The 112 comments that succeed this poll highlight ObamaCare, The Affordable Care Act, and the 2.3% Medical Device Tax as causes for a difficult year. You may feel the same way. What surprised me, however, was the number of medical device professionals that failed to comment on the opportunity ahead.

An environment like the one today, force companies to make tough decisions. But tough decisions often yield tighter strategies, greater focus, and more efficiency. Typically, CEOs look for creative ways to adapt and gain competitive advantage, while CFOs practice arduous cost management and departments are required to demonstrate more efficiency and cost savings.

As an information and communication professional, your contribution to the company’s competitive advantage comes from a consistently reliable and outstanding customer experience. But how do we do that when upper management is asking for more efficiency and cost savings? Here are 3 ways you can do both:

THREE WAYS TO INCREASE EFFICIENCY AND CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE:

1. Reach across barriers between Engineering, Marketing, Publications, and Technical Support departments to share resources and knowledge. Optimizing customer touch points can improve the customer experience and eliminate redundant efforts; saving time and money.

2. Maximize efficiency by creating instructions and training together. Although instructions and training materials have two different voices, finding a skilled writer and instructional designer who work together exchanging information, not only reduces the development time and cost, but also ensures a cohesive look to your overall product.

3. Evaluate the skills and commitments of individuals responsible for documenting procedures and training others. Are they being pulled in too many directions losing efficiency in their daily tasks?  Have they been educated and trained to deliver usability? Utilizing a dedicated professional writer eliminates excess time from conflicting priorities, multiple starts and stops, and rework, and delivers user-friendly information.

Tell us what your experience has been with improving information efficiencies. Maybe you can even add an idea or two.

Then I started training sales people. Here’s what I learned:

•  Sales people are very fast at everything they do. They don’t like waiting.

•  They don’t want to search.

•  They want answers right away.

•  They want to fit the training in between all the many activities of their busy days—waiting for a meeting, over morning coffee, or even while stuck in the back of a taxi.

•  They like to interact with the material. Passive learning is out.

I wanted to know how to train sales people effectively every time, so I interviewed sales professionals, talked to friends in sales and got plenty of practical experience in designing programs for medical device manufacturers. Here’s what I came up with:

FOUR RULES FOR SALES TRAINING.

1. Take advantage of online E-learning. Laptops work, but mobile devices—tablets and smartphones—are even better, because they are so convenient and can use cellular service or Wi-Fi to log in anywhere.

2. Break the training into convenient chunks—or modules—with one or two topics that take about two minutes to complete, and five minutes at most.

3. Follow up with a quick one or two question assessment to make sure they get it.

4. Use less text and more visuals, and make them interactive.

Tell us what your experience has been with training sales people. Maybe you can even add a rule or two.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Pesce (rhymes with mesh) is Director of Learning for Novatek. His passion is for reinventing the way we learn. Among other roles, he has been VP of Technology for the American Society of Training and Development, and has worked in instructional design and programming.

ABOUT NOVATEK
Modern medical devices do miracles. But people must know how to use, fix and sell them, or they are wasted. Novatek helps medical device manufacturers to capture the knowhow that people need, and deliver it to them through easy, engaging learning and reference systems. Your products win, because people know how.

If not, you’re missing the most important part of the equation – ACTIVE!

Every week Novatek walks into a Medical Device Manufacturer and gets the grand tour. When asked where all the critical information is stored, fingers point in multiple directions, undoubtedly including aim at someone’s head. How are you going to access that?! Will customers know how to change the diluent fluid if they were trained 11 months ago?  Will field service engineers know how to replace an assembly if the technique to the intricate lock is stored in an email forwarded around? Will your sales representatives recall why your product beats the competition if it’s stored in the file cabinet?

If you’re information is scattered physically and electronically in more than 1 location, chances are your knowledge is STATIC. Here are some tips for making your static knowledge ACTIVE:

• Identify 1 electronic storage areas that are easily accessible and highly used to consolidate your company’s knowledge. In order to get the information needed at the time it’s needed, it must be easy to find!
• Identify all the relevant knowledge that is stored in key employees’ heads and capture it. This information is active for the key employee because he’s using it, but what about others? Find the best way to organize this information and disseminate it to others through learning or reference materials.
• Identify pre-requisite knowledge for each role, activity, or training and ensure individuals meet the pre-requisite requirements. Knowledge of biology or chemistry is often required to use a device properly so active this fundamental knowledge through refresher training courses.
• Track and measure performance then look for themes in the weak areas. Chances are that knowledge is dormant so create training, choose a more effective delivery method, or make the information more accessible.

If you’ve had success implementing these tips for improved accuracy and efficiency, we’d love to hear your story!

We felt, however, that neither documentation nor training captured the importance and indispensability of the results. The trouble with weak names is that they don’t inspire fresh thinking, or new, better ways of doing things. We needed a new name, an idea that would get us excited enough to break new ground and conquer new territory. So we did some serious thinking.

We agreed that we are in the knowledge business. That might be enough for a glib marketing slogan, but that’s about all. So we pushed it further.

First, although companies usually produce documentation and training separately, often in different organizations, we saw both drawing from the same knowledge. How inefficient and unnecessary it is to capture and organize that knowledge twice. So we should have one body of knowledge about each medical product or process.

The real difference lay in how the knowledge is delivered. The experts that we serve—doctors, technicians, service engineers, and sales people—need some knowledge top of mind, all the time, so they don’t even have to think about it. Imagine a sales person demonstrating a product if they didn’t know how to operate it, or understand the technology. They need to learn it inside out. On the other hand, there is a lot of knowledge—like the submerged part of an iceberg—that must be available to the expert at her fingertips, easy to find when she needs it. We call those two modes of delivery learning and reference. No rocket science so far.

Then we asked ourselves, what it is about this particular knowledge that makes it special, and sets it apart. See if you can think of other characteristics, but we came up with PACER:

• Practical—it answers the question, “How?” Be familiar, if you want, and call it knowhow.
• Accurate—it must be correct. There is no tolerance for error or ambiguity in health care.
• Critical—it could make the difference between life and death, a diagnosis made or missed, an instrument working or down when needed.
• Engaging—if it’s hard to use, boring, or ineffective, people will ignore it. It should be easy to use, interesting, clear, even fascinating and fun.
• Regulatory compliance—the FDA and similar bodies throughout the world require documentation of products and processes to meet high standards, not as a bureaucratic exercise, but to ensure our health and safety. We must comply with those high standards.

As knowledge goes, it’s very special. We decided on the term Active Knowledge. It captures the criticality and excitement of PACER, without getting into marketing hyperbole. But here’s the real test. When we started to use those words, members of our team at Novatek smiled, said, “Yes!” and some eyes even misted over. They know that what we do is important, but they loved to see it on a banner that they could march behind, to be bold, and to create new, better approaches. In short, to innovate and excel in everything we do.