Or How To Tackle Two of the Biggest Challenges in Healthtech – Eternal Sales Cycles and Stalled Deals
Arguably, the biggest sales challenge in growing a healthcare technology business is the sales cycle length. We consistently hear from clients that deals last forever and often stall. In this post, we will share some ideas of pipeline acceleration, both in how you can speed up active deals where the buyers are engaged and also the most frustrating issue of all—stalled deals.
My colleague Mark Erwich (our Chief Strategy Officer) and I discussed this in the latest episode of the Healthtech Marketing Show. Mark has extensive hands-on experience in this issue.
I wished I had been working with him when I ran my healthtech software company.
Listen Now to Episode Now
Why Pipeline Acceleration Is Even More Challenging in Healthcare
In healthcare, several factors make pipeline acceleration even more important and problematic than in other industries. Here are the biggest challenges in selling to healthcare that are at the root of the issues we face selling to them.
- Lengthy Decision-Making Processes: According to research by HIMSS earlier this year, sales cycles last 13+ months on average, and for many, 24+ months is not uncommon. We had one deal in the last four years when I ran a software company! And it was worth the wait. Across our clients, we are hearing that deal cycles are getting longer.
- Budget Constraints: As we all know, healthcare systems and payers are under incredible financial pressure. They operate with significant cash flow constraints. Budgets that had been approved can be put on hold.
- Competing Priorities: Healthcare IT teams juggle hundreds of projects. Enhancing existing solutions takes priority, making it extremely difficult to prioritize adding a new solution. In the podcast, Mark tells a story about how he was meeting with a CIO and was delighted to see that his firm’s proposal was listed as a project on the CIO whiteboard. The CIO told him not to get too excited, as it may not make the list of projects they took on.
- Risk Aversion: The stakes in healthcare are higher than in many other industries. If you make the wrong decision in finance, you lose money. In healthcare, the wrong decision can affect patient safety. This is one reason why healthcare decision-makers are notoriously risk averse. The fear of making the wrong decision can lead to analysis paralysis. We will discuss this at length under stalled deals.
- Limited Buyer Group Engagement: This last issue is often overlooked and an area where you can make a big impact. If you aren’t engaging enough buying group members, you may be kidding yourself that you are seen as a priority. Buying groups in healthcare systems are rarely smaller than five stakeholders and sometimes as many as twenty. If you don’t have all the stakeholders on your side, this gap may be stalling your sale.
Actionable Pipeline Acceleration Techniques for Marketers
So, what can you do about these challenges? There’s plenty you can do.
We have broken down recommended actions into two Pipeline Acceleration topics: The first focuses on In-process Deals and the second, the bane of every business in healthtech, those cursed Stalled Deals.
Honestly, we should have published this on Halloween. Stalled deals are a nightmare!
In-process Deal Pipeline Acceleration
Accelerating active opportunities requires seamless collaboration between sales and marketing. The single most important condition for this to work is to break down the silos between sales and marketing.
Marketing will need to listen extra carefully to sales. Sales may already have relationships with customers and know their issues. Equally, sales need to be open to ideas and recommendations from marketing.
In Mark’s words:
“In twenty years of doing this, we never lost a deal because marketing sent something to an active prospect.”
In some organizations, the Marketing department is not seen as having a role in influencing opportunities in the pipeline. Sometimes, it needs a little push from the Marketing leader. You also might want to propose a pilot.
In all cases, a successful Pipeline Acceleration project leads to better mutual understanding, greater respect, and partnership between Marketing and Sales.
So, let’s get into specific activities you should consider.
1. Expand the Buying Group
As discussed above, buying groups are large. Having a relationship with 2-3 stakeholders may not be enough.
Identify key stakeholders beyond your primary contacts. Create a map of all the potential stakeholders in the buying group. This may be twenty or more stakeholders in large organizations and complex sales.
Map these out for each account in process in your CRM. Who do you have a relationship with, and who do you need to engage?
