Field notes · Sales ops playbooks

The Monday call list, built from data you already have

By the Sightglass team7 min read31 July 2026

A monthly depletion export is raw material, not a work list. Nobody drives to an account because a file has thirty thousand rows in it. The useful output of that file is much smaller: a handful of accounts per rep, in order, each with one sentence explaining why it's there. Everything between the export and that short list is processing.

This note is about the processing. It's the same job whether you build it in a pivot table on the last Friday of the month or have it built for you — the decisions are what matter. How many items. How to rank them. What mix. What to say about each. How often to rebuild. Get those wrong and the list is ignored by week three, which is the only failure mode that really counts.

Seven is the number that survives a week

The constraint on a call list isn't analytical, it's the windshield. A field rep's week is mostly spoken for before it starts: booked appointments, a ride-along or two, resets, samples, and the drive between all of it. What's left is room for a few unplanned stops and a handful of real calls. That's the budget the list has to fit inside.

Seven fits. Twenty doesn't — twenty is a report with a sort applied. And a list you can't finish stops being a list within about three weeks. It becomes background guilt, and reps quietly stop opening it. A list that gets finished gets opened again.

Seven items can be closed out in a normal week, alongside everything already booked.
Seven items and their reason lines fit on a phone screen with one scroll, which is where the list will actually be read.
Seven forces the ranking to be honest. If only seven survive, someone has to decide what matters.
Seven leaves room for the rep's own judgment. The list is an input to the week, not the week.

If your team's week genuinely holds more, use eight or ten. The number matters less than the principle: the list has a fixed length, and the length is set by the week, not by how many accounts happened to trip a threshold. A threshold-based list has no ceiling. In a bad month it hands a rep forty accounts and no order to work them in, which is the same as handing them nothing.

Rank by cases at stake, not by percent

Most homemade flags are percentage-based, because percentage is the easy formula. It is also the wrong sort. Percentage measures how badly an account fell. It says nothing about how much of your year is in the room.

The ranking rule
A 40 percent drop on two cases a month is eight-tenths of a case. A 20 percent drop on forty cases a month is eight. The second account is ten times the problem, and a percentage sort ranks it below the first. Rank by the cases at stake and the order fixes itself.
01Set a baseline for each account: the median monthly cases over the twelve months ending before the recent window you're about to compare against. Median, not average — one holiday drop shouldn't set the bar for the year. Keep the recent periods out of the baseline, or a declining account quietly drags its own bar down and the gap reads smaller than it is.
02Set the recent number: average monthly cases across the last two complete reporting periods. Two periods, because one thin period is usually reporting lag rather than a lost account.
03Cases at stake = baseline minus recent, per month. Multiply by twelve when leadership wants the annualized figure, but keep the monthly number on the rep's list — that's the number they'll say out loud.
04Apply a floor before sorting. An account whose baseline is a case or two a month can't produce a gap worth the drive, however dramatic its percentage looks. Set the floor where your own book stops being worth the fuel.
05Sort descending on cases at stake. Break ties on tenure and recency: between two equal gaps, take the account with the longer history and the more recent last order. More to save, and easier to reach.

The same arithmetic handles the harder case — accounts that stopped ordering altogether and so have no row in this month's file at all. Their recent number is zero, their gap is their entire baseline, and they sort where they belong, near the top. You only see them if you kept last year's exports. A single transaction file can't show you an absence; that's what a transaction file is.

13,109
accounts listed in a single depletion export
630
quietly sliding — 4.8% of that book

Those figures come out of one importer's own exports, analyzed by us rather than by them. The point isn't the size of the decline. It's that 630 accounts is still far too many to hand a sales team as a flat list. Even after the filtering, you need an order — and the order is where most homemade reports fall down.

Mix save-work with grow-work

A list made only of decline reads as an accusation. Reps read the first couple of Mondays carefully and then stop opening it. It also misrepresents the week: some of the best use of a rep's time is at accounts that are doing well.

Five save items and two grow items works. The split does two things — it keeps the list short enough to finish, and it puts one reachable win in the week when the save items are all hard conversations.

Upsell. An account already taking one SKU that fits the profile for a second. The relationship exists and the ask is small.
Winners. An account that's up. Worth a call to say so, and to ask for the extra handle while the number is in your favor.
Look-alikes. Venues that resemble the rep's best accounts on the attributes you can actually see — type, size, what they buy, who delivers to them.
Cold venues. Accounts in the territory with no history at all. These belong on the list occasionally, not weekly. They're the slowest item on it and shouldn't crowd out a save.

Give every item a line the rep can read aloud

A ranked list with no explanation gets treated as somebody's hunch. The fix is one sentence per item, in plain numbers, that a rep can repeat to the account or the distributor without translating anything first.

The shape is always the same: what the account used to do, over what period, what changed, and what's at stake. Something like — took roughly five cases a month for eleven months, nothing in the last two reporting periods, about sixty cases a year. That sentence survives being read out on a Tuesday morning in a bar that isn't open yet.

Numbers, not adjectives. "Down sharply" is unusable. "Five cases a month down to none" is a conversation.
Traceable. A rep who doubts a line should be able to see the rows behind it in one step. One wrong item that can't be checked costs more trust than ten right ones earn.
Honest about what it doesn't know. If the data can't yet support the conclusion, the item shouldn't be on the list. Silence is cheaper than a false alarm.
Neutral about the fix. The line states what's at stake. What a rep can actually do about it — samples, point-of-sale, a ride-along with the distributor rep — varies by state and by agreement, and that's a question for your compliance people, not for the report.

Rebuild it weekly or it stops being trusted

Monthly lists go stale in week two. The depletion file updates on its own schedule, but the rep's week doesn't — visits happen, orders land, one conversation changes the picture. Rebuild the list every week against the newest data you have, even when the underlying file hasn't moved much.

Two rules keep it honest. Anything the rep actioned drops off; nothing is more corrosive than seeing an account you visited last Tuesday still sitting at number one. And anything they didn't action rolls forward once, then gets demoted with a note. Otherwise the same five accounts occupy the top forever and the rep learns to skip the top.

Two cautions worth stating plainly. Depletion data lags by roughly a day or two, so one thin period is usually lag — wait for the second before putting an account on anyone's list. And seasonal SKUs will fake churn every time they rotate out. Don't drop them from the file — compare each seasonal to the same window a year earlier, so one that simply ended looks normal and one that failed to come back still shows up. A third, about people rather than data: don't make completion rate on this list a management metric. The moment it's scored, items get cleared to be cleared, and the ranking stops telling you anything.

Or have it built overnight

All of this is doable by hand. The arithmetic is a pivot table and an afternoon. What's hard is doing it in the same week, every week, for every rep, through a quarter when everyone is busy — which is precisely when the list is worth the most.

Sightglass reads the VIP depletion feed you already pay for, nightly, and keeps every snapshot, so the history outlives any single export window. It ranks by cases at stake, mixes save-work with grow-work, writes the reason line, and drafts the outreach — one to the account, one to the distributor — in your own voice. The briefing lands in Slack, in an email digest, or in the dashboard. Nothing sends until a person approves it, and approved mail goes from the rep's own mailbox, so replies come back to them. Your reporting stays exactly where it is.

And when the data is too fresh to support a conclusion, it says nothing rather than inventing one. A list is only useful for as long as everything on it is true.

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