How They Got Good So Fast

Who here practices their lines of engagement at least 100 times just BEFORE they start talking to people?

In every discipline (except NM) they require massive amounts of practice by those learning it, BEFORE they’re allowed to interact with a real client.

In some fields, even the pedigreed experts with 10 years of advanced education are called practitioners – e.g. a lawyer has a law practice; an MD has a medical practice. Nobody’s ever finished getting better. That’s the message.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we had such a philosophy in the NM industry? You know, learn the words to use to talk to people? And some practice sessions to go with? That’s what networkers are supposed to do, right? Talk to people to sell their product and business? Only no one teaches them how. Weird.

Anyway, for those who believe in practice like I do, here’s a trick some Harvard researchers discovered in the surgery field. The one medical team that used it was 7 times faster than the 17 other surgical teams at other hospitals.

Harvard Business School researchers followed eighteen cardiac surgeons and their teams as they took on a new technique in cardiac surgery…

“The new heart operation – involving a small incision between ribs instead of a chest split open down the middle – proved substantially more difficult than the conventional one…Everyone had new tasks, new instruments, new says that things could go wrong, and new ways to fix them…

“Researchers found striking disparities in the speed with which (the 18) different teams learned.

“All teams received the same three-day training session and came from highly respected institutions with experience in adopting innovations. Yet, in the course of fifty cases, some teams managed to halve their operating time while others failed to improve at all.

“A physician on the Harvard research team made several visits to observe the quickest-learning teams and the slowest, and he was startled by the contrast.

“The surgeon on the fast learning team was actually quite inexperienced compared with the one on the slaw-learning team – he was only a couple of years out of training. But he made sure to:

1) pick team members with whom he had worked well before and

2) keep them together through the first fifteen cases before allowing any mew members.

3) He had the team go through a dry run before the first case, then

4) deliberately scheduled six operations in the first week, so little would be forgotten in between.

5) He convened the team before each case to discuss it in detail and afterward to debrief.

6) He made sure the results were tracked carefully. …

“At the slowest place, the surgeon chose his operating team almost randomly, and did not keep it together. In his first seven cases, the team had different members every time, which is to say that is was no team at all. Nor did they schedule the operations six in a week. And he had no pre-briefings, no debriefings, no tracking of ongoing results. From Complications, A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science

Bottom line: If you have trouble talking to people, if you find you really don’t want to follow up, chances are you just don’t know the words to use that will engage the other person. You can learn them though. And then, have fun with practice.

Who here has done Cadaver calling, 100 calls in one week, in pairs, as laid out in the If My Product’s So Great How Come I Can’t Sell It book?

I have some folks doing that right now, who’ve never done it before, and already teams are reporting back…they’re scoring referrals and they’re only supposed to be practicing on cadavers (!)

P.S. We just did a totally fun class on creating and practicing One Liners. I hope to have it available for an MP3 soon. Email me here if you want to be notified when it’s available. Put One Liner in the subject. It’ll be US $19 for two 45-minute MP3s. CDs $25 (avail Jan.)