The skill no one will teach you

One of the best sales reps I have ever watched in action did nothing the Challenger model, or any other model, would tell you to do. I had come along to one of those basic GP office lunches, the kind with a bad name for being a waste of pharma’s time. Just a room of tired doctors trying to get through their break.

But the rep broke the frame. He never opened his PC loaded with branded slides. Instead he walked to the big whiteboard on the wall and started drawing. The lunch was still demanding everyone’s attention, and yet I watched the doctors look up, curious. Where was this going?

Then he started to talk. What he had drawn was a stripped-down version of his treatment’s mechanism of action. It was not that he lacked slides, he had dozens of them on his laptop, he chose to draw it by hand. And he was no artist, believe me.

What he did, as he pointed to his subpar drawing, was inviting the room into a conversation. How to use the treatment. Which patients it fit. The whole thing flowed, naturally, easily. I have not seen anything that smooth before or since.

I was curious whether the moment turned into anything, so I followed up two weeks later. Three new patients started on treatment in fourteen days, from that single office.

Here is what we can learn from it.

It was not a technique

The easy reading is that the whiteboard was a clever tactic. Ditch the slides, grab a marker and stand out. If that were the lesson, you could teach it on a Tuesday and have the whole field running it by Friday.

But the drawing was not the point. What made the doctors listen and lean in was the entire package. He knew the science well enough to redraw it live, no notes, simple enough for a tired GP to follow. He could feel that the slides would lose the room, and chose another path in the moment. And when the doctors started asking questions, he did not steer them back to a message, he followed them into a conversation about their own patients.

None of that is a tactic. It is a capability. The drawing was the visible tip of it.

What we do not train

Pharma is good at building communication models. Key messages, objection handling, the steps of a call, the branded MoA deck with the animation that took three agencies to sign off. There are reasons for all of it. Models scale, they keep a field force consistent, and they keep a regulated industry inside its lines.

But a model is a script that treats every moment the same way. The rep’s lunch with a set of hangry GPs can’t be put into a model that follows a linear script. The value came from the moment he left the script, read the room, and built something for the people actually in it.

We train the script. We do not train leaving it.

What the research actually says

There is a name for what he was doing. Researchers have studied it since the 1980s under the heading of adaptive selling, the degree to which someone changes their behaviour during a conversation based on what they read in the situation, rather than running a fixed routine. Weitz, Sujan and Sujan defined it. Spiro and Weitz later built the scale still used to measure it. The finding that holds up across the decades is unsurprising once you have watched it happen. The people who read the room and adjust outperform the people who deliver the same call every time.

Adaptive selling is not improvisation for its own sake. It rests on something solid underneath, real knowledge of the product, a genuine grasp of the customer’s world, and the confidence to put a hypothesis into the open and be corrected. The whiteboard rep had all three.

Why this is the capability that matters now

The hypothesis in my last article about the hybrid rep was that the bottleneck for a new treatment is rarely the science, it is the system around the decision. The role our industry is reaching for is a scientist with consulting instincts, someone who can sit in front of a stakeholder and build a plan rather than deliver one.

That role lives or dies on the exact capability the whiteboard rep showed by accident. Walking in without a script. Listening first. Forming a hypothesis in the room and testing it against the person across the table. The same muscle a good consultant uses, pointed at a patient pathway instead of a pitch.

It is the hardest thing to train and the easiest thing to recognise. You have seen it too, the colleague whose meetings just go differently, and you could never quite say why.

A note to you, reading this

If you want the skill, the bad news is that no model will hand it to you. The good news is that it is built the way every craft is built, by you yourself, applying it in the real world.

But adapting in the room is not improvising from nothing. The rep who leaves the deck and the script in the bag can do it because the work happened before the meeting. Homework on the account, on what this stakeholder is struggling with, on where their patients fall out of the pathway. That homework is what lets you adapt live instead of freeze.
How to perform account research and develop hypothesized insights is a skill that can be taught, that’s what I do all the time.

The permission

The rep never knew he was modelling the role of the next decade. He just knew his science and trusted his instincts.

You can learn to do the same. Not from a model but from practice.

/Mats