A bullet dodged

Recently I endured one of the strangest meetings of my consultancy career.

It began with an email from an ex-client who was now an account manager with one of the most successful pharmaceutical advertising agencies in Europe.  She had a client whose product was facing some specific strategic challenges that she felt I could help resolve.  Given our history I was confident she had a realistic idea of what my company does and specific thoughts as to how I might be able to help her help her client.  Could I come in for a pitch meeting?

When an agency this big calls you take the meeting.

It was scheduled for 930am a few Friday's ago at the agency’s lovely Home Counties offices and to run for ‘ninety minutes, two hours at the outside’.  As requested I customised my basic credentials presentation to hone in on the product’s current needs by highlighting some successful work with other products facing similar challenges.

In a pre-meeting she’d stressed that Charlie, the client in question, was sometimes a bit unpredictable and hard to handle.  That she’d insisted on a formal pre-meeting should have been red flag enough.

I arrived my usual fifteen minutes early to be told that Charlie, also travelling out from London, would be about thirty minutes late.  I chatted with my ex-client and her colleague when a few minutes after 10am a secretary announced that Charlie had arrived but was outside having a smoke.  The other account manager was describing a long overdue beach holiday she is taking next month when he appeared,

Holiday?  Who said that you could take a holiday?  I never signed off on that.

 Charlie wore a golf shirt, jeans and ancient trainers.  Without shaking hands or acknowledging me he threw himself in a chair and announced that he was late because he’d been up all night watching the General Election.  We got a short yet impassioned lecture about the inequities of the first-past-the-post electoral system and then turned on me, 

What’s he doing in a suit?

Before I could respond he waved his own comment away.  I handed over a business card which he tossed unread on the table next to his BlackBerry and cigarettes.  My contact said a few words and handed the meeting over to me.  I began to begin when he interrupted, 

Is he going to stand the whole time?

I was. 

I’d really prefer it if you’d sit down.

I declined.

I’d be using flipcharts and so on and he’d get a far better idea about what my company offered far more easily if he just let me do what I normally do.  He snorted but let me get on with the presentation.

I made it as far as Slide 2 before he interrupted again.  This time he wasn’t objecting per se but rather commenting on the way I was constructing my argument, 

I can see what you’re trying to do here.  It’s not going to work.

He lasted two more slides before declaring that he ‘got’ what I was trying to do but what was I going to do for him?  I negotiated my way through another six or so slides to the point where I move from what my company offers to hone in specifically on the client’s challenges.  And I really do mean ‘negotiate’; after each slide Charlie had to be told to hold his question as the issue raised was addressed always on the next slide.  Finally I picked up a marker pen, turned to the flipchart and asked my usual question, 

So, who is the correct patient for your product?

Charlie immediately left the room for a cigarette.  When he returned ten minutes later I repeated my question,

So, who is the correct patient for your product?

There isn't one.

All I'm trying to understand is where the product should be positioned and define that in terms of the patient that the product will help.”

My next slide outlined a few parameters to help the discussion. 

You don’t understand.  No one knows where to position the product.  I've been in pharma for twenty-five years and I’ve never see anything like this.  It’s impossible.

I’d read the research and it didn’t seem impossible to me.  The product was currently getting low-level usage in one major European market but not in the right type of patient to sustain long-term growth.  I told Charlie I wasn’t talking about how to position the product; we’d get to that later, but simply where it should be positioned.  That is, for which sort of patient.

 That’s the problem.  It’s a extremely complicated area of medicine and no one can say where it should be positioned.

What does the clinical data say?

It says we can be used anywhere in the disease area.”

Okay let’s start with this; how many prescriptions do you need a year to make budget?

He named a figure (which I knew already). 

Then as I understand the disease area, that means we have to avoid pigeonholing the product for last line use because the epidemiology shows us that there aren’t enough eligible patients in that ‘last line cohort’?  Coincidentally this is the only place you’re currently getting sales.

I see what you’re trying to do.  You’re trying to say where we should tell the market where the product should be used.

That’s what positioning is, Charlie, that’s exactly what I was trying to do. 

There’s no point.  The sales team isn't smart enough to follow a strategy as complicated as that.

Let’s leave the sales team out of the mix for the moment and start with the customer; where do the doctors want the product used?

I obviously didn’t understand enough about the product.  That was certainly true; at the start of the meeting I’d given myself permission to ask naïve questions.

