Abstract

 “I’ve been working this job for 3 years now, I know how to sell! I don’t need all this!” Chaz thought to himself as he was preparing for a field visit with his manager. Tony, his manager, requested that he book meetings with a director’s level or above for a business review. Historically, Chaz only met with manager levels and below, because they were all in his most frequently visited area of the building so he could “get the job done faster” as he had told Tony in the weeks prior. Chaz set up the business review meeting with two director levels. One leader was the Director of Operations across the IDN, Integrated Delivery Network, and the other was the Director of Supply Chain. This was the first meaningful meeting either director had with Chaz for anything more than a 30 sec chat in the hallway trying to book the meeting. Tony had a lengthy conversation with Chaz preparing for this meeting. Tony challenged Chaz to “lead a conversation with his customer for an hour without bringing up his product in the discussion”. He continued. “This would ensure the discussion would be focused on the customer and the issues or business challenges and not our offering.” In effect, Tony was asking him to diagnose the customer's issue before prescribing a solution to that problem, formulating DxB4Rx for the creation of a vision. “How can you quote a new container system when you don’t know why the customer wants to buy?”, challenged Tony. Chaz was not convinced he could carry on that conversation and that he “just wants to deliver a proposal for replacing a legacy product and standardize their containers on our offering”, and he continued, “They can’t issue a purchase order if they don’t have the quote!”

When the meeting started, Chaz immediately opened his folder and started to pull out the quote. Tony inserted himself into the conversation to prevent that from being handed across the table by simply stating, “Do you mind if I approach a couple of topics prior to quoting anything?”. The customer agreed. For the next 50 minutes Tony went on a probing quest to ask the customer different questions as it pertains to current failure points or inefficiencies in their processes and products they use and their issues with their sterile processing department - the area department of a hospital where surgical devices are cleaned and sterilized for use on the next patient. He never mentioned a single product his company sold. The conversation focused on the main topics of tracking the assets within the hospital system, scheduling ongoing repairs, and identifying delays in their processes to turn over sets for the next procedures.

Tony asked the customer, “How many vendors do you currently use for handheld and laparoscopic instruments?”, and the director replied, “That is part of the problem, we don’t know. We have always purchased the least expensive products from whatever vendor supplied our need at the time.” Tony then dug deeper and asked, “How does this create problems with your team building sets for the next patient procedures by putting the right instruments in a container for a specific upcoming case?” Since Tony recognized they had too many vendors supplying containers & instruments, he knew there was a valuable justification to be had but needed the customer to discover it. He diagnosed the problem more. The customer responded, “This is a big problem for us, first our set sheet lists of specific instruments that go into each container for a procedure, can’t be followed because the variety of options for the same type of instrument being supplied by multiple companies. This has prevented us from having a consistency.” Continuing, the director stated, “Not only are our set sheets inaccurate, but we are also challenged with high attrition rates because of the frustration levels of not having accurate set information to build sets for the next procedure”. Tony recognized this problem was much bigger than he anticipated, and it was important to probe the customer further. The director shared, “These rising attrition rates only exacerbate our problem because the new hires don’t possess the tribal knowledge of knowing what alternative instrument options work for the set sheets.” Tony peeled the onion back a little more, “What impact is there on the operating room when incomplete sets show up?”. The director disappointingly had to admit, “Many case delays, unhappy surgeons because they don’t have the instruments they need, and it results in adding more instruments to the already overloaded container sets. It’s a vicious cycle of inefficiency.” Tony then completed this line of probing by defining the actual cost to the hospital of added reprocessing time, overloaded sets, operating room delays, attrition, and unhappy surgeons all because they don’t have accurate and complete set information easily accessible to their staff. He then conducted a mini-waterfall summary of all he learned around the problems created by multiple vendors and inaccurate set sheets. The customer said, “Yeah, that’s right, unfortunately you are seeing my pain.”