The Critical Importance of Selling 
          the "Experience" of the Sale
               By Kim Michael     Copyright May 2015

For many years in retail it was believed as long as you had the lowest price that nothing else really mattered.  In the wake of that ill-conceived philosophy we saw the mega super store arise and over night the: Walmarts, and Home Depots, and Krogers, and Lowes, of the world began to swallow up their competitors.    

Then something changed.  True the economy went south, but something else changed.  All of those mega marts that sacrificed service found themselves loosing market share, and even those who remained healthy knew that times were changing and they would have to change with them or perish.    

It has been a long time in coming, but retailers are beginning to see the importance of service minded and service trained personnel.  We are rapidly coming to the point where customers will no longer accept rude treatment, or no treatment at all, as a replacement for lower prices.  And as stores grow larger, the need for assistance becomes even greater, particularly in the age of the Internet with so many consumer options available.  The fact is, the quickest way to an “out of business” sign in the window of mega retail marketing is to think that you do not need the “human” interaction that promotes the ease of “buying”, and the greater management misconception that  your employees, even the lower paid ones, can not be taught the basic amenities of human interaction and conscientious service. 

There was a time in the not so distant past when I could walk into Home Depot, almost any Home Depot, wander around for literally hours, even pass employees in their trademark orange shop aprons; and not have a single one of them ask if I needed help, or even acknowledge that I was there. 

My family had made several large appliance purchases that ended up being poorly installed and even more poorly attended to by the customer service department.  Apparently, we like many other consumers, stopped going to Home Depot.  With Lowes just down the street why tolerate what we considered an inexcusable attitude toward their customers. 

Now that could easily be the end of this story, but it’s not.  Something happened at Home Depot.  For someone, somewhere in that organization the light came on.  Several months ago I stopped in breaking my promise that I would never darken their doors again.  Immediately I was met at the door by a young lady with a smile, a thankful appreciation that I had come in, and most important of all, “How can I help you?”   Which she also said with a smile. 

I was stunned.  What had just happened?  As I walked around the store every Home Depot employee I saw smiled acknowledging my presence and then asked if I needed help.  I ended up buying a lot more than I needed, another by-product of good service. 

A few weeks later, remembering my good experience, I went to Home Depot again, another one closer to my home.  I needed some custom cut plastic for a project, but my real interest was to see if the Home Depot change of heart I experienced earlier was real, or just a fluke.  I walked in just after the store had opened and the manager of the store was meeting with his sales staff before they hit the floor.  I thought to myself, OK, let’s see if management had the same prerequisite of good service that I had experienced with the floor staff.  My intent was to stroll by, trying not to solicit a response and see what happened. To my surprise the manager stopped his meeting turned to me, smiled and said, “Can I help you with something?”

It turned out that I needed a lot of help and the sales staff at Home Depot stayed with me until it was finished.  There is a lesson to be learned here.  Good service is the experience we buy, as much as the goods we purchase.  And long after those goods are gone, the memory of the experience remains.  I think Home Depot learned that the hard way, but they made the changes that will keep them at the forefront of the market instead of trailing it and in so doing made a loyal customer out of me.        

The take-away is universal.  For anyone who sells a product or a service, a store or an individual, a big company or small--it is important to always remember that you are selling two things: The product and/or service, and the “experience” of that product or service.  And if you shortchange the second, it can and will dramatically impact your success at selling the first...ever again.

HEALTHCARE: Opportunity in the Eye of the Perfect Storm

Healthcare:
Opportunity in the Eye of the Perfect Storm

By Kim Michael--Contributing author John Collier--CEO  Innovative Managed Care Solutions Copyright March 2015

As anyone in healthcare knows, healthcare in the United States is undergoing significant change right now, much like the famed “Nor Easter” that Bostonians refer to as “The Perfect Storm”.  “The Perfect Storm” is when many different weather patterns combine at a single intersection to become a “super” storm.  That is essentially what is happening in healthcare. 

First we have the Affordable Care Act, which will likely add many millions of previously uninsured Americans (or Americans forced to change insurance companies to an Exchange ACA Plan) to the category of the insured, however the percentage of young and healthy people that the government had hoped to sign on did not materialize as planned.  Instead the majority of the first wave of the newly insured were the older and sicker segment of the population whose need for more healthcare per capita, reducing their overall contribution, seriously skewed the delicate balance between risk, cost and utilization.

Next we have the massive and costly system conversions, stemming from requirements by the federal government and the ACA.  This added meaningful use to the equation, including electronic prescribing, and adhering to quality standards, for physicians, at least called PQRS which many hospitals and healthcare systems across the country entered into in hopes of better controlling costs and creating better clinical outcomes through unified platforms and greater transparency. 

