Kristy Rosano runs sales education for a $2B Philips Healthcare business. Her reps are in hospitals four days a week. Here's how she stopped asking them to open another app — and got 99% adoption.
The reach problem in medical device sales enablement
Kristy Rosano runs sales education for Philips Healthcare's $2B hospital patient monitoring business. Her reps are account executives, associate account managers, and specialists — all field-based, all in customer meetings at least four days a week. The old playbook was a paid microlearning vendor that asked reps to open yet another app on top of the CRM, the sales enablement platform, and the customer-facing tools they already carried. Adoption suffered. So did the budget.
"We had a previous vendor that we were using that was taking a big chunk of budget for microlearning … sometimes we had to put questions and quizzes together and then they would evaluate those … and they would update them and then send them back to us. And so the preload was a lot.."
Kristy RosanoDirector of Sales Education, Philips
Drop the app. Text them instead.
For their sales kickoff and sales intensive events, Kristy's team stopped routing prework through an app and started sending it as a text message to each rep's company phone. The format was deliberately playful — memes, animations, a Mission Impossible theme for the SKO with goodies on offer for reps who showed up on time. By the end of the year, user adoption was at 99%. The mechanism is the headline: a text lands, a rep taps, the prework gets done before they walk into the room.
"Instead of an app within the app for the SKO, right? Or within the app for the sales intensive event, we're just text messaging them. Well, they all have a company phone, right? And all these outside sales reps. And so we were able to use 7taps just to text message them. And so they weren't opening an app and they're all on their phones. Me and my phone are besties, right?" hear it at 6:05Kristy RosanoDirector of Sales Education, Philips
Cutting the preload from days to ten minutes
The old vendor cycle was heavy: draft questions, send to the vendor, wait for review, get them back, upload via spreadsheet, push through the app. Kristy rebuilt that loop with 7taps AI. For a Challenger-style selling exercise on constructive tension, she fed the AI a few sentences of direction — no proprietary IP — and got a working game back in five to ten minutes. That is the speed her sales managers needed, because new product introductions arrive faster than any three-month rollout can keep up with.
"I was amazed the amount of intelligence that 7taps AI had in it … I didn't give it any intellectual property. I just told it a few sentences and it pulled from the worldwide web of information and it created this from its AI engine."Kristy RosanoDirector of Sales Education, Philips
QR codes in the learning lab when no instructor is there
Philips runs a mini hospital learning lab in its Nashville hub — an OR, monitoring equipment, a telemetry mannequin named Tammy. The education team can't staff it every hour. So Kristy's team is putting a QR code in each room. A rep scans, a 7taps walks them through that specific room with voice, video, and cards. Same lab, same equipment, self-serve learning when the educators are in West Virginia. This is the kind of last-mile training delivery a traditional LMS was never built for: no login, no scheduling, just the message and the moment.
"We're starting to develop QR codes that go to each room in the OR, right? What's the OR? How do I act? What do I do? What about the monitoring solutions in this area? And so the QR code will take them to a 7taps, they'll open that and then it'll really walk them through it with voice and video and cards to walk them through that room so that if we're not there, they still learn in the lab." hear it at 11:28Kristy RosanoDirector of Sales Education, Philips
Aligning L&D with business priorities — and protecting rep selling time
Adoption is only half the story. Kristy's team also has to defend rep time against every product manager who wants their launch trained immediately. Her tool is a Gantt chart of training hours by month, by role, by region. When a marketer comes asking for another hour-long virtual call, the answer is often: not this month, or let's make it an email, or let's gamify it instead.
"We tend to be the one neck to choke. We are the ones that come and we say, hey, here's our gant chart for the year with hours and who's getting them out of the field for what they're doing. So we can't allot any more time for this month or this quarter." hear it at 14:39Kristy RosanoDirector of Sales Education, Philips