Charlie responded by likening the challenges he faced in his market to the launch of the blockbuster antidepressant Prozac.  I told him I found analogies to be of limited benefit.  Why didn’t he instead walk me through the actual issues facing his own product in a way that I could understand and we’d take it from there? 

I find it easier to use this analogy when explaining to people about my product as it keeps things simple.  It’s not just you.  I do this all the time with our sales team.

The point of his Prozac analogy was that the drug represented a game-changing technological advance that created a multibillion-dollar market overnight.  He felt strongly that his product should do the same.  Prozac hadn’t been niched, which was why it was so successful.  And wasn’t that what positioning was?  Niching by another name?  He suggested that we dwell on this wisdom whilst he stepped out for another cigarette.

Need I say that his product was no Prozac?

Around we went.  Every time I proposed a positioning Charlie rebutted it with either another ridiculous analogy, by ‘reminding’ me of a piece of data that he’d hitherto neglected to mention or just by leaving to smoke.

At 1230pm I said I was mindful that it was now Friday afternoon and that I had enough information to put together a costed proposal which he’d get by the middle of next week.  I started to pack up my things, as did the account managers. 

Wait a minute.  What's going on here? I didn’t say that anyone could leave.

I said that had a teleconference scheduled with another client. He demanded that I postpone it, which I duly managed to do (thank god for sane clients).

I don’t have anything else on this afternoon so I want us all to stay here and keep going until we work this thing out.

After we went around the analogy/previously unmentioned data/cigarette loop another time I’d had enough, 

Charlie, I think that three hours is more than long enough for a pitch meeting.

Pitch meeting?  Who said anything about this being a pitch meeting?

It said so on my first slide.

(One of only seven you saw you boor.) 

No, you should know that I don’t waste my time with pitch meetings.  If the girls here say that you’re the right guy for the job then that’s good enough to work for me.

Well, we haven't agreed terms yet and I'm not prepared to share any more of my IP until we get that sorted.  Anyway I still have to make that other call.

I said my goodbyes and left.  My ex-client walked me out, apologising the entire way to the car, 

He knew damn well it was only a pitch.  I told him a dozen times.

The following week I fired off a brief proposal that included a ballpark budget that ignored his request for a discount ‘because we’d never worked together before’.

And that, of course, was the end of the matter.

***

Charlie was a walking Petri dish of insecurity.  Everything he said or did amounted to an ironclad guarantee that he would be a nightmare to work with.  Except that in Charlieworld I wouldn’t be working with him, I’d be working for him.

The ways in which Charlie would be a poor client fall into three broad categories: (a) his inability to engage in Marketing 101; (b) his total lack of respect for anyone inside his business, but most of all (c) the aggressive status games presumably played to mask the first two shortcomings.  The specific behaviours that bother me fell under one of those three headings: - 

Deficit in Marketing

• Hypnotised by the complexity of the product and unwilling (unable?) to see that the marketing still needs to be simple
• Overuse of banal analogies to avoid engagement in the actualities of his own market
• Opting to make a show of positioning the product ambitiously if unrealistically but without any real plans to assist the sales team in establishing this in the field 

Lack of Respect

• Seeing the sales team as stupid
• Antagonistic towards the rest of his organisation.  I got a sense that Charlie’s vociferous support for a project would immediately damn it in the eyes of everyone else.  What good would that do my long-term prospects within his organisation?
• Wanting the whole project to be prohibitively difficult as that might excuse the ambiguous positioning and correspondingly poor sales results to follow 

Status Games

• The relationship with the two (female) agency account managers totally ignored their expertise
• Withholding information from a potential supplier (me).  Of course I didn’t know the data as well as he did, but I resented the implication that I was incompetent rather than newer to the project
• Leaving the room to smoke every time the discussion put him under any sort of pressure
• Dressed so casually as to be dismissive of everyone else in the room
• Actually lying about his understanding of the nature of the meeting

***

So like the title says, a bullet dodged.  If there was an upside it was that I got to bond with the account managers over the experience and that just might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Synthesis v Analysis

Synthesis (n) The combination of ideas to form a theory or system: the synthesis of intellect and emotion in his work, the ideology represented a synthesis of certain ideas.  Often contrasted with analysis 

Analysis (n) detailed examination of the elements of structure of something, typically as a basis for discussion or interpretation: statistical analysis / an analysis of popular culture.  The process of separating something into its constituent elements

In sales/marketing synthesis is an ad hoc project whereas analysis tends to be an ongoing process.

