First Cut Is The Deepest

Selling to a surgeon is like playing with a tiger, as long as they want to play you are okay, but as soon as they don’t, you are toast. The amount of confidence you have to possess to cut people open and hold their life, literally, in your hands, is staggering. As a result, surgeons don’t have opinions, they know things for sure.

Cut to me, sitting in a windowless room in a hospital in the far north of England, trying to tell two surgeons their inventory system was rubbish. It wasn’t going well, one of them had already stood up and said he had another meting to attend. He was only delaying long enough to see his colleague tear out my jugular, I reckon (at least it would be a clean incision).

I had tried describing terrible scenarios of open patients and missing surgical items - it could never happen, they said, they checked before starting.

How about savings in staff time from picking the material for procedures more quickly - no benefit because surgeries are scheduled, so nurses are there anyway.

Last shot - what about stock losses, they would reduce to zero? - didn’t care, most of the stock wasn’t theirs.

Wait a minute. I asked them to describe in detail, how that worked.

The stock is owned and put in the hospital stores by manufacturers, a rep calls every fortnight or so. Except some of it is owned by the hospital.

“Simple”, they said and the second surgeon stood up.

“How do you know the difference between the two stocks?’ I asked, “And when does the ownership for the item pass to the hospital? And how does the rep know what to restock?”

The first surgeon said, “There are stickers on the product to tell the difference.”

“But the sticker is on the outer packaging and that gets binned before surgery,” said the second surgeon.

“We own it as soon as we use it,” said the first surgeon.

“But we take three different sizes into the theatre and only use one, do we now own the ones we have unpacked?” said the second surgeon.

They both sat down and looked at me.

“We don’t know how the rep knows, they just know,” they said.

“I can do a walkthrough and find out the whole process, if you like,” I said.

“Would you? That would be very useful,” they said.

The sales conversation had started at last.

They didn’t adopt our inventory system in the end, but they took our procurement contract, which was a result. The learning I gained went into an entirely new sales approach which was very successful.

When a prospect has a very strong belief about how their world functions, it is often useful to ask them to explain the detail. If they are right, then they get to show off and feel good. But, if they cannot explain it (and they won't), then you have an opportunity to step in and help.

The very definition of enterprise selling.

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