Rainier Surgical Drives Lower Costs, Higher Revenue

Rainier Surgical’s field sales team covers four territories across wide swaths of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Building relationships and selling medical equipment to providers while also assisting with their patient support takes strong teamwork. Field sales, field service, administration, and inside sales all need to work in unison to ensure Rainier Surgical’s business runs smoothly. Three key areas needed to be better optimized.

Finding opportunities to grow business and prospect was not as effective as leadership knew it could be. Rainier Surgical reps had a lot on their collective plate, from picking up and delivering orders across their large territories to stocking consignment products at provider locations. This meant reps did not always create enough time to prospect new opportunities. Jeff Padilla, Rainier Surgical's Director of Sales, heard a range of valid reasons.  “I’m so busy. I don’t have time to figure out where these accounts are at. I don’t have time to go and plan a whole route out,” Padilla said, referencing some common reasons sales reps did not prospect enough.

Transitioning new team members into territories and onto new accounts was not an easy task. Rainier Surgical needed to improve its onboarding process to get reps to success faster. “We had to go in, create a spreadsheet, give new reps the addresses. They’re going into Google Maps,” he said. Plotting addresses one at a time eroded efficiency. The team needed a solution that both organized customer locations and provided a multi-stop route planner. For reps covering territories in large states, effective time management is mandatory.

Supporting providers and their patients was time-intensive but critical to maintaining strong relationships. Rainier Surgical knew it needed to create more time to sell, but also that it could not come at the expense of its account support. This meant they needed a better ability to communicate with accounts and access data. “I would have to call the account. Then call the office and find out what’s going on with the patient. I’m then calling the account back,” Padilla said. A tool to facilitate the timely flow of communication and data was the key to fixing this process.

Rainier Surgical turned to RepMove to help optimize its field operations. Combining the best aspects of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform with mobile route planning, RepMove offered a unique product that seemed tailormade for Rainier Surgical's field sales team. It provided everything Rainier Surgical needed and then some.

It’s difficult to improve what you can’t measure. RepMove provided immediate visibility into opportunities to improve sales rep performance. “The conversations you can have as a leader, you’re kind of at the whim of whatever that rep is reporting back,” Padilla said. Like virtually every field team, his reps had busy days and could lose track of details that a system would automatically capture.

Padilla could now easily access objective, real-time data to help improve performance. “We can see notes in real-time. We’re able to see where they’re at on their route and what they’ve been doing,” Padilla said.

This gave him personalized data to help every member of his team with the specific challenges they faced. It also put account and prospect data in every reps’ pocket so they could create faster sales routes and add more visits to their days. “They can’t say ‘I didn’t have the information, it wasn’t easily accessible, I didn’t have the time to do it,” Padilla said. When these issues arose, Padilla had what he needed to coach his team to success. It made for productive conversations that would improve performance. “Now let’s talk about how we can create a plan to fix it going forward,” he said.

Creating new sales opportunities is pivotal to a sales rep’s success. But when days are busy and existing customers need support, finding those opportunities can be tough. Not so with RepMove.

“I can go in and look at an account and see if reps added any prospecting opportunities throughout the day,” Padilla said. “As a leader, this gives me the opportunity to say ‘hey I see that on your schedule you’re completing all your tasks on your daily route, but you’re not going in and adding any prospecting opportunities’. And then we can have a discussion about why that’s happening.”

This gave Jeff the opportunity to show his team how easy it was to grow sales without going far out of its way or significantly impacting its current plans. “I can go to my map and I can see where my day’s stops are at. And then I can filter it, add in my prospect opportunities, and I can say 'here’s my route, look at all these opportunities for prospecting within this schedule I’m already going to'. So I can just add prospects right to my daily route, hit the optimize button, it falls right in my schedule.”

All of Rainier Surgical's account and prospect locations were visible within RepMove's web and mobile tools. Reps created their daily routes and used filters to visualize prospects that were already on their planned paths. Rather than spending hours on prospecting research, it happened in seconds.

“I’m off and running. How long did that take? One minute. It’s huge,” Padilla said.

Potentially the biggest value add for Padilla is how quickly his team can onboard new reps and get them to success. “The best thing for us is having those daily routes and being able to transition those when we have a new rep coming in,” he said.

It can take months for field sales reps to get up to speed with all of their accounts and customers, let alone prospects. Learning new territories and efficient routes also loom as obstacles. But RepMove helps new reps overcome them.

“It’s going to be super easy. Reps are going to come in. They’re not going to know where any of these accounts are. But they’re going to automatically on the day they are done with training have a set schedule of where they’re supposed to go. They’re going to put in their addresses, they’re going to optimize it, and they’re going to be off and running.”

RepMove has impacted three key areas for Rainier Surgical: higher revenue, lower costs, and faster onboarding.

“RepMove has assisted revenue growth,” Padilla said. “It’s creating efficiencies to hit more stops.” Top-performing reps are visiting 25-30% more customers and prospects every day.

This increase in rep efficiency has the downstream effect of saving on the cost of gas Rainier Surgical covers for its reps. “Instead of doing a star, a rep that goes from one end of the territory back and forth in a star pattern,” he said, reps are taking far more efficient routes across their wide territories. Reps can also export their mileage and create expense reports with RepMove.

Perhaps most importantly, his reps get up to speed and see success faster as onboarding went from “a couple months to a couple weeks,” Padilla said.

RepMove’s constant strive to release new features has created unexpected efficiencies too. Other parts of the Rainier Surgical team are quickly seeing these benefits.

“It’s getting even better now that the administrative team is using it,” Padilla said. “Team messaging has been huge. It’s helped quite a bit as far as organizing and being able to communicate with the team to make it easy. We’re now putting orders into RepMove. Everything is being kept in it and it makes it so that everyone has access to it.”

RepMove’s CRM capability has driven new efficiencies in account support as well for Rainier Surgical. “Now I can just jump right into RepMove, pull the patient up, here’s a list of everything that has happened, here’s where we’re at in the process. That has been hugely beneficial,” Padilla said.

The most unexpected gain might be that Rainier Surgical has gained an extension of its team. “The thing that all of our team has been really pleased with is how easy it is to get ahold of RepMove,” Padilla said. “I don’t think there’s ever been a time I called one of your team members and I haven’t gotten a response either immediately or within the same day. It’s been such a breath of fresh air to have a team that we’re able to work with. When we need to implement something, we need to make changes, if there’s something we’re having issues with, it’s always taken care of.”