- When technology vendors begin conversations with healthcare organizations using a product pitch, they often fail.
- Technology vendors should start by identifying key pain points felt by their target audience.
- Building from customer challenges, vendors can create a go-to-market framework focused on solving problems rather than presenting product features.
When technology vendors approach prospects in healthcare, they often send in sales team members with a product pitch. But starting with a templated deck that emphasizes product features is rarely the best first step.
Healthcare organizations face some fairly daunting challenges—from significant IT talent shortages to cybersecurity concerns. They want to know that their technology vendors are presenting real-world solutions, not just pushing the latest technologies.
Vendors, then, should start by understanding their prospects’ pain points and then crafting a go-to-market plan that addresses those pain points. The sales team can share challenges that potential customers report, and then validate the messaging and go-to-market plans that marketers build. Together, sales and marketing can create a framework for facilitating dialogues with healthcare organizations rather than simply delivering product pitches.
Identifying Common Challenges in Healthcare
Though every healthcare company faces its own mix of challenges, there are several pain points that are common to many companies. These issues appear as day-to-day obstacles not only for hospitals and clinics but also for the healthtech companies building solutions for providers and payers.
- Talent shortages. Qualified IT and cybersecurity professionals are in high demand in every industry. Healthcare providers often lack skilled engineers who can implement and maintain modern technologies. Healthtech companies, meanwhile, additionally need developers to create innovative products. These shortages produce significant obstacles for modernization projects and new product development.
- IT cost constraints. Operating costs keep rising for IT teams. Many struggle to maintain legacy systems—and they lack the budget to acquire and implement new technologies. For these cost-conscious teams, every purchase must deliver real benefits to the organization.
- Strict regulatory compliance. Complying with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a continuous challenge for healthcare organizations. The introduction of new technologies—such as AI—will create additional compliance hurdles. Healthcare organizations need ways to streamline compliance efforts, which are never one-time tasks.
- Technology interoperability. Healthcare organizations often manage complex networks of providers, payers, and patients, all in different locations. Enabling different systems to communicate and share data effectively while maintaining security and compliance is a constant pain point.
- Security. Healthcare organizations remain a top target for cyber criminals. Attackers know that these organizations manage a treasure trove of personally identifiable information (PII) and payment data—and attackers are increasingly using new technologies, like AI, to access that data. For IT and security teams, combating emerging threats is a high priority.
- Resistance to change. Within healthcare organizations, new technology solutions often meet real resistance. Employees might be concerned about job security and are often reluctant to disrupt carefully honed workflows to integrate new tools.
These challenges are a common baseline. When marketers work with sales teams, they can find the right mix of challenges for particular customer segments and then begin to create a go-to-market strategy.
Building the Go-to-Market Plan
With a set of challenges defined, marketing teams can assemble a go-to-market plan that will resonate with customers. Starting with a simple framework that asks a few key questions can help keep teams focused on the most relevant messaging.
Target audience. What types of organizations should be targeted? Which personas at those organizations should receive the messages? The marketing team might decide to focus on hospitals of a certain size and tune messages to IT leaders and decision-makers.
Primary customer challenges: What are the most pressing challenges facing this industry subsegment? Marketers might learn, for example, that the hospitals they are targeting need to meet rising demand for telehealth offerings to support pre-op patients. But these hospitals face shortages of personnel who can implement, operate, and manage necessary technologies.
Relevant offering: What is the vendor’s most relevant product, solution, or service offering for addressing that customer challenge? The same vendor might determine that an AI tool with natural language processing, delivered through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, will enable providers to present clear pre-op instructions to patients—without having to scale their internal teams.
The goal: What is the marketing team’s goal with the go-to-market plan? What outcomes count as success? The marketing team might want to advance sales conversations with prospective customers about telehealth initiatives.
Core message: What is the one thing that marketers want to say to the target audience? They should craft a statement that captures not only the challenges but also the benefits that the vendor’s solution can deliver. The core message might be: This AI tool, delivered as a cloud-based service, enables hospitals to provide personalized care, offer real-time support, and improve safety for pre-operative patients—all without adding excessive IT costs or complexity.
Once that framework is created, the marketing team is ready for three pillars of action:
- Communicate: Marketers can further refine the core message to generate a concise value proposition. Like the core message, it should reference the challenge and explain exactly how the offering solves it. The marketing team must then translate that value proposition into a variety of formats and integrate it into campaign assets.
- Educate: Marketers should then plan and launch multi-channel campaigns. They should build webpages, social content, email campaigns, case studies, and other assets that the target audience is likely to consume in every channel the audience uses.
- Consult: Marketers should participate in vertical-specific activities. For example, they should attend healthcare events, work with third-party analysts to amplify messages, and build a customer reference program that validates the offering in the buyer’s own language.
Maintaining a Purposeful Sequence
Healthcare buyers can tell the difference between a vendor that understands their world and one that is running a templated playbook. That’s why the first step in engaging with healthcare organizations should not be presenting a pitch deck. Technology vendors’ marketing teams must work with sales to understand customer challenges. They can then establish a go-to-market framework and put their campaign tactics into action.
With this methodical approach, each interaction remains focused more on the buyer’s reality than the vendor’s product sheet. The result will be a richer dialogue in which a vendor’s products are viewed as true solutions for a healthcare organization’s specific needs.
A: Many technology vendors begin their interactions with healthcare buyers by presenting a product pitch. But those buyers are less interested in product features than solving their industry-specific challenges. As a result, leading with a product pitch often falls flat.
A: Technology vendors’ marketing teams should first understand the industry-specific challenges facing their target audience. Those challenges—from talent shortages to IT interoperability issues—are the starting point for building a go-to-market plan. Beyond identifying pain points, vendors should attempt to determine the unique mix of challenges for industry subsegments.
A: As with any vertical, marketers should define their target audience and confirm primary challenges, and then identify the most relevant offerings, establish their strategic goal, and create core messages. These steps should come before launching campaign activities.
