Background

Call planning is a methodology familiar and necessary to many industries that rely on a human salesforce. As a software process it allows a company to understand and manage its sales targets and goals at all levels. In pharma, this is commonly done at the doctor level and across all eligible products. It involves the company setting a master plan, individual reps modifying their individual plans, and then submission of plans back through all layers of management, a few times a year.

Problem

Our existing call planning platform has outlived its useful life, fine for the desktop era but virtually unusable on the tablet and not optimized for the current reps needs:

The pharma rep's role has moved from being a more soft, social activity, focused on relationship building, to an analytic, CRM driven, just-in-time message delivery and intelligence gathering operation, managed my corporate HQ. The previous generations of call planning tools were meant to be used once or twice a year on desktop environments primarily as a way of setting a general plan. Now reps are crunched for time, and primarily using tablets in the field and need to modify plans in a more agile matter. The legacy systems are too complex and unwieldy on tablet screens. A major client recognized this and threaten to pull a multi-millon deal unless we committed to modernizing our software for tablet use.

Solution

Reconsider call planing as mobile first product, stripping it down to its essentials, focusing on what reps truly need out in the field. I conducted interviews with field reps and observed their use of existing solutions and a prototype of the new product offering. Utilizing feedback from those sessions we iterated continuously and launched a well received pilot with the client, saving the deal and becoming a market case study in the process.

Early sketching based on stakeholder interviews drove buy in for the high level concept:

Through extensive Axure prototyping we arrived at the final tablet friendly design: