The Course of Life - Part II
Alpha Between the Ears
I do mean this.
What follows is the Harvard education of sales. Because that is what was given to me - by a man named Ivan.
Timeshare sales training for me lasted three weeks. What I took from those three weeks is what would become my dissertation.
The system of sales.
The calculus of persuasion.
The keys to the kingdom.
Call it whatever you want to call it. You take what I write next and you apply it in your life - there is nothing stopping you from achieving whatever you want in your laps around the sun.
Some context before diving in.
In Part One I talked about the test scores. Reading, writing, and mathematics. I comprehend material well, I apply it logically, and the output is high quality.
To produce a paper, you have time to think. Solving a problem may or may not require urgency. Reading requires the passage of time.
Communication is an entirely different animal.
The art of effective communication, for me, has always been about the latency on the API calls.
Low confidence = high latency. High confidence = low latency.
Low latency on the right calls equals conversion.
Growing up, I did have a charm about me. But I was incredibly shy. I got nervous having to pick up the phone to order pizza back then.
I had the Ritz-Carlton that refined the vernacular. I had the intoxicating experience of literally intoxicating people as a sommelier.
Now I needed to figure out how in the hell I was going to get through a 90-minute presentation, for a product I knew nothing about, in a cutthroat industry that is all about the numbers.
You produce or you find the exit.
Ivan
Ivan was my trainer.
I have had plenty of people tell me that I am the most naturally talented salesperson they have ever known. Ivan is the reason for that.
Ivan could light up the room. He did. Every single day. It was part of his job to take people from all walks of life and turn them into producers. A sale itself. He was articulate, charismatic, and credible.
Before entering the industry, he had run an auto-detailing company. The topic he was training on was tonality. He went into a ten-minute pitch on everything he did to detail a car. It was vivid. It was a story. It was told with conviction and enthusiasm.
His point was simple.
There is a vast difference between someone saying, “I will detail your car,” and what Ivan had just described.
When your livelihood depends on the response your words receive from people who are making a decision - how you say it is just as important as what you say.
Ivan gave me confidence. He gave me the system.
The system
Credibility. Commonality. Problem. Solution.
In that order. Every time. For all things.
These concepts are not a script. They must be followed in order. Any deviation reduces both the potential and the durability of the outcome.
I was trained on them for use on the sales floor. But over the course of life - the curriculum - I have come to understand them as the fundamental ingredients of any transaction taking place anywhere.
So first, a brief description of each concept and how it applies to persuasion and to business generally. Then I am going to show you exactly how I applied each one, using the case that proves it best.
The C²PS Framework
Credibility - Know your product. Know your competitors. Know the market. Dress the part. Use your full name. Firm handshakes. Speak clearly.
Commonality - Build rapport. Find common ground. Discovery. Open-ended questions. Relationships require listening. Trust is not trivial.
Problem - Identify the problem. Consider life impact. Decisions are driven most often by two emotions: hope and fear. Both are emotional reactions to problems. If describing the problem does not draw emotion, either a problem does not exist or you have not described it well enough.
Solution - Nobody cares to know about your solution unless they believe you are credible, they trust you, and they have a problem. If you have not checked those boxes, there is no reason to present a solution. If you have checked those boxes, presenting the solution and closing the sale is the easy part.
Now for the fun part - the Sprezzatura. The Alpha Between the Ears.
Credibility
This is the hard part. This is the part that nobody sees.
My career after leaving the timeshare industry spanned multiple domains of healthcare. High achieving in all of them.
How? I study.
If you want to compete, you had better understand the rules of the game.
I spent six years at the top of enterprise production for one of the largest and highest-volume private ambulatory spine surgery practices in the country.
Before arriving in that room, I had absolutely no understanding of spine surgery or anything remotely close to it.
Then again, I wasn’t a sommelier before I was a sommelier either. I didn’t know how to sell timeshare either. Until I did.
If you want to compete, you study. Plain and simple. This is not a secret.
