ROLEPLAY

Keepin’ It Real

The bulletin boards at CafePharma.com, a virtual gathering spot for pharmaceutical sales reps, are stocked with the outspoken rants on everything from the repercussions of skirting ethical boundaries to dealing with dumb managers.

After one rep wrote that he’d prefer that he never hear the words, “Let’s role play” again, we asked others. Here’s what we heard back:

It’s Fake!

Role playing is completely fake and couldn’t be any farther from reality. Time would be much better spent going over frequent objections and best practices on handling those objections.

Not Real Life

Role play is the furthest thing from real life pharma… Need I say more? If I ever recited that shit to a doc I’d be thrown out.

Only Shows Off Stamina

Top rep here. It is TRULY FAKE! It shows off your stamina and knowledge, that’s it.

Time It

All you are doing with role play is a canned message that usually lasts about five to eight minutes, which in today’s climate unless you are doing lunch, is unrealistic. I had a manager who would have us do real role plays and he would start a two-minute timer and provide us with different situations and we had to SELL in two minutes or less. It was realistic and very helpful.

Supply Reps With Responses Instead

Five years pharma experience, three years device experience: Role playing sucked because it had nothing to do with reality. However, in devices you never role play at meetings – EVER. Having come from pharma, I think the benefit to role playing was you had to ingrain responses into your head for every objection. In devices, you know your product but there are times where a surgeon gets irate or screams out a quick objection and for no other reason you are a bit taken back...the response may “lag” even though you know the information. That never happened in pharma because you were beat to death with the responses.

My preference is NO role playing, but supplying reps with the objections/responses for study purposes. Only the committed reps will learn the information, the slackers will circular file it.

Substitute For Creative Training Ideas

Role playing is not valuable in the least. It is a substitute for a lack of creative ideas in training. We hate it because good salespeople are rotting in training again and again hearing the same crap at different companies.

This is especially problematic if the position for which the person was hired required “three to five years of experience and proven success, blah, blah, blah.” Why would you waste the time of a top performer by giving them year-one training? What proven sales people need is not level-one role playing but level-three coaching.

That is what is wrong with so much of the training in any industry. It is always geared to the lowest common denominator so top performers must suffer being managed by DMs who couldn’t sell a crippled crab a crutch and who are often threatened by the existence of the top performer they claimed they wanted for the position. Plus you never get as much from these top reps as you could because the training is always for the neophyte, the novice, the freshman rep.

It takes a very keen, secure and unselfish person to take an experienced rep to the next level – those types of people don’t exist in the high school atmosphere of training. Training personnel are more focused on who arrived five minutes late and persecuting them for the remainder of training.

The people they need to train are DMs in the art of coaching, as that is the second training void that exists. You pay a signing bonus, negotiate vacation for a top rep and give them to a mediocre-at-best DM who is threatened? Where is the ROI there?

What companies should ask is if they so desperately seek a Tiger Woods or Roger Federer (top performer) do you have anyone who is able to coach them to the next level of their already-superior performance? Can you imagine Roger suffering through instruction on how to hold a tennis racquet?

I have been in the industry more than 12 years and nothing in the training departments has changed in that time period. Don’t you find that peculiar? I find it pathetic that training departments so lack and stifle innovation that they refuse to create or find new and more effective methods of training.

Role playing a small portion of training is OK, but to the extent that these training departments and DMs rely on it makes it useless.

You role play with a co-worker who is awful, you can’t tell them so. You aren’t their manager plus you’re trying to play nice in the sandbox during training. Who benefited from that? NO ONE.

Role playing is a waste of time, is terribly ineffective and lacks innovation.

Read more about Role Playing in our September/October article: The Trouble With Role Playing

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