Free guide · Sales enablement
Fifty Warm Leads.
If fifty warm leads arrived tomorrow, could your team convert them? If the answer depends on which rep takes the call, you have an Empower problem. The Five Ps, the decision-making web, and the first 90 days of fixing it, in about ten minutes.
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Aim, problem, vision, mission.
Aim
To give you the Empower playbook from It's Not a Sales Problem in working form: what an empowered sales team looks like, how to score your own against it, and the first 90 days of building one.
Problem
Access has collapsed and the leads keep coming back rubbish. Most companies respond by asking reps to work harder, when the spread between their best and worst rep is the real leak, and the conditions for a productive conversation were never created before anyone walked through the door.
Vision
A team where conversion does not depend on which rep takes the call: one playbook, one message, materials that keep selling after the meeting ends, and a proposal that answers every evaluator before they ask.
Mission
Make sure that when demand arrives, your team can convert it.
You do not amplify a bad sales pitch.
Think of your commercial operation as a funnel. Demand generation pours water in at the top. Your sales team converts it out of the bottom. If the funnel leaks, more water does not mean more revenue. It means more leakage. That is why Empower comes first in the 3 Es: before you invest in generating demand, make sure you can convert it.
The test is one question. If fifty warm leads arrived in your inbox tomorrow, prospects who had already heard of you and were interested in learning more, could your team convert them? If the answer depends on which rep takes the call, you have an Empower problem.
Empowering a sales team is not a training programme, not a CRM upgrade, and not a new set of brochures. It is giving your commercial operation the intelligence, the messaging architecture, the tools and the evidence base to compete before anyone enters a room. An empowered team can answer three questions without hesitation: what do we say, what do we leave behind, and what do we do next.
Everything in this guide comes from It's Not a Sales Problem, built on 47 product launches across five continents over twenty years. Chapter 8 is the full treatment; this is the working version.
What changed while nobody was watching.
Four shifts, in order, and each one makes the old model of selling harder. If your enablement approach predates them, it was built for a market that no longer exists.
01
Access collapsed
In 2008, sales representatives had access to around 80% of physicians. By 2021 that had dropped to 44% (ZS Associates, 2008 to 2021). Industry data since puts it at around 24% today. Three in four clinicians are now effectively unreachable by your field team.
02
The single decision-maker went
The clinician who could once say yes alone now sits on a committee with procurement, finance, IT and quality. Win the clinician and you have won one vote on a committee of eight. Congratulations.
03
Information became free
Clinicians no longer need a rep to learn what exists. They research the way everyone else does: online, on their own schedule, long before any meeting. The rep arrives mid-conversation, not at the start of it.
04
Procurement professionalised
In October 2025 the Department of Health and Social Care launched value-based procurement guidelines: cost now accounts for a maximum of 40% of the evaluation score, with 60% assessed across five value domains. If your proposals lead with price, you are preparing for a world that is disappearing.
The arithmetic nobody runs.
Here is what you are working with when you do get through the door. The average clinician has approximately twelve minutes per supplier interaction, and three of these slots per week. That is thirty-six minutes total. Not for you. For everyone. Every company, every product, every representative trying to reach that clinician. The same clinician is using up to fifty medical devices and thirty pharmaceutical products a week, so your innovation is competing for a sliver of attention inside an already saturated working life.
Now the cost side. A fully loaded UK field sales representative costs between £80,000 and £165,000 a year once you include salary, bonus, benefits, car, travel, technology, training and management overhead. Divide by roughly 1,400 planned calls a year and each planned call costs £60 to £120. Adjust for failed attempts, no-shows and non-productive travel time, and the true cost of a meaningful meeting lands between £100 and £300. That is the price of every conversation your enablement decisions are shaping.
The trap is treating this as a field-productivity problem. It is not. When your sales team complains that the leads are rubbish, they are usually right: not because the targeting was wrong, but because the leads were captured from people who did not yet have demand. Demand generation, the layer between awareness and lead generation, is the layer nobody owns. Sending reps to convert interest that does not exist is fishing in an empty pond and blaming the rod.
