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One of your products brings in more than $3 billion per year and it has been determined that your moment of peak performance has occurred and passed. This means the forecast shows that you should experience a decline in growth for the coming year. In fact, the forecast shows you should be flat and just maintain revenue performance compared with last year. Here's the problem... your parent company is having a tough year and they need to squeeze everything they can out of the top performing brands within the company. You've been asked to do everything you can to turn the trend around and create growth in a declining brand! Does this sound familiar to you?
This was exactly the situation within of one of the top 5 pharmaceutical companies in the world just over a year ago. They engaged Partners In Leadership to create greater levels of accountability to facilitate growth in a declining brand.
There are two key groups involved in accomplishing this growth target, the Managed Markets Group and Marketing. Anyone involved in the pharmaceutical industry over the last 5 years, has heard the complaint about managed care. Put simply, if the insurers won't cover your product, how can you get doctors to prescribe and pharmacies to fill prescriptions for your product? We began with the Managed Markets Group and focused on the Self TrackTM Training. This track provides models and tools that create greater individual and personal accountability for the team's desired results. The focus was to enable this team to push through obstacles and open up more managed care access for the sales and marketing teams. Next, we engaged the Marketing team utilizing the same focus, models, and tools. With the Managed Markets team driving access, the Marketing team needed to drive demand. The challenge: The Marketing team had been dramatically reduced in size and budget over the last 2 years. So the longstanding direction was given once again: "Do more with less!"
"We need every marketer to take accountability for overcoming obstacles and driving market share in any way we can." The Steps To Accountability® proved to be a key tool to their success, bringing awareness when they slipped into the blame game versus driving the needed results. Remember, this product was expected to decline. In fact, the adjusted goal for this year was to grow by 0.08%. This was an attempt to show some positive movement and reverse the trend.
In the next 8 months the Managed Markets Group opened up unprecedented access to several national carriers who previously were planning to recommend alternate, newer solutions for their members. To date, the Managed Markets Group has solidified access for 94% of all covered lives across the country! The Marketing team went to work directly engaging the sales team face to face. They couldn't spend more money on ads or other traditional marketing approaches, so they took accountability for what they could do; engage the sales team more often and more effectively. With all kinds of pressure working against this product, the team was able to grow revenue by $168 million or 5.8%! The team truly embraced See It, Own It, Solve It, Do It® to achieve success!
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Facilitators often ask what activities can occur after the one day workshop to keep these great tools and concepts alive. The key is integrating them into the normal routine of running the business. One simple idea is to apply the LIFT Accountability Coaching Model™ to team meetings. The LIFT Model is an acronym that stands for:
Listen for obstacles (See It®)
Identify what you can influence (Own It®)
Facilitate the question "What Else Can I Do?" (Solve It®)
Test for movement (Do It®)
Have you ever been in a team meeting that was stuck Below the Line?® Applying this model to meetings provides a framework which avoids that trap and ensures the outcome of the meeting is Above the Line.® Think of a leader you are working with and coach them to look at current challenges facing the organization. Have them design a team meeting agenda around the questions identified in the LIFT Accountability Coaching Model.
Let's say you're a manufacturing team needing to reduce cost by 15%. The agenda would follow the structure shown below.
Listen: We have reduced costs by 5% but still have a long way to go to achieve 15%, why aren't we making the progress we need to make? (The leader will facilitate dialogue around the room as to why we are struggling with this result. This may start to sound Below the Line® but that's alright, you're going to move them up very shortly.)
Identify: So which of these obstacles do we most need to overcome if we're going to achieve 15% reduction of costs? Convince me that yours is the one that is the most important? (The leader will then take comments from the group and make a decision as to which obstacle the team should focus on first.)
Facilitate: What else can we do to overcome that obstacle? All the reasons why we can't do it are not helping us; we need to find a way. Who has some ideas? (If the group is stuck on everything they can't control, ask them "What's within our control here? Can we agree to focus on what we can control vs. what we can't?")
Test: What actions are we going to take? Who is the right person to take the following assignments from this meeting? How will we inspect to ensure we are making progress?
This example drives integration of the tools and content while ensuring we are taking the steps to See It,® Own It,® Solve It,® and Do It® toward achieving our desired results.
