Friday afternoon, plan B, C and D

The day

Working reps describe the same shape of day on podcast after podcast. It starts early, around half past five, with email and yesterday's numbers. The first case is around seven. Through the morning the rep is in the operating room, in scrubs, paying attention to the case and not to a phone. Midday is internal meetings, quoting and finance calls. Then, in one rep's words, four to six is cleaning up all the stuff and figuring out the next day.

That last block is the only time the CRM gets, and it is competing with tomorrow. Whatever the software asks for in that window had better take a minute.

The week

I like to plan my days on a Friday afternoon, with the caveat and little star on my paper that this is the plan. There is also plan B, C and D. Everything can shift at all times.

Planning is weekly, not daily, and it is expected to be wrong. A product that assumes a daily planning ritual is fitting a cadence the field does not run. A product that makes a plan expensive to move is fighting the caveat and the little star.

Why paper survives

Notebooks and binders are corroborated by working reps, not only by people selling templates. The phone is physically awkward in the room, and the room is where the things worth writing down happen. So the day's notes live on paper until the admin hour, and some of them never make it further. Any logging that is going to happen at all has to be one line.

The map changes without warning

Territory realignment arrives with no notice. Reps describe discovering it by accident, when they check who owns an account and find it is no longer them. The pay consequences are handled outside any system, with manual grace periods and split commissions. And a value analysis submission that was three months in when the map changed is suddenly nobody's.

What that meant for us

• The dashboard opens on your accounts and what has gone quiet, with "Log something" one line long: which account, who, what happened. Nobody lands on a greeting and nothing beneath it.
• A plan on the calendar is yours alone. Nobody has been asked, nobody is told, and moving it costs nothing. Only a request goes to the hospital.
• The hospital answers while you are in a case. A request survives a four-hour silence, because the person answering it is not you.
• Territory changes are dated and announced. Coverage is a dated fact that ends rather than vanishes, bulk reassignment tells the people affected, and "my accounts" is still what you see first the morning after.
• A new tool gets minutes of patience, not hours. So the first screen has to do the job by itself.