Score your own team.
Before the frameworks, the uncomfortable questions. Answer honestly; the point is not the score, it is where the noes cluster.
If fifty warm leads arrived in your inbox tomorrow, could your team convert them, regardless of which rep took the call?
Five questions to sit with
- →If your sales team stopped calling for six months, would any clinician seek you out?
- →If a tender was announced tomorrow, would the committee already know your name?
- →Can your reps articulate why your product matters in language a procurement director would understand?
- →If you put your five best salespeople in a room and asked each to explain your value proposition, would you hear one answer or five?
- →When did a clinician last recommend you unprompted?
True or false, per P
Playbook
What our best rep does differently is documented and available to every rep.
Pitch Tools
Our reps walk in with materials built for each audience, not a deck they rebuilt on the train.
Products for Prospects
When a prospect goes quiet, something useful from us keeps the conversation alive.
Proposition for C-Suite
Our clinical champions can answer the finance director on payback, or know exactly what to hand over.
Proposals
We can produce a customer-specific proposal in days, with outcomes first and credentials last.
Mostly true: deepen what you have and go deeper into the challenge you already solve. Mixed: start with the playbook, it unlocks the rest. Mostly false: start at week one of the 90-day plan and resist the urge to skip the foundation.
The Five Ps of sales enablement.
“I call the tools that empower a sales team the Five Ps. Each one solves a specific problem. Together, they create a conversion engine that works consistently, regardless of which rep is in the room.”
01
Playbook
Fixes: The spread between your best and worst rep.
One company had twelve reps selling the same product, with close rates from 12% to 38%. Same training, same territories. Two days documenting the top performer, turned into a playbook: not a script, a reference. Within six months the bottom performers had lifted to 22%, the middle to 28%, and overall conversion was up 40%. Institutional knowledge, captured and transferable. If your best rep left tomorrow, would anyone else know what they know?
02
Pitch Tools
Fixes: The rep rebuilding the deck on the train home.
A shared set of materials that tells different stories to different audiences: the clinical story for the clinician, the operational story for the ward manager, the financial story for the board. Built once, properly, so every conversation starts from the same foundation instead of each rep's private remix.
03
Products for Prospects
Fixes: The surgeon who says "remind me what this was about" two weeks later.
Within forty-eight hours, people forget the majority of what they heard in a meeting: three quarters or more of your carefully crafted pitch, gone (the forgetting curve has been documented since Ebbinghaus). Materials that keep selling after the conversation ends, mapped to the customer journey. One client was losing to a competitor who was simply present throughout the decision process; a library of prospect materials swung win rates back within eighteen months.
04
Proposition for C-Suite
Fixes: The clinical champion who cannot answer the CFO.
A device company had surgeons who loved them and a win rate below 20% on deals over £100,000, because every deal died at the C-suite. The fix: ROI calculators, total cost of ownership comparisons, implementation risk assessments, and champions trained to know which document to hand over when the finance director asks about payback. Win rate on large deals doubled within a year.
05
Proposals
Fixes: The two-week turnaround that loses to a competitor who took three days.
Of twenty lost deals analysed for one client, eighteen went to a competitor with a more professional, more customer-focused proposal. The client's proposals were not bad, they were generic. A proposal framework, research checklists, outcomes first and credentials last, with proof points ready to insert, took turnaround from two weeks to two days and lifted competitive win rates by 35%.
The playbook tells your team what to say to each stakeholder. The pitch tools show different stories to different audiences. The products for prospects keep every stakeholder engaged between meetings. The C-suite proposition speaks the language of the boardroom. The proposal addresses every question every evaluator will ask. Five tools, one conversion engine.
The decision-making web.
I learned this one the expensive way. An aesthetics capital deal: clinical team sold, budget approved, everything agreed. Then an IT manager I had never met said "You have forgotten about me", wanted to talk interoperability, and pulled the whole deal down. One influential objector is all it takes.