I asked a truly annoying number of questions of the physicians. I subscribed to Becker’s so I could stay current on market trends. I knew competitor offerings. I knew our offerings. I studied the ins and outs of commercial and government health insurance.
I also knew that people who had good insurance had jobs. Which means they do not have time during the day to talk about their pain. So I came into the office earlier and I left later.
I wasn’t doing it to cheat. I was doing it to win.
Others had the same opportunity. They either didn’t see it or chose not to take it.
Every interaction became training data, and ultimately became how I optimized the latency for conversion. I had a great many interactions with human beings living with chronic pain, from every walk of life.
Consider that on average I was talking to about twenty patients a day, for six years straight, and often on weekends because I loved it. That is more than thirty thousand patients.
Training data.
Critical in sales performance is sales attribution. What did you do, or not do, that led to the outcome? If you do not understand how it happened, you will not understand how to do it again.
“Calls are recorded for quality and training purposes.”
On the phone I had to say that as a compliance disclosure. Florida requires two-party consent.
I have been training for the quality my entire life. It is the reason that, even at the volume I was producing, I never had a single compliance issue the entire time I was there. Not one regulatory complaint. Not one.
I did get written up once, though. Not for compliance. For policy. There is a difference and it matters.
Here is what happened.
There was a patient I met with in consultation who begged me to give her a date on the surgical schedule before she was medically cleared. I still remember the conversation. She told me, specifically: “I just need a date so that I have hope to look forward to.”
So I did.
Earlier I wrote about hope and fear as the drivers of decision-making. This is where metacognition and abstract reasoning come in handy.
She was one hundred percent correct. Having a date on the schedule gives a person something to look forward to. It gives them hope.
Living with chronic pain is often living a life in the absence of hope.
I have known that feeling myself.
So I made the decision that I was going to give everyone hope, and give them dates for surgery pending medical clearance. Abstract reasoning in action.
I did not do it haphazardly. I pulled the data from our screening questionnaire and analyzed it to understand, based on indicated comorbidities, how long clearance took on average.
I ran it for a while, and I can tell you definitively that it was very effective.
Managing it was complex. I did not discuss it openly at the time, because it was against company policy. When it was found out, it led to the first and only write-up I ever received there.
I was upset that my clean record now had a blemish on it. Of course I was.
But I was also pretty vindicated by the fact that the people delivering the write-up were obligated to tell me that, despite writing me up for it, they were making what I had been doing the new company policy going forward.
Given my justification for optimizing the role that way, I will take it. It was a win.
Every patient was now going to be given the hope of a date, pending medical clearance.
That is credibility.
Thirty thousand conversations, a newsletter subscription, an annoying number of questions, and a willingness to be in the building when the people who most deserved my attention were actually free.
Nobody watching me work saw any of that. They saw a guy who was good at it.
That is what the Italian at Positano’s was looking at when I was twenty and had no idea what he meant. Sprezzatura is not an absence of effort. It is the concealment of it. The work is real. It just gets done before anybody arrives.
Credibility - Know your product. Know your competitors. Know the market. Dress the part. Use your full name. Firm handshakes. Speak clearly.
Every line of it is work you do before anyone sees you. That is the entire point.
And your credibility is what reduces latency for the next part of the framework.
The API routing.
Commonality
I am going to jump to device distribution to talk about commonality.
Trust and rapport came naturally to me working with chronic pain patients. I know pain myself. That is the entire idea behind commonality.
Not “How’s the weather in your parts?”
Not “I’ve heard it’s beautiful out there.”
Genuine connection.
Working with chronic pain patients, I had an advantage: my lived experience was not far from that of many people I was talking to every day.
Device distribution is an entirely different landscape, which makes it the more useful example - building commonality in an industry I had almost no exposure to.
To start, the same rules always apply. Credibility comes first.
So I studied. Same as I always do. Within the first week in the industry I had built myself a dashboard in Salesforce. Important to remember: I think in systems of sales. Not just sales.
The key to commonality is observation, and your ability to reason on the input.
Think back to Part One, and George asking me for a Harvey Wallbanger. I didn’t have the answer. But George and I were both professionals in the service industry, where having a response is a requirement. I gave the response, and then I went and got the answer. No hesitation. Minimal latency.
