Count the gearboxes.

Somewhere on an American highway, an operating theatre rolls along.

One of the biggest names in medical devices built it. The mobile lab tours the country with integrated stations so surgeons and theatre staff can get their hands on the kit without leaving town. When that isn't enough, there are cadaver courses: one-day labs, two-day programmes, surgeon faculty, the lot. This company educates its customers more thoroughly than most companies educate their own staff.

Its own staff do rather well too. The sales job adverts promise extensive product training, an in-house product programme and field sales training, and ask reps to know competitors' kit as well as their own. It employs a curriculum team whose own job advert calls the sales force the company's most critical asset.

The money follows the belief. Last year its selling, general and administrative line came to more than five times what it spent on research and development. Not all of that is training, obviously. But it tells you where the company thinks growth lives: in front of the customer.

So far, so admirable. Here's the odd bit.

What the curriculum covers

Across the industry, enablement teaches four things well: the product, the pitch, the process and the other company's product. Then it stops.

It also thins out as you climb. A 2016 CSO Insights study found enablement programmes targeted salespeople in 94% of organisations, frontline sales managers in 63%, and higher-level sales leaders in just 50%. The more of the market you answer for, the less help you get reading it.

Meanwhile, the customer has moved. Gartner found B2B buyers spend 17% of their buying time with suppliers, and when they're comparing several, any one rep gets perhaps 5 or 6% of it. In hospitals, the verdict increasingly sits with value analysis teams: a Premier survey of its member hospitals found more than 90% had at least one guiding product decisions. The decision gets made in meetings your rep will never attend, by people weighing budgets, tenders and every other supplier's promises.

What market view reps do get usually arrives once a year, as a launch deck at sales kick-off, written by the people who built the product. It isn't wrong. It just isn't neutral.

Which brings me, as these things do, to 1942.

The gearbox counters

In August 1942, British and American intelligence estimated Germany was building 1,550 tanks a month. They had espionage and the full apparatus of conventional intelligence behind that number.

A small group of Allied economists had something duller. Serial numbers. German factories stamped sequential numbers on chassis, engines, gearboxes and road wheels, so the economists copied them off every captured and wrecked tank they could reach, and did the sums.

Their estimate for August 1942: 327 a month.

After the war, the German production records gave the real figure. 342. The spies were out by a factor of four and a half. The people with notebooks were out by fifteen tanks.

Richard Ruggles and Henry Brodie, who documented the method in 1947, explained the gap: conventional intelligence had absorbed the myth of German invincibility that the propagandists built after Poland and France. It had taken the other side's own story at face value.

No single serial number told anyone anything. A gearbox with a number on it is trivia, but a few hundred of them, read together, is a production line. Germany published its tank output on every tank it built. It just never meant to.

Your market does exactly the same. A tender notice. A job advert for a market access director in a city where your competitor has no office. An FDA clearance. An earnings footnote. The faculty list for next spring's congress. Each one is a serial number: stamped, public and dull on its own. Read together, they tell you what your competitors are building, and roughly how many a month.

A confession

Go back to the top of this piece.

Everything I told you about that company's enablement engine came from the company itself. A curriculum job advert. A few sales job adverts. A handful of surgeon education pages. One earnings release. Nobody inside said a word to me, and nothing there is anything they didn't choose to publish. I picked them because they do this better than almost anyone. You may already have guessed who they are. That rather proves the point.

Four kinds of serial number. One read.

We call that convergence intelligence: roughly a hundred public signals per market, each one boring by itself, read together until they point somewhere. None of it is secret. That's the point. You can check every line, which is why it survives a board meeting.

If you run enablement, here's the takeaway. Before your next new rep meets their first account, hand them that account's serial numbers: what it tendered, whom it hired, what its committee approved, what it said in public this year. Then ask one question on day one: "What's this account building, and how many a month?"

You have spent a fortune teaching them the tank.

Teach them to count.