It's fine to use a consultancy for synthesis because it's ad hoc and a decision needs to be made before the project begins.  It is defined and therefore manageable.  But any organisation that automatically outsources all of its analysis work is abdicating responsibility for anything like realtime decision-making.

When budgets are tight and analysis budgets are cut back then decisions are either made too late or without sufficient information or not at all.  Consultants like me need to be in the synthesis game.

Brand v reputation

I need to cut back on my use of the word 'brand'.

Brand (n). 1.  A trademark or distinctive name identifying a product or a manufacturer.  2. A product line so identified: a popular brand of soap.  3. A distinctive category; a particular kind: a brand of comedy that I do not care for

A key element of the long-term project to legitimise marketing as a profession is the argument that a brand should be treated as an intangible asset and thus be included on a Balance Sheet.  As a marketer by training I certainly understand that a well-respected brand makes it easier to sell the product so branded and thus has a value.


'Brand' is meant to have a value neutral connotation.  A brand is manipulable, which is the purpose of positioning.  This leads to a line of thinking that like any other asset a brand can be neglected or even purposefully damaged and then repaired.

This is the thrust of an article on the IPL cricket competition by Gideon Haigh who is surely the world's finest cricket writer.  He explores the damage that marketing thinking can have in sport: -

A game is a cultural activity, operating at myriad levels, all of which need to be maintained, nurtured, protected. In the world of the brand, all that really matters is the face shown the public, the spectacle, the image. A game depends on fair dealing, robust processes and good people prepared to place their individual interests second. Both a game and a brand are at reputational risk, but in the case of the brand only the appearance of respectability and integrity is essential, and that can be achieved, or so it is usually felt, by sound media management, and at worst post hoc damage control.

Part of the problem is that the term is used far too loosely.  Often when we say 'brand' we really mean 'reputation'.

Reputation (n). 1. The general estimation in which a person is held by the public.  2. The state or situation of being held in high esteem.  3. A specific characteristic or trait ascribed to a person or thing: a reputation for courtesy

Reputation has a old fashioned judgmental, not to say a moral, element to it.  David Cameron's long-term project to 'detoxify the Tory Party brand' was a worthwhile exercise yet it fell short of establishing a reputation for inclusiveness.  Of course there is only so much of a (positive) effect that a political party can have on its reputation if it is out of power so the Tories' real work on this starts now.


I spend a lot of time advising pharmaceutical clients to ignore the brand and to focus on patient outcome as this is where a drug's real value lies.  Advertising agencies, who make money on the premise that a manipulated brand is an enhanced one, rarely thank me for this.  Then again, if I'm annoying the agency then I'm probably doing something right.


The brand v. reputation distinction operates most cogently at a personal level.  As a performer I suppose I have a brand and certainly every show I've produced has benefited from attention to this detail.  Still, I think we'd all do better if we were less concerned with branding and each paid a little more attention to our reputations.

David Heinemeier-Hansson

Yesterday I went along to the Regent Street Apple Store to listen to David Heinemeier-Hansson speak.  I'm not a programmer so until yesterday he was someone who existed only on the edge of my radar.  This was the descriptor for the talk: -

David is the developer behind the hugely successful software Ruby on Rails and Basecamp. Join him as he discusses 37signals’ business manifesto, co-written with Jason Fried, Rework: Change the Way You Work Forever.

It was a free talk so that he could spruik his GTD book so what was there to lose?  As with any other free event nothing but my time.

Even an hardened stand-up would label the lecture theatre at the back of the Apple Store 'a tough room'; substandard acoustics and an audience full of nerds accessing the free WiFi but that doesn't begin to explain the underwhelming non-event that followed.  A profound inability to engage with the audience, an absence of stagecraft and a monotony of delivery all gave the impression that the speaker was focused on nothing more than his final PowerPoint slide and the customary yet desultory round of applause.

Leaving aside the props that Heinemeier-Hansson gets for being sickeningly fluent in English, he wasted my time.  The content of the talk was not so much 'how to improve my personal productivity' but rather 'how to behave if I worked at 37signals'.  I was less likely to buy the book at the end of the talk that at the beginning.

When will people realise that all public speaking is performing?

