You spent six figures finding them. Then you handed them a laptop.

Walk into any large medical device company and ask to see the sales rep onboarding programme. You will be shown something impressive. Stryker publishes its neurovascular training structure openly: a named curriculum, checklists, self-paced modules, classroom weeks in Salt Lake City, simulator training in Chicago, sales method training in Fremont, and an entrance exam that every sales professional must pass at 80% or higher before the classroom weeks begin. Somebody owns it, somebody measures it, and somebody is accountable when it fails.

Now ask to see the equivalent programme for the VP Commercial who started the same week. The one the company spent six months and a six-figure search fee recruiting. The one whose decisions will shape the next three years of revenue.

There isn't one. There is a laptop, an org chart, a culture deck, a diary full of introductory meetings, and if the company is thorough, a licence to one of the big syndicated data houses, the same Clarivate or GlobalData reports every competitor in the category is reading that same morning. The rep gets a syllabus. The VP gets a login.

So we went looking for the programme

We spent this summer researching how US medical device companies educate newly hired senior commercial executives about the market they are entering, because we assumed we had simply never seen the programmes rather than that they didn't exist. We went looking for the named executive market immersion programme, the competitive intelligence team with an onboarding mandate, the bespoke market briefing commissioned for an incoming leader. Across the strategics, the mid-caps, and the venture-backed companies, we found none of it in any public source. Market education for the most expensive hires in the building is assembled ad hoc, if it is assembled at all.

The research on what this costs has been sitting in plain sight for years. Egon Zehnder and Michael Watkins, writing in Harvard Business Review in 2017, found that only around 2% of companies provide accelerated integration, a fully orchestrated programme for the new executive. Roughly two-thirds provide only basic orientation. The same research found that integration support reduces the time a new leader takes to reach full performance by an average of 40%, from six months to four. And in Egon Zehnder's global executive survey, 57% of senior executives said it took six months or more to reach full impact in their last role, with the top reason cited for difficulty being a poor grasp of how the organisation works, named by 69% of them.

Here is the detail that stopped us. Spencer Stuart, one of the world's most respected search firms, advises incoming executives to study a specific set of documents before day one: the competitive assessment, the segmentation analysis, the portfolio evaluation, the customer and channel information. It's good advice. It's precise advice. And nowhere, in their guidance or anyone else's, is any party named as the producer of those documents.

One of the world's top search firms prescribes the medicine. Nobody dispenses it.

A gap nobody owns

It would be easy to read this as negligence, and it isn't. It is a hole between departments, and if you have lived through it from either side, you already know its shape. Sales enablement owns the reps, and does that job well. HR owns the paperwork and the culture induction. Strategy owns the analyst subscriptions, which were bought for the leadership team's ongoing needs rather than for any individual's arrival. The competitive intelligence team, where one exists, supports everyone and onboards no one, because onboarding has never been in its charter. The market education of a new commercial leader sits in nobody's budget line, and what sits in nobody's budget line becomes nobody's job. Every function is doing its work correctly. The gap is what their edges don't cover.

The arithmetic is uncomfortable but worth stating plainly. If a senior commercial leader takes six months to reach full effectiveness, and a meaningful part of that time is spent piecing together the competitive landscape, the reimbursement picture, and the channel dynamics of their new market from fragments, then the company is paying a six-figure salary for information gathering that could have been on their desk on day one. Not the culture, not the politics, not the relationships. Those take the time they take. The market knowledge is different. The market knowledge is a document, and documents can be handed over.

The one window they will read every page

The obvious objection is that executives don't read. In post, that is mostly true, because their diaries eat documents whole. But there is one window in a commercial leader's working life when they will read every page put in front of them: the weeks before they start. On gardening leave, or the Friday before day one, with nothing in the diary and everything riding on how fast they come up to speed. It is the most motivated reading an executive will ever do, because the success of the job depends on it.

There is a second reason that window matters, and it is the quieter one. From day one, almost everything a new leader learns about their market arrives through the team they have been hired to assess. Not dishonestly. But every briefing is also a case for the strategy that produced it, every pipeline review is presented by the person who built the pipeline, and nobody walks their new boss through the numbers that make their own work look ordinary. Spencer Stuart calls the pre-start period a rare unbiased moment to absorb what the outside world thinks of the company, and unbiased is precisely the right word. It is the last time the executive will see the market before it is framed for them.

And the motivation cuts deeper than duty. If the last person in the seat took six months to reach full effectiveness, the new leader who arrives already fluent in the competitive landscape and the reimbursement position is up the ramp in weeks. Everyone notices that difference, and nobody forgets who produced it.

The Day One Brief

For the past twelve months, every executive we placed has started with one. A commercial intelligence report on the exact market they were walking into: the competitive landscape, the reimbursement position, the channel dynamics, built for them before their first day, because it seemed obvious that someone we had spent months finding shouldn't spend their first quarter finding their feet. We assumed this was ordinary, and the summer's research told us it was singular. We had been dispensing the prescription without knowing nobody else was.

So we have opened it up. Reports matter in this industry. They tell you the market, the devices, the competitors, the codes, and every commercial leader has a shelf of them. But every report on that shelf was written for a thousand readers.

What if one was written for exactly one? Your therapy area. Your geography. Your position, and the question sitting underneath it, the one that is usually just another name for your greatest challenge. That is what Innotech Business Intelligence builds, for any incoming commercial leader, whether we ran the search or not. We call it the Day One Brief.

If you have a senior commercial hire starting in the next quarter, the brief form takes four minutes: intelligence.innotechrecruit.com/request.