Focus Magazine - Fall 2012 - 34

SELLINGSKILLS

Integrating Compliance to Drive Confidence and Results
I By Liz Levy and Philip McCrea ompanies invest a great deal of time, money and e ort in setting up their salespeople for success with rigorous training – ensuring that representatives are equipped with innovative selling skills and uent in key clinical and marketing information. But in today’s highly-regulated life sciences environment, is this enough? Headlines touting the punishments leveled against companies due to violations by sales personnel grimly attest to the fact that it’s not. e immediate and natural response has typically been to bolt on “compliance training” broadly across organizations, reactively pushing out dry, legalese page-turners with a “can’t-do,” riskprevention focus. is compliance training is o en administered separately from core sales training, in annual cycles that lack role-relevant context. is approach tends to produce two common sales pro les: “No Con dence Guy,” who is so paralyzed by his fear of inadvertently committing a violation that he can barely speak to his

customers, and “False Con dence Gal,” who doesn’t understand how some boring compliance course relates to what she does in the eld and continues to put the company at risk as a result. ere is a better way to help sales personnel achieve the authentic con dence they need to bring real value to their relationships with customers and improve bottom-line results, and one major driver is more e ective training that incorporates certain key elements: • Can-Do, How-To Focus: While it’s certainly important that people know what they aren’t allowed to do, it’s just as important to understand what they can and should do. Compliance is about behavior. E ective sales training demonstrates how regulations actually play out in a salesperson’s everyday environment, and how to handle common and high-risk situations. is helps sales personnel build mental models for correct behaviors. Opportunities to practice in a safe setting with immediate feedback reinforces those models and build con dence. “Serious games” featuring jobrelevant scenarios and case studies can be e ective in grounding compliance and driving home the consequences and bene ts in a way that resonates with realworld experience.

• Fun! Making the training jobrelevant is a positive step towards engagement. Opportunities for interaction, great visuals and even humor will make the training experience fun and interesting, increasing the likelihood that people will retain and implement what they learn. Take a cue from B.Braun Medical’s highly engaging videos, in which company executives sing lyrics such as “all those donuts we dropped o without education, lunches I purchased with no accreditation.” • Integrated & Continuous Learning. Finally, a stand-alone training event on a particular compliance topic won’t support lasting behavioral change. A dynamic, blended sales training curriculum that embraces compliance and integrates can-do, compliant behavior throughout – even making it part of the selling methodology – will set salespeople up for success. Formal training events combined with less formal updates and on-thejob performance support tools can deliver the right information at the right time to help the program maintain relevance and impact over time. I
For more information, scan/capture the QR code with your smartphone.

Liz Levy is an instructional designer at ClearPoint, a global authority in interactive health education. She can be reached at liz.levy@clearpointlearning.com. Philip McCrea is the CEO of ClearPoint, and he can be reached at p.mccrea@clearpointlearning.com.

FOCUS | FALL 2012 | www.spbt.org

http://www.spbt.org

Focus Magazine - Fall 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Focus Magazine - Fall 2012