The Medtronic case

Being able to negotiate to increase your leverage within a network.

The Sales NegotiActor^® workshop by VisionMind aims at improving your ability and effectiveness in managing professional relations: managerial, sales and relational.

Sales NegotiActor^® uses the innovative and exclusive Mapp^® methodology and helps people find key objectives in negotiations, overcome obstacles, and get results.

by Roberto Monti, Sales Manager and Partner VisionMind

The interview with Alessandra Sama was published in the December 2019 issue of the quarterly AIDP Direzione del Personale (page 34). The editorial board of DdP has kindly granted reproduction rights.

The article

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We spend most of our time negotiating: with our partners, children, supervisors, colleagues, collaborators. With our clients and suppliers. With a whole lot of people who are part of our many networks.

Every case is different, for sure, as diverse are the goals and the weight of our negotiations.

Nevertheless, if followed, learned, and used, some rules and tools make us better negotiators, and help us make the most out of any situations for ourselves and our counterparts and reach goals that are sometimes unhoped-for, and far beyond our wildest expectations. It’s not just about our behavior and communication skills: it’s also about being able to involve others, run the discourse with authoritativeness and respect, share mutual added-value goals, and reach those goals with satisfaction by all parties.

It’s not easy, and we are definitely not always able to do so.

Is it our fault? Someone else’s? Is it the circumstances’? Or all of the above?

Whatever the circumstance, we can become better and more effective negotiators by investing in ourselves.

Medtronic, a global leader in medical technology with a worldwide turnover of over 30 billion dollars, present in Italy with eight offices and 2,000 employees, believes negotiating abilities is paramount for business development and professional growth of its people and overall effectiveness.

We have talked about this with Alessandra Sama, Head of HR Medtronic in Italy.

What makes Medtronic special? What are the cultural traits that make it an excellent organization internally and market leader worldwide?

Medtronic is a leading company in medical technologies, services, and solutions that improve the lives of millions of people worldwide. Our technologies are a well-established reference for innovation and quality in about 70 therapeutic areas.
We are the only ones on the market to offer such a vast and complete product portfolio that includes integrated paths for the most important chronic diseases, so much that every second, two patients are benefiting from Medtronic technologies.
Medtronic has always been interested in cultural aspects and values; we are still today driven by the Mission that our founder drew up in 1960: "To contribute to human welfare by application of biomedical engineering in the research, design, manufacture, and sale of instruments or appliances that alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life." It is precisely this last part that makes us proud to be part of Medtronic for what we do every day.

Starting from its Mission, Medtronic has elaborated a culture based on Leadership Expectations (SHAPE-ENGAGE-INNOVATE-ACHIEVE) mentioned in any company process. Medtronic Italy has also elaborated something even more specific and consistent with the country strategy within the country. We have drafted the 4 Identity Traits (Being a Community, Being a Captain, Generating System, and Showing Courage), which are pivotal to strategic business goals. We try to communicate and live them daily because we believe them to be a fundamental part of our success.

It's interesting to see how you enact company values by balancing individual and social dimensions cleverly. Relational dynamics are often the byproduct of people's negotiation skills within the organization. How do you feel about the state of affairs, and what are you currently doing as a company to improve it overall?

Assuming that people negotiate since birth, negotiations are an indispensable component of human relations we can't do without, and we continuously need to train and perfect. Internally, this component is fundamental as we work in a matrix-like organization, with multiple stakeholders often located globally, where the decision-making process involves many of them, often with different needs. We have increasingly focused more on helping people develop this skill, and we are currently investing many resources, even financially, on negotiation, influencing, presentation, and public speaking programs, both in Italian and English.

How do the current situation and your organizational structure affect people and their behaviors?

Our context is now more complex than ten years ago. We are present in more than 150 countries with over 90 thousand employees worldwide, and we are continually searching for the right framework to meet the growing needs of patients and customers to be successful on the market.
We continuously look at how we can improve internal processes, be more efficient and effective, and do what we do better. This requires a shift in our mental and behavioral approach from our people who are asked to be open to transformation and evolution, to contribute to it, to engage themselves in constant improvement, to be able to manage an increasingly more ambiguous and uncertain world where we are required to dare more. We are driven in doing so by our Identity Traits. It's not an easy job, but we are doing our best.

