Kristy Rosano runs sales education for Philips Healthcare's $2B hospital patient monitoring business. Her reps are out in the field at least four days a week. Here's how her team stopped asking them to open another app and texted the training instead.

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. They are field-based and out at least four days a week, and even inside sales goes to customer meetings. The previous microlearning vendor took a big chunk of budget, and it could only send training through an app. For reps who already live in the CRM and a couple of other apps, that was one more app to use.

Drop the app. Text them instead.

For their sales kickoff and sales intensive events, Kristy's team stopped using an app within an app and texted each rep's company phone instead. Once reps knew who the texts were from, they knew they were legit and not spam. The format was deliberately playful: memes, animations and a Mission Possible theme that told reps where to be and had them compete for goodies. A scavenger hunt in the learning lab followed, so when product quizzes came, reps already knew how to use the tool. Kristy reported that the team increased user adoption by 99% by the end of the year.

One game in 5 to 10 minutes

The old vendor cycle was heavy: draft questions, send them to the vendor for review, get them back, keep Excel spreadsheets of the right users, push it all through an app. The team has no instructional designer. For a Challenger selling exercise on constructive tension, Kristy gave the 7taps AI a few sentences and no intellectual property, and she estimates the whole game took 5 to 10 minutes. With a new product introduction or a new sales role always coming, a three-month build would be out of date by the time it launched.

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 developing a QR code for each room. A rep will scan it, and a 7taps will walk them through that room with voice, video and cards. Kristy works from West Virginia and her team can't be in the lab every five minutes, so people in the building between meetings can still learn on the fly, whether or not an educator is there.

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 for the year with the hours reps spend out of the field. When a product manager wants time for their product and the month is already full, the answer is often: not this month, or could it be an email, or could we gamify it instead.