The end of the arc

Lately my stand-up has been underwhelming.  Whilst I haven't actually been 'dying' on stage neither have I left my audience clamouring for more.  Sure, I've only done two gigs since the month-long ash-cloud-extended sojourn in Asia and Australia but there's a deeper problem than lack of stage-time, which is my usual diagnosis for a malaise like this.

Instead it just feels like the end of the arc.

In late 2006 I kept a long-standing personal promise to try stand-up comedy.  I was 39 and rather than aiming for fame'n'fortune I gave myself the more realistic goal of attaining what I called 'journeyman status'.  In 2010 I get paid pretty well.  I get asked back.  I have bit of a reputation as a solid, reliable comic for either 'Opening 20's' or compeering.  If I stopped today I'd leave the industry if not a success then certainly not a failure.

Job done.

The end of an arc like this is a time of extraordinary vulnerability.  When our business began to take off in multiple markets around the world my then partner's enthusiasm demonstrably waned.  The minute the market wanted him he lost interest.

He explained the paradox by describing a dinner party with old friends from medical school.  Because their services are always in demand very few of the doctors he trained with were in any way entrepreneurial; why start your own institution when there are plenty who will bend over backwards to make sure you're happy?  Around the dinner table my partner's decision to start a pharmaceutical consulting firm was regarded as either brave, laughable or contemptible.  Yet within a few years he was a founding partner of a growing business  with strong prospects and an already impressive record in markets as different as the US, Spain, Singapore, India, Taiwan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

Job done.

By then no one was laughing behind their hands at dinner.  But once he reached the end of that narrative arc from risk to assurance he lost enthusiasm.  I was driven by less easily sated demons.  It was this misalignment of motivation more than any disparity in contribution that led to the decoupling of the business a few years later.

If I cannot construct a realistic and satisfying narrative of my future stand-up career then every gig from now on will feel like an unsatisfying postscript because that's all it will be.  The storyteller in me has some work to do.

Exceeding expectations

An easy point of differentiation between stand-up comics and improvisers is their attitude to collaboration.  An interesting question to ask a performer on a long car journey is this: -

Would you rather be recognised as the best act on a mediocre night of comedy or a good contributor without being the stand-out act on a great one?

Every decent improviser opts for the former; the audience experience (aka 'the night') is all that matters.  Far too many stand-ups measure their performance comparatively against the rest of the bill rather than in the absolute terms of audience appreciation.  When I'm going through a bad patch I fall into the same relativist trap and my post-gig analysis starts sounding like the ravings of a paranoiac: -

Was I the weakest on the bill?  Was there a sense of palpable relief when I said goodnight?  The audience only talked during my set and listening intently to everyone else didn't they?  The other acts were all backslapping each other but did anyone say anything complimentary to me?  In fact when I came off stage I don't think that anyone even looked me in the eye...

And so on.  As such schadenfreude is the default setting for most stand-up comics.  This is why a commonplace on the English scene that Michael McIntyre is a poor comic, hardly better than Jimmy Carr really but at least he's no Joe Pasquale.  This mindset is self-destructive in the most obvious yet insidious way and we each need to guard against it.

Conversely, in consultingland it's been years since I've watched another external consultant or trainer work.  I often share a stage with internal speakers but it's very rare for direct competitors to speak to the same audience on the same day*.  The only indicators I have that I'm any good are that (a) my clients pay me on time and (b) keep asking me back.  I find that it's actually pretty easy to 'exceed expectations' when a client has paid thousands in travel, accommodation and fees and effectively gambled tens of thousands more in taking the sales team off the road for a few days because I'm given a brutally clear sense of what those expectations are.

Part of the frustration in performing comedy on most nights is that the audience has no more than a shaky idea why they're there in the first place.  Expectations usually range from the depressingly downbeat (I just hope no one embarrasses themselves, I couldn't bear to watch that) to the ludicrously optimistic (What do you mean a tenner in a room above a pub doesn't get me Eddie Izzard?) making it hard to judge your performance on anything other than your fellow acts.

None of this improves the mental health of your average stand-up comedian, who was unlikely to be especially sane before he took up the craft.

* The exception to this rule are those showcase events where speakers are allotted stage time in front of an audience of would-be buyers.  It's been years since I've attended one.  My business is totally driven by word-of-mouth recommendation amongst a small number of potential clients so the effort needed to make a showcase work has never justified the return.