As you’re probably well aware, the proper step to take upon completing a detail call is to conduct a post-call analysis to evaluate your performance and develop a plan for making future improvements. Yet with the busy lives drug reps lead, there are always dozens of reasons why you just don’t have the time. But as Robert F. Wright, an Ohio-based district trainer for Organon, notes, the benefits to a properly conducted post-call analysis are so great that reps should make them a priority. Writing in Pharmaceutical Representative Magazine, Wright identifies the following four steps to making your post-call assessments pay off with improved overall performance:

1. What did you do right?
Ask yourself, beginning with your pre-call plan through the moment you walked out of the physician’s office, what you did well on the call. Here are some more detailed questions to consider:

• Did you create your pre-call plan?
• Did you review prescribing behavior?
• Did you mentally or verbally role-play what you intended to cover with the provider during the call?
• Did you have an objective going into the call?
• Did you engage the physician or did he or she seem bored?
• Did you effectively answer questions posed by the physician?
• Did you close?

These questions and this process are important, whether a call went well or was a complete dud. Analyzing your performance on good calls can be more helpful than kicking yourself after bad ones.

2. What did you do wrong?
Now that you’ve completed the process of patting yourself on the back, it’s time to take out the ruler and rap your knuckles a bit. Ask, “What did I do poorly on this call?” Even the greatest calls have some area where you could have done better. Approach your shortcomings as developmental opportunities – you may not have known the answer to this physician’s question, but you will next time. Instead of focusing on dozens of areas for improvement, pick three and focus on them. Then resolve to make the changes immediately.

3. Work it out at the “Why?”
It’s one thing to figure out what you’ve done poorly on a call – another thing entirely to find the source of the errors. Why did you fail to pre-call plan adequately? Were you too rushed? Maybe you have a valid reason. Then again, maybe you don’t – “I didn’t review the literature because clinical studies are so boring” is not a legitimate excuse. You need to take care of even the more tedious aspects of your job if you hope to succeed.

4. Plan to act
Management has a plan of action, or POA, and so should you. Take the three areas you’ve identified for improvement and share the items with your manager. Say, for example, you need to improve your work with clinical studies. Make a plan to read the studies during your waiting time and to use one study on every call you make in the next two weeks. Write it down and email it to your manager – this step will solidify the plan as a must-do in your mind.

Admittedly, with the reach and call frequency demands on most pharmaceutical reps these days, you may not be able to do a thorough post-call analysis after every call. If that’s the case, plan to conduct these analyses only for your most important calls or just for your lunch appointments. What matters is that you begin the process, follow all four steps, and then follow through. Do so and the results should begin to appear in a matter of weeks.