Every healthcare sale runs through a web of stakeholders, each with different priorities, concerns and criteria for saying yes. Mapping it means naming, for any target account, the lead clinician, the ward manager, the procurement manager, the finance director, and potentially IT, infection control and quality assurance, and knowing what each of them cares about before the process starts. The Five Ps only work when they are aimed at the web, not at the clinician alone.
Issues versus problems.
“When you fix an issue, people thank you. When you fix a problem, people pay you.”
A surgical tray that wastes five minutes of theatre time is an issue: an inconvenience people live with and complain about. The same tray across 2,000 procedures a year, costing £150,000 in lost productivity, is a problem: significant enough to demand action. Same situation, different framing, completely different response from the buyer.
The discipline behind this is CIPSS: Challenge, Issues, Problems, Symptoms, Solution. Work from the customer's broadest challenge down through the issues and problems to the symptoms they can see, and only then present the solution. The sequencing is the point; reps who jump to the solution are describing a product, reps who work the sequence are diagnosing a situation. If too many of your customers are stuck at the same stage in your pipeline, ask yourself: are we talking about issues or problems?
One warning from chapter 9 that protects this whole guide: the full messaging house is a marketing tool, and handing it to a sales team is how it gets ignored. What your reps need is simpler, the top three to five messages for each persona they speak to. And keep the claims inside what you can evidence: a message stretched past what you can credibly support snaps, and it takes your advocates' trust with it.
The channel that listens.
The most underused part of a sales channel is not its ability to deliver messages. It is its ability to collect them. Reps are astute communicators, and clinicians open up to them in ways they never would in a focus group. That intelligence flows two ways: deeper, into solving the problem you already solve better than anyone, and wider, into adjacent problems in the same clinical workflow.
The sharpest version is negative feedback on the proposition rather than the product. When you lose, was the business case strong enough? Did the proposal address the full decision-making web? Was the implementation plan credible? The distinction changes everything about what you fix.
The first 90 days.
The build sequence, from chapter 18 of the book, filtered to the Empower work. Scale it to your reality: a founder-led startup and a thirty-person sales team cannot run the same plan, and at startup stage Empower means getting the founder's pitch right before it means anything else.
Week 1: assessment
Audit the current state. Gather the data you already have. Interview the sales team on what they actually use versus what they wish they had. Talk to recent customers, and to recently lost prospects.
Days 8 to 30: foundation
Define the ideal customer profile. Map the decision-making web for your typical sale. Work CIPSS for each key stakeholder. Build the claims matrix so marketing, regulatory and sales agree on what can and cannot be said.
Days 31 to 60: quick wins
Align with sales as partners, not recipients. Produce one piece of genuinely useful content, your first Product for Prospects. Put basic measurement in place.
Days 61 to 90: system building
Build the playbook. Establish review rhythms: weekly leading indicators, monthly pipeline, quarterly outcomes.
The common ways this fails: trying to do everything at once, skipping the foundation, waiting for perfection, going it alone, and measuring too much too soon. The playbook you delay until next quarter is the one that quietly costs you the next five years.
Take it with you
The PDF, for your sales meeting.
Everything on this page, designed for print. Built to put in front of your commercial team at the next sales meeting, self-assessment included.
Where to take this
Three ways forward, in ascending order of commitment.
Read the full treatment
Chapter 8 of It's Not a Sales Problem is the complete version of everything here, with chapters 5, 9 and 18 carrying the diagnosis, the messaging architecture and the implementation plan around it.
Train the team on it
The Stakeholder Mapping workshop teaches the decision-making web in a half or full day, and the full day applies it to three to five of your own target accounts, leaving you with the mapping framework, a procurement process map and tailored proposal templates.
Talk it through
A free hour with Michael against your own pipeline. No pitch: if we can help, we will say how, and if we cannot, we will say so.
Healthcare innovations deserve recognition. We help them get it.