The consuming public has a very high expectation of the professional standards that are imposed on the medical profession, and all of their faith and hope frequently is placed into the hand of the doctors who are taking care of family, friends and loved ones. This is one reason why doctors have to prepare themselves in the most careful way for the procedures that they perform.
Sales and business professionals should look at the tremendous preparations that doctors make and apply some of the same logic to the way that they approach their responsibilities on a day to day basis. This is not in any way about likening the responsibility that sales people have with the responsibility that medical doctors have; however, there is a specific logic and there are some approaches that we can benefit from by studying doctors.
The most important approach is that doctors, when they are first learning their craft, do not practice on live people. It's well understood that doctors have to learn the intricacies of the human body. And it's also well understood that their skills when they are learning are far from honed; therefore, they practice on cadavers. By practicing on cadavers, it's difficult to make a mistake that would compromise their future. Even though they could waste a valuable resource, they're not going to do any damage that's really beyond repair.
Sales people can learn a lot from the reasons why doctors practice on cadavers. Sales people also need to practice on customers where a failed outcome is not "a big deal." Rather than making our first sales call on our most lucrative potential prospect, we need to practice on smaller customers so that we can refine our pitch, refine our approach, get a better understanding of how the customers and prospects absorb our material and make the necessary refinements before moving forward to work on "bagging the elephant."
By being very careful about how we are perceived and by practicing on lower value targets, we increase our ability to close the lower value targets. And as we work our way up the prospect ladder, we're not risking the very few high-value targets that exist in our marketplace.
So, as you are working hard every day to build your company, or as you're building your career, remember to practice on "cadavers." Practice on those companies where you aren't likely to make a critical error and spoil the most significant opportunities you can have as you move your career forward.
About Joel G. Block
Well known in the business community, Joel Block is a best selling author, speaker, and business strategist. Frequently a principal in his transactions, Joel has raised tens of millions of equity dollars for his ventures, which have included real estate syndications and privately held businesses.
Joel’s career is highlighted by the launch of a financial publishing company which he grew nationwide and later sold to the Los Angeles Times. More recently, Joel works with scientists, engineers, technologists and others to help them optimize their entrepreneurial opportunities. Would you like to get a private phone consultation with Joel? Visit www.joelblock.com/capital for details.
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1 Comment »
June 2, 2008
Barbara Arnold-Feret said:
Another aspect of medical learning is how some of the schools teach - they bomband you with more material than you can possibly ever read, then demand that you produce a solution for a problem in a very limited time. The analogy to business is that every day we have more and more information thrown at us, and from the information overload, we need to sort out the relevant and immediate answers to situation at hand. Medical students are taught to quickly access the information by looking at the headers and introductions to material, read what they believe to be most helpful, then see if the information matches the facts that they know. If not, the student is taught to quickly find the next most likely solution. Medical students don't go from the top of the list with the intention of reading all materials, but rather go for information most likely to help first. That is a skill that business has to use in the day of emails, trade information and marketing analysis.
Another aspect is grand rounds. Almost all medical students go on rounds with teachers or attending physicians, and are quizzed about why they are treating a patient a certain way and what their rationale is, and what the expected results will be and when. Lower level students are started with more common diseases, then as they gain experience, are expected to be able to diagnose and treat more complex problems. When business starts a new college graduate in the first private sector problem, it would make sense for them to learn a bit about the situation, the business culture, the people involved, and how the presentation of the information is done before they are asked to lead on new projects.