Dialling random numbers - one of my all-time favourite consulting moment

It was a Friday, around lunchtime. I just wanted to be sure that the reimbursement application I had been working on for months had actually been submitted by the KOL professor who had agreed to do so.

I phoned the client. Was the application submitted? I don’t know, she said. I can’t reach him. His secretary did not know whether it had been submitted and refused to telephone her boss on the mobile “because he is out hunting”.

We were stunned.

We had worked on this for months. Only a few hours left to go before the deadline for submission.

What to do? We divided forces: my client glued herself to the phone to keep trying to reach the KOL on his mobile. I would try to find out from the organization where we had to submit whether the professor had already submitted the application.

Meanwhile it was mid-afternoon on a hot Friday and I was sceptical whether anyone would even still answer the phone there.

I figured some people might still be working. I started analysing the structure of the organisation’s phone numbers to figure out how their system of extension numbers might work. I tried to think of their office layout. I figured if I just tried potential extension numbers in sequence, like 001, 002, 003, etc. and if they had open plan offices, people would hear the phones ring in sequence and not answer, thinking it would be someone trying to sell them something. So I started dialling different extension numbers randomly, not in sequence, leaving random pauses in between.

And reader, as you might guess, I did manage to get some hapless person on the phone that way eventually. However, she was not able to help me as what I was asking was confidential information. Hm. What do do?

We knew that a medical association was submitting reimbursement requests for our drug’s competitors with the same mechanism of action and similar efficacy and safety. Somehow politics had got involved. But if we did not submit our application, our drug would not be reimbursed, but all the competitors would be.

I asked the poor lady on the phone if it would be ok if I submitted the application through their eportal myself on behalf of the professor, accompanied by an email saying please discard this 2nd submission if you should have received it twice. I checked with the client. The client said yes. So this is what we did.

We found out on Monday that the professor had indeed submitted the application before going out hunting. We got the reimbursement at the price we requested.

Why is this one of my favourite consulting moments: consulting is never boring. You keep discovering skills you never knew you had…