What many did not anticipate was the vast amount of time it would require to complete, and the massive demand on internal resources it would inflict in relearning and retooling to accommodate the new technology, all while simultaneously working on the original system.   

And if that was not enough, add to it a completely new medical coding system (ICD-10) that will convert what was once 13,000 codes (ICD-9) to over 68,000 codes –which will change on October 1^st, 2015.  Example: Instead of coding for a patient who has had a toe amputated, coders will need to select the code that it is the third toe on the left foot.  The new coding process involves much greater specificity and significantly more detail in physician documentation, which leads to another issue that many coders have with the process, even before ICD-10. 

Healthcare associations across the country are already warning that this alone will result in a black hole that will devour resources on a massive scale, increase denials, slow revenue and reimbursement cycles, and require staffs across the country to be completely retrained, and payment systems retooled. 

And if that is not enough to adequately call the current healthcare environment--the “Perfect Storm”.  Add this to the mix:

                     *The Federal Government’s mandated that all hospitals update
                                    to accommodate Electronic Health Records (EHR).

                     *CMS fee reductions reducing reimbursements to hospitals often at or below

                       Cost.

                     *Federal government cutbacks (sequester impact).

                     *More regulation on both hospitals, physician groups, and insurance

                       Companies.  

And beyond the provider’s doors, the world of third party reimbursement is changing as well.  A snowball of increased patient pay involvement predicated by the rising and unchecked costs of healthcare, perpetuated by the Affordable Care Act will soon create a patient responsibility/liability “crisis” across the country that will likely impact millions.

For an industry that is slow to change, the part of the Perfect Storm that has already hit has left healthcare and the business of healthcare—reeling; and there is still more to come.  But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. 

Our system of healthcare is broken.  I think most people will agree on that point.  In 2000 The Word Health Organization ranked the US as 37^th in the quality of care and first in cost per capita.  Since then a number of studies doing similar rankings consistently find the US either last or near the bottom, though it has yet to be established how these metrics are derived.  Even so, it seems to be evident that  Americans pay the most of any country in the world for healthcare and yet the quality of that healthcare is seriously in question.  Even so, there are people (and organizations) who are making huge profits, while the majority of the healthcare industry is struggling just to survive, somewhat mirroring the polarity in the US between the “haves” and the “have nots”.

The one reality of healthcare, and the one least talked about, is that “true healthcare reform” in this country will not occur until there is a solid commitment to fix the pieces that are broken.  We can reduce fees, cut cost, increase the number of insured people to off set rising costs, but until we decide to fix what’s broken, it will continue to be broken.

How we got here (and why) is an interesting story. 

Historically healthcare originated from different seeds of the same tree--two distinct sides to healthcare.  The clinical side, which dealt with treating patients, curing disease, tending to the care of others, and tracking outcomes became one branch; and then there was the business of healthcare, how those services are billed and reimbursed became another. 

As these two branches evolved through the years they became two separate platforms and strangely, platforms that did not talk to one another.  To get them to communicate a third language had to be invented which was called medical coding.  Procedures and services had to be translated into numbers and codes for the business side to know how to bill for them-but before that could happen it had to go to a device called the “Charge Master” which took the codes and translated them into costs so the billing platform could bill for them. 

Now complicating this even further was the physician’s part of the bill that was separate from the hospital’s systems, and of course any services like tests, lab work, x-rays, etc. were also billed separately and did not match up because often times one did not know what the other was actually billing for.  So at the end of the day there was no single point, where everything was actually visible— except the patient. But because of the complexity of the statements, few patients had any understanding of what they were actually looking at.  Insurance companies took on the role of managing costs by reviewing services and paying claims, but not really managing the actual care of the patient, which was often left up to the Primary Care physician, but once the patient was referred on to either another doctor, specialist, or hospital, his or her ability to manage that patient’s care became almost impossible to track and consequently impossible to manage. As a result cost overruns, unnecessary tests, redundancy in treatment and even fraud could occur with little or no ability to control it.

So this is where, at least one of the lights at the end of the tunnel can be found.  Most of the advanced systems that providers are embracing the idea of converting to a unified system; the idea of a single platform that integrates all of the platforms that didn’t, or couldn’t talk to one another before, theoretically creating a single pathway that a patient’s care, and the cost of that care, could be mapped and thus managed to create better outcomes and reduce interoperability.    

