trakki
Route planning for medical device reps
By Manuel Ober · · 3 min read
Medical device sales runs at two speeds
Hospital purchasing gives you appointments three weeks ahead; a practice sees you when you happen to be in the area. Getting both into one week is the real job.
Plan only the fixed appointments and you soon drive 300 kilometres for two conversations. Plan only the unscheduled visits and you miss purchasing.
Fixed appointments first, then fill in around them
This is how you build a week in four steps.
- Set the fixed appointments. Tuesday 10:00 hospital in Linz, Thursday 14:00 lab in Wels. They stay where they are.
- See on the map who is due nearby. Around Linz there are three practices that have had no visit for six weeks, and a dental lab that is due soon.
- Plan again. trakki fits them around your fixed appointments: the practices and the lab land on the Tuesday, before and after the hospital, with drive times, opening hours and lunch break. Whatever finds no room in the whole week comes first when you plan the next one.
- Allow for the hospital meeting to overrun. It often runs longer than planned. Set a longer duration, and trakki shifts the visits after it later.
More on the method is in the guide Route planning in field sales.
Long distances: stay overnight instead of driving home
Medical device territories are large, often half a province. If you are in Linz on Tuesday and Salzburg on Wednesday, you do not drive home in between. In trakki you mark the overnight stay in the weekly plan. Tuesday then ends at the hotel and Wednesday starts there. When a night away pays off is in the guide Overnight or drive home.
When hospital purchasing is due again
For equipment a hospital buys only every few years, what happened last time is what counts: which device you showed, who was interested, when the budget frees up. In the customer file every visit is there with your note, and you can still edit it later. A task such as “Follow up on the quote” is attached to the customer and, if you like, only appears from a set date, say January, when the budget comes in. Before the next appointment you look in the file instead of three mail folders.
trakki never schedules hospitals that only see you by appointment on its own. They go on a list of calls to make.
What stays with you
Hospital lists with contact names are confidential. trakki has no server holding them, and you need no account. The list sits on your phone. If you use sync, trakki puts a file encrypted with your sync password in your own cloud (Google Drive or OneDrive) or on your NAS. For address search and drive times, addresses and coordinates go to Stadia Maps, never your notes. If you type a customer name, that name goes too, so you get the business suggested. Keep patient data out of your notes. Whether you may load company data into an app of your own is for your employer to decide.
What you pass on is up to you: trakki exports all recorded visits and phone calls as an Excel file, with date, customer, address and note. Whatever your employer does not need, you delete in Excel beforehand.
Where trakki stops
trakki is not a CRM: it does not track quotes and does not manage devices or contracts. It plans the week, shows who is due and records your visits. Quotes stay in your company's system. You can look at trakki in the browser with sample customers, on the home page.
Frequently asked questions
Can I enter fixed appointments with a time?
Yes. An appointment has a day and a time, or a time window with a duration. It stays where it is and trakki plans around it. Move it, and you plan again.
How do I handle customers with several contacts?
The note records who you spoke to. If a hospital has several departments, create one customer per department. Each department then has its own cycle and its own file.
Does trakki work in Germany too?
Not yet. trakki starts in Austria, and the address search only finds Austrian addresses.