Context Matters

Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy. — Isaac Newton

There are a hundred faces in the audience, spread throughout the conference hall, milling around, and making small talk. I am standing in the back of the room, uncomfortable in my favorite gray sweater, dark slacks, and heels. I’m sweating already and cursing the decision to wear my hair down. I’m overheated despite the frosty, stale recycled air circulating around the room.  In my hands, I crumple sheets of paper with my slanted handwritten notes squeezed tightly into the margins. I’ve written the entire presentation, word for word ten times.  The slides will project behind me, each displaying words or images selected to reiterate the main points, serving as prompts to if I lose my way.

I don’t feel ready, or qualified, but here I am regardless, about to train this room full of sales professionals on the key differentiators of our products. The lights dim a bit to indicate that the program is about to begin. My name is announced, my bio read, and after only a slight hesitation I walk down the center aisle and up onto the platform. I’m too short to stand behind the podium, so I position myself slightly off center and launch into the material.  

The content of that talk was largely marketing, but in the world of pharmaceuticals marketing has a highly rigorous and scientific tone. We aren’t allowed to make bold efficacy and safety claims without mountains of supporting data. Clinical trials generate enormous data sets and comparison studies, review papers, and editorials. Each argues for or against a particular treatment as better or worse than the current standard of care of alternatives. There are funding concerns, potential for conflict of interests, or the perception of biased scientific interpretations that must be considered and addressed. Pharmaceutical marketing materials are highly scrutinized and regulated. Every piece of print material can and will be used against you in a court of law if the messaging is in any way false, misleading, or inadequately supported by evidence. This regulation is vital to patient safety. It is also a different universe from my time designing newspaper print ads for local coffee shops. 

Months of preparation have led up to this training session. We’ve recently relaunched today’s focus molecule in the US and the company is taking the occasion to reinvigorate efforts in other markets outside of North America. As one of the original molecules in its class, our product has decades of studies and data on its use across patient populations, a positive. It also carries a reputation as old and outdated, a definite negative in an innovation rich industry. I’ve been asked to consolidate all of this history into simple, relevant, modern, selling points that will resonate with our target physician audience. Today, in this presentation, I will train a hundred colleagues how to successfully, and compliantly, sell this product.

Where to begin? How am I, someone who hasn’t taken a chemistry class since high school, supposed to read and understand complex biological mechanisms our product produces in the body.  I can barely pronounce half of the molecular systems in play. Furthermore, I am easily the youngest individual in the room, the least experienced, with no PhD behind my name and a woman at that. I see the pockets of skeptical faces staring back at me, their expectation of my inadequacy as bright as the projector lights in my eyes. Already they are checking their watches, anxious for me to complete the training so they can move onto the more important agenda topics. No matter, I am undeterred, confident in my preparation and the process which has carried me to this podium.

The first step was to engage with the experts. There were individuals within the company who also had decades of experience with this molecule. I sought them out, requested their time and assistance, asked them to point me toward relevant source data and past marketing/branding campaigns for reference. This was helpful and eye-opening, as every one of these individuals turned out to be exceedingly kind and surprisingly normal human beings. To the letter they were generous with their time, encouraging of my efforts and patient with my litany of questions.

Next, I set about gathering perspectives from other sources that might not be so favorable to our desired position. It became my mission to read every piece of contrary published data ever written about our product. No matter the journal, no matter the date, I would read the study or articles firsthand, making notes of themes and patterns established over the years. I paid fees to access obscure papers, began to recognize common authors, made note of study design flaws and data inconsistencies. I studied diagrams, charts, and footnotes. There is little humor in scientific writing, it’s dense and repetitive, long paragraphs in small font.  In time, I would learn to read abstracts and then scan for key conclusions, a checklist of sorts forming in my brain for homing in on the main points.

What I couldn’t learn from the experts, or from the scientific literature, I tackled in a less conventional approach: Wikipedia and Google.  If I didn’t recognize a word or a process or concept, I looked it up.  I found diagrams and watched You-tube videos. This is how I learned about coagulation, antagonists, inhibitors, and catalysts. My vocabulary expanded to include biology terms, chemical reaction equations and the five stages of kidney disease. I amassed knowledge, eventually building a giant reference binder to hold the reems of printouts, each highlighted and cross referenced against multiple sources.

But then it struck me, this is great for a dissertation or an in-depth formal review, but how do you consolidate all of this down into a compelling two-minute elevator pitch, or a brochure slogan? I can’t print a novella on the subject for the Sales Team to distribute throughout the field; all of this complex jargon must be simplified into a digestible form that doesn’t lose its essential meaning.         

I started by writing long-hand full sentences summarizing key themes. I drew process flows of supporting evidence. If this, and this and this, then follows the requisite, inarguable and logical conclusion. Once refined, I took my drafts home, reading them to my husband and my Mom, editing and refining them over and over until I knew the studies, the arguments, the rebuttals by heart. Then I challenged myself to say the same thing, with half of the words. By repeating this process several times over, I whittled away at the complex jargon, revealing the core message within. 

Before long, I could explain to my friends, or anyone who cared to ask, how exactly our product would be expected to behave in a body when injected. Most importantly, I could do this in plain language as if we were chatting about the weather. This summary, these prompts, are what went into the brochures, onto the website and made up the training program I was delivering that day to a room full of impatient sales professionals. This army of reps would then spread out into the world, using my words as their key talking points and differentiators.

I learned here the magnificent power of simplification. Breaking large complex concepts down into the basic components makes them digestible, attainable, and accessible. Breaking large, complicated projects down into daily tasks renders them achievable. If you write a page a day, you have a 365-page book in a year. 

Creating a marketing brochure is simply learning the material piece by piece and then refining that knowledge into a series of three to five sentences on a page. Project Management is the same; understand the goal, outline the steps to get there, the resources required, do each step in sequence until the project is finished. Manufacturing pharmaceuticals is mixing the raw ingredients, filtering the solution, filling the material into a vessel and sealing it closed. Complex processes, distilled to their core elements become simple. 

I was very nervous that day on stage. What if a question was asked that I could not answer? What if I tripped on the stairs? Funny enough, both things did happen, and do you know what? I was fine. My preparation carried me through. I was able to laugh at my clumsiness, carry-on with the message and respond thoughtfully to the audience’s feedback. They asked great questions, and when I didn’t know the answer at the moment, I committed myself to researching their point and following-up.    

From that day forward, I came to believe that I can learn anything. Anyone can learn anything. I’m not a passive receiver of information, I am empowered.  A classroom isn’t required, I can be my own teacher. There is no longer a need for someone to tell me what to do. Going forward, if ever I’m unsure, I now know how to get started. 

I couldn’t have articulated this feeling at the moment, but the pattern repeated again and again as I took on increasingly new and more challenging projects.  Each new experience pushed me to the limits of my knowledge and comfort zone, and then I developed the ability to take one more step. I confidently raised my hand to go first into new situations, trusting myself to figure it out and pave the way for others to follow. Again and again, others would ask me, “How did you know to do that?” My answer is always, “I didn’t, but I investigated and learned.  Based on this, the next step made sense, so I tried.” 

#Simplicity