A medical distributor's visits for four manufacturers

The situation

The distributor represents four manufacturers: one each for imaging, patient monitoring, laboratory analysers and sterilisers. Each has its own team and product manager. Reps visit hospitals and clinics by appointment. One purchase passes through a doctor who asks for the equipment, a biomedical engineer who checks it and a purchasing officer who buys it.

Before

Visits were noted in each rep’s diary. At the end of the month each product manager wrote a report for his manufacturer from what the reps could recall. Nobody could say which hospitals had asked about which line.

Setting up

Each manufacturer is a team, matched to its own sales team in Odoo. The admin builds the form for a client meeting: the product lines of all four manufacturers, and one required question, the department. The follow-up email is approved in English and Arabic, and each line has its catalogue.

On a visit

A rep meets the head of a hospital laboratory and scans his card. The name is printed in Arabic and English, and both are kept.

She chooses Client meeting, taps Chemistry analysers, 1 to 3 months and Influencer, and answers the department question. The next action is Send quotation, by Sunday.

From the same screen she sends the approved email in Arabic, with a link to a page holding the analyser catalogue. The lead later tells her when the email was delivered and when the page was first opened.

What the manager sees

Within about a minute the hospital, the contact and the lead are in Odoo, under that manufacturer’s sales team. Each product manager sees his own team. The director sees leads and hot leads by team, and what was asked about by product line. For a manufacturer’s report he narrows the Overview to its team and to 30 days, which gives that team’s pipeline too, and exports it.