Focus Magazine - Winter 2013 - 35

SELLINGSKILLS

The Disorienting Dilemma
I By Jill Donahue

Y

Moving HCPs
up the staircase
of behavior
change
requires different
interventions at
each step

ou’ve likely been there – you’ve got 30
seconds to get your message out. Instead
of trying to make your message fit, why
not try to expand the 30-second detail? Consider
this familiar situation, with an uncommon
outcome:
“Dr. Anderson stood and reached for the
door knob when his rep tried a new
approach. Dr. Anderson stopped, did an
about face, plunked himself back into
his chair … and kept talking. It
worked!”
What did the rep do? She created a
Disorienting Dilemma (DD) to
engage Dr. Anderson. Mezirow,
the father of transformative
learning, coined this term
to describe a method of
engaging the audience
to make them “lean in”
and want to learn
more. So, what is it
and how can we use it
in pharma?
Let’s first look at
where it best fits. What
do you think is the biggest
mistake we make that leads to
shortened calls? It’s mismatching.
But to understand mismatching, you need to
know a little bit about behavior change.
As you know, people don’t change in one step.
It takes many steps to move from “uninterested”
to “on board.” Moving people up the staircase of
behavior change requires different interventions
at each step.
For reps, the biggest mistake occurs when, in
our well-intentioned effort to ensure we deliver
our message, we mismatch what the healthcare

provider (HCP) is ready to hear with what we
are anxious to tell him or her. We jump up the
staircase of behavior change and tell our message
before we engage our audience.
The result? Thirty-second calls that result in
… nothing! No behavior change!
That’s where the DD comes in. It is the most
powerful way to engage HCPs when they are
uninterested. To create your own, think of
something that would be surprising or cause
HCPs to look at things differently. It should
make them question what they
currently do and intrigue them to
want to know more. In short, it
makes them think. Then, present
that idea in the form of a
question, image, story,
testimonial, analogy,
metaphor, simile or
surprising fact.
At the beginning of this
article, there were two DDs
to gain your interest to read
this article. What were they?
(Yes, the story of the rep’s
success and the question about
the biggest mistake.)
If you are thinking that your topic
doesn’t have any DDs, research it until
you discover a surprising fact, an offbeat statistic
or something to debunk a common myth.
How will you know if it worked? You will see
it. It could be as subtle as an eyebrow raise, eye
contact or a question. All of these are signs that
they want to learn more. The result? You will
gain more interest, time and move them up the
staircase of behavior change. Try DDs with your
training audiences. You will love the reaction
you get. I

Jill Donahue is founder of Excellerate. Email Jill at jill.donahue@excellerate.ca.

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