But there are still other major pieces of this puzzle that need to be fixed.  Recently I spoke with a friend who needed an MRI.  One location quoted him $700 while across town he got a quote for the same test and it was $10,000.  Same test.  There is a huge discrepancy (and little or no consistency) in the way healthcare is priced.  Prices vary from physician practice to physician practice, hospital to hospital, demographic to demographic, and region to region; simply based on what the market will bare.  But history has proven that market driven healthcare pricing rarely serves the needs of the patients and often opens the door to what, in other industries, would be labeled “price gouging”.    

The same is true of insurance companies, all of whom negotiate different terms and have different fee structures for each hospital, forcing many hospitals and physician groups to have literally hundreds of separate contracts on file; complex contracts that are constantly being updated and changed, causing a ripple of costly inaccurate payments to occur.    

And if true cost control is ever to happen, America has to address the cost of pharmacy and drugs.  In all of these focus areas, each arm or leg of the healthcare industry is extremely powerful because of the money they generate and the influence they wield, but none more so than the drug companies.  Drug costs in the US are many times higher than any other country in the world.  At one point during the ACA negotiations the government considered allowing Americans to buy drugs abroad, from places like Canada where drug costs are far less, but the power of the US drug cartel crushed it.  But if reform is to be driven by pricing, why not open the doors to competitive world pricing like the world’s oil market?  This is the one area of healthcare reform where price driven reform would work and significantly balance (and reduce) drug costs through competition.

So all of these pieces of the Perfect Storm, if managed properly, can have a happy ending, but it will require America to rethink what “reform” really means, and to realigning itself with the best practices that serve the needs of the patient--both clinically and economically.  

Surviving the Graveyard of Negative Paradigms by Kim Michael Copyright February 2015

PARADIGMS-GHOSTS OF THE PAST

There is a story about a Russian bear named Bongo.  Bongo lived in a ten foot by ten foot cage, on display in a small village somewhere in the south of Russia, where his owner made his living charging admission to see the bear.

Bongo spent his days walking from one side of his cage to the other and then back again; day after day, week after week, month after month for many, many years.  Finally at the urging of the town’s people his owner agreed to return him to the wild where he could live out the final years of his life in freedom.

Bongo was taken to a remote part of the forest and there, he was set free.  Years later his owner returned to the place where he had set Bongo free only to find the skeleton of a dead bear, with a ten foot path worn in front of it.  The cage that Bongo lived in for years was gone, but the cage that was still in his head was stronger then ever.  Sometimes we as human beings are unaware of the cages that we create for ourselves and then live with.   

The one constant of the world is that nothing is constant.  The base of our knowledge is never static, nor should it be.  What is true today may not be true tomorrow.  By not allowing yourself the ability to see those changes and the new possibilities they represent, you are doomed to only what you once knew.  The reality of this is even more true for business, and sales in particular.

I believe one of the single greatest sources of lost opportunity is what I refer to as “causalities of doomed history”. They are people who live in the past of their own failures; they failed and the memory of that failure continues to haunt them. As is often the case, “bad” experiences are often “emotional” experiences, which means they can be anchored heavily in how we think and react moving forward.

Even years later, despite the likelihood that the same people are no longer there, the weight of that bad experience continues to blind to the present because they can only see the past.
Over the years I have encountered a curious phenomenon that I have literally seen happen over and over again.  Let me set the stage for you.  We begin with a company that has been in business for a number of years, maybe not an old company necessarily, but a one that has an established sales force.  Then one day a new, inexperienced salesperson is hired and in a matter of a few months, sometimes even weeks, the new person is selling more than people that have been there for years.

The question is why?  It would be easy to attribute it to youth, or maybe because new people tend to be more aggressive, more energized, or maybe even smarter; but interestingly none of these reasons are the real reason.  

I believe the real reason is ignorance…yes ignorance.  Ignorance, despite popular opinion, does not mean stupidity, nor does it have the negative connotation that many ascribe to it.  Ignorance is merely the lack of knowledge in a specific area.  The kind of ignorance that I am referring to here is the same ignorance that affected Einstein, or Edison, or Currie; and it is the same kind of ignorance that I suspect lies at the heart of almost every great human achievement, the fact that it was conceived and created by an individual who did not know they couldn’t do what they did.    

New salespeople often come to a new job without the baggage of knowing what they can and can’t do, and yes they make mistakes, sometimes very painful ones, but they are also often successful in finding opportunities that were in front of the rest of us the entire time, the only difference is we are blinded by the artificial boundaries that we have created for ourselves.  Unfortunately they become the ones that others who follow in our footsteps will unconsciously take.