Medtronic is present in different markets with cutting-edge products and services. How have your reference points changed over time?

They have changed a lot. In the past, our main reference point was specialty doctors; now, we need to liaise with administration, purchasing, the pharmacy, health care managers who have become key decision-makers, and use different parameters to make decisions. In the current socio-economic context, the sustainability of care is essential, with an aging population and the increasing weight of chronic diseases.
Medtronic is a service and value-added project provider on the market, and it must involve new stakeholders, such as regional governments, public institutions, associations, partners, and corporations that can work with us to provide innovation and sustainability. This requires a paradigm shift, both mental and relational, and the ability to engage across the board.

Considering these changes, how have the negotiation skills of your sales network had to change?

A salesperson has now to establish relationships with these new stakeholders, to be able to "speak their language" and offer different negotiation skills. Their role is evolving a lot: they used to sell the "product," now they need to be able to sell "solutions" and "services" that have become the hallmark of our sales offer. The stakes are higher now, and so are the negotiation skills, which have to span over different fields and levels of relations.

A twofold cultural effort, therefore, that involves sales networks and market logic. How are you fostering these evolutions and meeting these needs? What are the contents and the stakeholders to prioritize?

We are working on different projects with different stakeholders intending to position ourselves as the company that - besides top-tier effective and safe products - contributes to shifting towards value-based healthcare. All the contracts we have signed under the Value-Based Health Care, the new business model we share based on the possibility that a specific therapy might not yield expected results, prove so. Or the contracts that include services and products for Disease State Management, where we are going to map, increase the efficiency and standardize clinical paths. Or the deals we are signing with some large strategic clients where we offer cross-business high-value propositions, services, integrated value-added solutions that might include consulting and digital innovation.
Medtronic intends to position itself on the market as an "innovative" company by offering new business models beyond product logic.

As for internal changes and the ones happening on the markets, and the subsequent needs for people's growth and development, what type of perception and awareness have you found within the organization? And what about outside?

The level of awareness is high at the top of the organization, and we are working on getting the same results throughout the company. This is a huge commitment both in terms of communication and training and development, starting from middle managers and then covering everyone else.

Last year we started a project for those in charge of resources called Medtronic4ME with the exact purpose of redefining managers' profiles in the face of the new internal and external contexts by guiding them through the development of some skills and behaviors which are critical to reaching our business goals.

Another initiative is MAKE (Medtronic Master Advanced Knowledge Experience), a unique training program that aims at developing and training internal talents in leaders of tomorrow, so that they are going to be able to deal with the main changes the Italian Health Care system is going to face and support our Strategic Roadmap. This Master falls under the umbrella of the Medtronic Campus, which is the central hub coordinating all the training and development activities for our personnel to help them grow professionally and contribute to the company's success, consistently with our Mission. There are eight fields of study, from healthcare economy to market access, on how to create value in this context; marketing, to overcome the sales logics and embrace a new strategy based on services; healthcare procurement and how to purchase value; contracts on value, data analytics and its use in the healthcare industry; digital transformation and managing relations with stakeholders; customer-centricity. The faculty includes both internal and external teachers and testimonials, even international. The study path is ten months with in-class training sessions, follow-up studies - even via e-learning platforms, individual study, a study trip abroad, and a final hackathon.
In-class training sessions are held at our headquarters, in the X Value Lab, a space we designed to appeal and foster ideas co-generation that we use for all our training activities, even the ones we deliver to our healthcare stakeholders.

One last question: in your experience, how will negotiation skills have to evolve in the future, and what type of content do you think we will have to focus on in particular?

I believe negotiations are one of the soft skills no artificial intelligence will ever replace in the future. According to the World Business Forum, negotiation and communication are among the ten most strategic competencies for the future. I think this skill will be even more critical to manage increasingly complex, diversified, and sophisticated relational situations
I think that we all should focus on the emotional aspects of negotiations. I genuinely feel that effective negotiation is based on handling the emotional pressure, what is happening, understanding how relational dynamics will evolve, how we come across to others, and how we can act on our behavioral flexibility. This is what we are going to work on in the upcoming future.