Somebody’s Watching You

Edition: May 2010 - Vol 18 Number 05
Article#: 3455
Author: Repertoire

How suppliers can use vendor tracking data constructively

Acute-care reps: Hospitals might not be the only ones tracking your comings and goings in this new information age. Your sales manager might be doing the same thing, employing the same tool that many hospitals use today – reports from vendor credentialing firms.

Call reports won’t be replaced. After all, they give the manager a complete, front-row seat as their reps progress along the selling continuum. But vendor credentialing reports are neat, clean, accessible on demand, and easy to understand. They can give the sales manager the bare facts: Who did the rep visit? When? For how long? For what reason? (The last answer is based on the brief description reps provide the credentialing systems when they check in at hospitals.)

While the advantage would seem to lie with the sales manager, reps stand to benefit as well, according to the vendor credentialing firms. “The suppliers and reps who are out there working hard and hustling – oftentimes that goes unnoticed,” notes John Wills, president, Status Blue, Marietta, Ga. “‘I practically live in that operating room,’” he says, paraphrasing what a sales rep might say about a customer. “‘If they only knew how much time I spent there, they might not be worked up about this 2 percent price increase.’”

It remains to be seen whether reps will buy Wills’ line of thought.

Below the radar … for now

To be sure, vendor credentialing remains primarily a tool for providers to ensure that field reps meet various credentialing criteria, such as vaccinations, background checks, training, insurance, etc. And, at least up to this point, the point person for distributors is the so-called vendor credentialing “administrator” – not the sales manager.

“In a lot of instances, the administrators who manage these efforts tend more often to be from HR or training,” notes Kristine Hayes, director of vendor services, Vendormate, Atlanta, Ga. That’s especially true for large organizations. It’s no surprise, then, that vendor credentialing firms have directed their marketing efforts and service offerings to that clientele.

Vendormate’s “Administrator dashboard,” for example, allows the administrator to quickly see which of the company’s reps have met all their customers’ credentialing requirements, and which have not. Regarding the latter, the dashboard shows the administrator what actions need to be taken to ensure that they fall into compliance with all their customers’ requirements. What’s more, the dashboard includes a “robust directory,” which allows administrators to review each of their customers’ policies, says Hayes. “A lot of administrators are grabbing those policies and sending them to their legal teams for review,” she says. “That’s definitely a section of great interest.”

“Vendors’ first concern is, ‘Are we compliant?’” adds John Harper, Vendormate’s vice president of marketing. “Using this as a sales management or performance management tool is down the list. It’s not necessarily the No. 1 question we’re getting, but one we’re expecting will start coming up.”

VendorTrail

One vendor credentialing firm – Pittsburgh, Pa.-based ProTech Compliance – markets an offering directly to the sales manager. Available on a subscription basis, VendorTrail™ gives sales managers the ability to track and report the whereabouts of their reps, says ProTech COO Greg Jones. With VendorTrail, managers can lay their reps’ trip reports against actual visits. “It increases productivity and allows for the managers and vice presidents to manage the logistics of their territories,” says Jones. Available for about a year and a half, VendorTrail currently has six subscribing companies.

First data, then management

It should probably be no surprise that when data is easily accessible, management activities quickly follow, according to those with whom Repertoire spoke.

“The fact that hospitals are logging vendor visits and badging vendors is nothing new,” says Wills. “But in an electronic format, reporting is much cleaner and easier than when it’s in a three-ring binder. It’s a natural value for the hospital and supplier to use that data in constructive ways.”

For their part, hospitals can review their records to see whether a service tech, for example, has indeed been onsite to provide regular preventive maintenance on a particular piece of equipment, per the contract, says Wills. But in fact, hospitals haven’t expressed a lot of interest in using it in that manner, at least to this point, he adds.

Suppliers, on the other hand, can use sales call data in a number of ways. They can use it not just on a micro scale, that is, to monitor the activities of individual sales reps, but on a macro scale as well, says Wills. For example, a national company whose sales are lagging in a particular geographical area of the country might look at the vendor credentialing reports to “get a sense for the presence of our people in the institutions there,” he says. “They can put it on a trend line and see if maybe there’s a correlation between their presence and the numbers.”

ProTech Compliance offers a module called GiftsTrackers™, which tracks and reports the gifts being exchanged between sales reps and hospital employees or physicians. GiftsTrackers allows the supplier to make sure that the gifts its reps are giving to providers stay within the guidelines established by the company and the provider, explains Jones. On the other side, it helps hospital administrators make sure that their employees or clinicians are obeying the provider’s guidelines.

Caveats

Numbers don’t tell the entire story, of course, adds Wills. For example, they don’t reflect the quality of a sales call, nor can they capture the spirit of the relationship between the rep and the customer. And numbers can cause havoc if they fall into the wrong hands, which is why Status Blue takes precautions to release sales-call data only to those in the company who have been authorized to review it.

But if the appropriate safeguards are in place, reps have nothing to fear from managers having quick and easy access to their daily sales calls, says Wills. “If [a sales rep] is worried, it probably says something about [his or her] overall work ethic.”