Paradigms are the pathways we create, models of not only how we act, but how we think, and they are not necessarily bad.  The actual definition for paradigm is, “a model or example”.  In this case the paradigm is an evolved methodology of thinking. We learn that a stovetop can be hot, but that knowledge is not limited to just one stovetop.  The knowledge is generalized and we concurrently know that all stovetops “can” be hot.  The danger in paradigms is when the only thing we consider about stoves is whether they are hot or not.   All the other perspectives of what a stove could be are no longer seen and we develop what is called paradigm blindness.

What is sad and all too often the case; not only do we condemn ourselves to the failures of the past, we can pass on those paradigms to others without even knowing it.

PASS DOWN BEHAVIOR

If being a causality of our own doomed history was not destructive enough, we can, and often do, pass on our attitudes to others.  Whether it be a note in a database from years before, or just an attitude, like ripples on the water that eventually wash up on some distant shore with no recollection of the pebble that caused them, we become epicenter of events that may occur far beyond our station and far into the future

Robert Coeffman, a Harvard PHD specializing in emotional response behavior, tells a story about a test involving monkeys.  It began with several monkeys in a cage.  At one end stood a tree with a piece of fruit at the top.  Eventually when one of the monkeys discovered it and climbed the tree to get it, as soon as he touched it the entire group was sprayed with water, apparently something that monkeys don’t particularly like.

Eventually another monkey would try it and then another with the same result, all of the monkeys were sprayed.  In time the monkeys stopped trying, in fact they would not even go near the tree. 

Then one of the monkeys was removed and a new monkey put in his place, but when he tried to get the fruit the other monkeys would beat him up.  This continued on and one by one the original monkeys were replaced until all of the original monkeys were gone, and though none of the new monkeys had any memory of being sprayed, none would try for the fruit, or even get near the tree.

Now humans, you would think, would be different because of their intellect and their ability to reason, but history has not proven it to be so. 

A good friend of mine who is African American told me of an even more provocative and startling example.  He was in the process of writing a book on his family’s history and in the context of that research became interested in what he called “slave” behavior.  For anyone who is not familiar with  the term “slave” behavior, it is a mindset passed from one African American generation to the next, over hundreds of years.  He was amazed how much certain attitudes of slavery continued to have an affect on people a hundred years later, despite the generations that have come and gone and were not actually the generation where the paradigm began.  In the broader sense, we are all products of our past whether its origin is ours, or someone else’s.

In business the life cycles are much shorter, and as a result the strength of the past is much more visible.   The battle to overcome our past regardless of race or circumstance is a constant battle, and new attitudes can only come about when we learn from the past, but not embrace it so vehemently that it becomes our future.

I try to impress on the people that I teach, regardless of their age or their personal circumstance that what they absorb from those around them, must be taken with a grain of salt.  Learn to see past the artificial boundaries and discover for themselves what is real, what is possible, and then act with abandon on what you know to be true.

   Perfecting the Art

   of "Not Selling"                                        

      Kim Michael Copyright January 2015

     The world is changing and so too, the world of sales.  There was a time when people would answer the phone and get excited about winning something, or of getting something for free.  Not any more.  The constant barrage of sales pitches and the relentless way they are being thrust at us, have changed the way we think.  People now know nothing is for free.  You leave your name and number in a bowl for a drawing and within three days you will have a dozen telemarketers calling you.  You buy something at a store and leave your email address and suddenly your getting twenty emails a day, often from the same company.  All of this has a market changing quality to it that extends into the professional world.

      I am constantly amazed at how many variations there are of methodologies to selling.  My first foray into professional sales was "features and benefits", then it was “relationship" selling, then it was "solution selling” and most recently I saw the idea of “insight” selling—all valuable components of selling, to be sure, but for anyone who thinks any one of these are the "do all” and "be all" to successful sales—they will find out very quickly, the real world does not revolve on methodology.

     The first thing I recommend anyone do when they first join a sales team is remove the word “sales” from their vernacular.  The word pigeonholes others into believing you are the same type of individual who has called them a dozen times at home, or the insurance salesman who won’t leave, or a host of relentless others who won’t take “no" for an answer.  As professionals we live in the backlash of the sins of others, and to overcome it we have to be different.

     My experience has been that the most successful people in sales are the ones who are able to leave the concept of “sales” at the door step.  They make selling a “human” interaction—which it is.  They listen more than they talk.  They ask the kind of questions that open doors rather than break them down.  And they realize that a client’s emotional needs are as important (if not more) as the hard asset needs they are there to address.  And finally they are proactive, leading the process instead of merely reacting to it.