Vodka. Galliano. Orange juice.
I’ll never forget it now.
Meta commonality life hack: don’t just observe. Be curious. Stay curious. Forever.
Finding commonality is about discovery. Same as in legal proceedings. Finding the evidence. Asking the questions.
The common theme I heard from everyone working in the supply chain was this:
“I cannot buy from you because my GPO says I can’t.”
That did not compute for me. Hospital closures were happening left and right. Physicians were short on the materials they needed to deliver care. I had genuine products that were cheaper, in quantities that could make a real impact on a budget.
Hell or high water, I was going to find a way to distribute it.
Commonality is a requirement in the framework no matter the product or the service. And in healthcare, if you want to fast-track your way to it - build a patient-first brand. Then live it.
I don’t have to develop that brand, because I am the same as everyone else. Another human being trying to get by inside a system whose incentives were never optimized for people like me.
Most people working in frontline care delivery are well intended. It is the parameters of the system they operate inside that make the actual delivery so difficult.
That is a common thread that everybody working in the thing feels.
In supply chain, I figured that if I expanded access to products and helped contain costs, that would translate into better delivery of care, and therefore better patient outcomes.
So that is what I calibrated toward.
I have preached this to every sales representative I have ever trained. Your job is to move the needle.
Sales as a system. I had a blocker.
Everyone said they couldn’t buy from me because of their GPO contracts. So I went and found someone who would teach me how those contracts actually worked. Spend commitments. Benchmarks. Admin fees. The works.
Once the blocker was gone, so was the objection.
And that is when the purchase orders started to grow.
Most people who know me assume that part of the journey was the success.
It wasn’t. Not for me.
There are layers to this thing. I didn’t want the POs to grow for the sake of my own commission. I was in an entirely different headspace about it.
I took that job because I was at my wits’ end with the burden of arrhythmia in my life. I was tired of being isolated, trying to work remotely. I needed something close to home that wasn’t going to cost me a lot of stress.
When I got to that team, it was young professionals on the come up. A lot of hungry dogs. My kind of people.
And when I started to see the problems we could solve if we just dug a little deeper, I knew I was going to have to run just as fast as they were.
Almost forty, with a battery in my chest, an oh-my BMI, popping beta blockers like it was no big deal - and I did end up teaching that team a thing or two.
Commonality is critical in leadership. If you want to lead, you ask nothing of your team that you would not do yourself.
The script was flat when I arrived on that floor. The objections were blockers that had barely been addressed. It was telesales, and that was about it.
By the time I left, the entire culture on the floor had changed. I watched people who had previously felt limited in their capability start to feel a different energy. I preached that although the bosses on paper are in this building, the people we really work for are the patients - and for us, that means the people who support them.
I want to keep driving this home. Hope and fear influence decision-making. If your team doesn’t see the hope, or sees that you don’t have it, you have missed the mark on credibility.
I wasn’t rolling up my sleeves for the thrill of it. There was a lot of genuine talent in that building. I wanted them to thrive, and the best way to make that happen was to teach them how to fish.
For a while afterward, I would see photos posted on social media of a lot of them traveling to different conferences. Making relationships.
Forget the purchase orders.
Those photos were the win.
That is commonality.
What comes next
Credibility and Commonality have something in common that took me years to see.
Neither one is about you.
Credibility is the work you do before you arrive, so that the person in front of you is not wasting their time. Commonality is the work you do in the room, so that they are not talking to a stranger. Both of them cost you. Neither of them costs the other person anything.
That changes at the next step.
Problem is where the framework stops being preparation and becomes an act. You are going to locate the thing that hurts in the life of the person across from you, and you are going to help them feel it clearly enough to move.
Done right, it is close to the most useful thing one human being can do for another.
Done wrong, it is the most efficient method ever devised for taking something from someone who is already suffering.
I have done both.
I was good at both.
Part Three is the problem.
You are reading that correct.
- Matthew J. Adams
ad astra per aspera