     We don’t have to come armed with a multitude of sales tactics to find a prospect’s needs and close deals.  We don’t have to be better analysts of a prospect’s business than they are, and in most cases we aren’t.  We are only required to be experts in a few areas and what makes us more effective in those areas is that we can be “focused", where our clients are often wearing many different hats at one time.  True, good relationships will lead to bigger and better opportunities—which makes the process of growing a relationship “organically” far more important.

     One of the greatest sales of my life is when I asked my wife to marry me and she said “yes”.  Did I know all the her needs at the time of the close?  I guarantee the answer is no.  Did she know mine? Again... the answer is no.  But that relationship over the years opened new doors for me, new ideas, things I would not have experiences or even thought of, suddenly were on my horizon.  That’s what a good relationship is, that’s what effective partnering is.  What I brought the the table were abilities and perspectives that she did not have and visa versa.

      Today companies come to outsource companies looking for more than just specific solutions to problems.  They may start out there, but beneath those initial needs, they are also looking for good relationships and good partnerships that add to their horizon in a way that each finds value in the other’s involvement, each becoming a good steward of the other's needs, and expanding each other’s horizon.  Those relationships, like marriages don’t end with “yes”- they begin with “yes”.

The Myth of the Cave by Kim Michael

The Myth of the Cave

By Kim Michael

September 1940--four teenagers looking for a lost dog stumble into a cave in the south of France and what they find there will forever change how we look at our own past.  The cave is known as La Grotte de Lascaux and what made the discovery so unusual was that the walls extending the entire length of the massive chamber were covered with more than 600 drawings; extraordinary drawings in both detail and beauty, drawings that would easily compete with those of the most highly skilled artesians of today.  And yet amazingly, the drawings were not only old, even by today’s standards of what we consider old to be, these drawings were “ancient”.  They predated the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Pyramids of Egypt by literally thousands upon thousands of years.  In fact most experts now believe the drawings to be no less than 17,000 years old.  So who made the drawings and why?   

Anthropologists wrestling with this question for the last sixty plus years now believe that the creators of these amazing artworks were actually the early Paleolithic inhabitants of the area, a race of people that before the stone age.  Based on artifacts that were left behind it has even been suggested that the early dwellers may have considered the cave to be a sacred place; perhaps even a “magical” place. 

When I saw the pictures the thought occurred to me, “What would make a cave, or for that matter, a wall of drawings--“magical”?  Art that commemorates historical events is not magical.  If the intention of this art was to memorialize events of a people who had no written language, the cave and its drawings may have had a special significance, but it would not be considered magic. 

Another theory that has been put forth through the years is that when fires were used to light the chamber that the drawings on the walls would appear to move, or more to the point, come alive.  As interesting as the premise sounds, it is hard for me to believe that these accomplished artisans would really have mistaken the shifting light of a fire for anything but what it was.  That coupled with the fact that the drawings were in caves to begin with, meaning many were probably created by firelight would alone suggest to me that their creators probably had more than a passing understanding of flickering light and stationary pictures.    

No, for me to believe these early inhabitants thought something about the cave was magic, something more sophisticated had to be involved.  Then while looking over one of the many pictures depicting a tribal hunt, the light suddenly went on in my brain and in that moment, I saw it…the magic. 

Now, to understand this, you do not need to see the picture I saw, or the cave that it is in for that matter, but you do need to imagine yourself, seventeen thousand years ago, standing in front of the picture and looking at it.  The first thing you would notice is the amazing detail.  You can literally see everything, what the terrain looked like, the warriors crouching at their stations as a stampede of animals rush between them.  And then the kill, every detail frozen in a single moment so deftly displayed that you actually see the actual methodology they used; and then the successful outcome, the animals as they are field-dressed and carried back to the village. 

But where is the magic you may ask?

Consider now, as you stand looking at the drawing, that it is not the day after the great hunt, but the day before!  The great “magic” of the cave, I believe, was the belief that anything drawn on the walls would become “real”.  But the great magic of the cave was also the great myth of the cave; in that the magic was not in the walls, or the paint, or even in the cave itself, but rather, in the hearts and minds of those who had made the drawings.  The magic was the “planning” of the picture, and the more thorough that process became the more likely it would be that the magic would happen.  That same magic exists today though we call it by other names, “business plans” and “goal setting” or mapping out our dreams. 

Until we take an idea to the next stage and remove it from the medium of our mind and give it life by committing it to paper, mapping out the details and making it real, an idea will remain only that, an idea.  But when we take the magic next step, the magic of the cave will begin to happen and "The Myth of the Cave" will cease to be a myth.