Start making connections via LinkedIn. Research them to see who you know who may be connected to them. Nurture relationships by liking these buying group members’ posts and commenting on their posts in helpful ways that suggest you are someone they would enjoy working with. Don’t be salty. Earn their trust.
Create persona-specific content campaigns. For example, create personalized emails for the CIOs, CMOs, and CFOs that address their specific issues and tailor this to issues related to the organization.
Develop a tailored offer. For example, invite them to a webinar series addressing different aspects of your solution, each tailored to a specific role within the organization.
Once you know who the buying group is, you can use marketing tactics and creativity to engage them in so many different ways. And it’s fun!
One last point related to pipeline acceleration: Given how long sales cycles last, you will want to ensure that the stakeholders are still in the organization and have the same responsibility over time. There are so many changes in hospitals and within hospitals that, as a result of M&A activity, their title may be the same, but the role might have changed completely.
2. Align Content with Sales Stages
Conduct a content inventory and map assets to specific sales process stages.
Create stage-specific content, such as case studies, ROI calculators, and implementation guides. Here is an example.
For late-stage opportunities, provide a detailed implementation roadmap to address potential concerns about adoption and integration. You will see why this is important when we get to stalled deals.
And here’s the thing. If you do this well, you may avoid the deal stalling.
3. Personalize Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Efforts
For high-priority accounts, you may want to create account-specific landing pages highlighting relevant use cases or other content selected for them. This curation will demonstrate that you understand their issues.
Targeted advertising campaigns should be considered for large accounts like large IDNs and multi-state hospital systems. LinkedIn is ideal for this. You can then hit the account with hyper-targeted ads, for example, mentioning competitors or industry peers who are your customers.
“Hospital X chose our solution to improve patient outcomes by 20% – see how we can help you too“
4. Leverage Intent Data
Monitor target accounts for signs of increased interest in your solution or competitors.
Carefully analyze data about account activity from your own channels. This is known as first-party intent. This includes website activity, social media engagement, email opens, and clickthroughs. You want to determine how frequently people from the accounts with in-process deals engage on your channels and how stakeholders seem most engaged.
If you have access to third-party intent data, monitor this to see what relevant topics the accounts are spiking on, especially if you can monitor if there is increased intent in your competitors.
Alert sales teams to spikes in intent signals to prompt timely follow-ups. For example, if intent data shows increased research on a competitor, prepare a comparative analysis for your sales team to proactively address potential objections.
Accelerating Stalled Deals
When I ran a software company, I had countless nights lying awake wondering why a hot prospect who had been on track to close suddenly went quiet. They had become what a colleague called “submarines”.
More often than not they would reappear later (sometimes months later) and explain that the reasons for radio silence were unrelated to our proposal. (Thanks for keeping us in the loop. Ha!).
The toughest thing is the helpless feeling of inaction. Fear not! There are things you can do.
1. Re-engage with Value-Focused Messaging
When a deal stalls related to your proposal, it is typically for two reasons. Firstly, for a long sales cycle, the stakeholders may have forgotten what set you apart and why you were the lead proposal. New stakeholders may be involved who don’t know you or may even have been predisposed to your competitors.
In this situation, you should use a FOMO approach.
In a Fear of Missing Out Approach,” you want to reinforce your unique value proposition and convince them that they are missing out by not moving ahead. For example, will not acting now impact their ability to hit their goals next year? Will they miss out on special pricing? Will their competitors take advantage of their delay? Will their patients or members defect due to their inaction?
Another important element is to align your messaging with the hospital’s budget cycle. They may need a budgetary quote in October for instance.
It’s about overcoming inertia by reminding them why they are interested in you and creating urgency.
There is much you can do here. You can create account-specific case studies highlighting similar organizations’ success. Use this to remind them about the value proposition they embraced initially:
For example:
“By implementing our solution, a hospital similar to yours reduced readmission rates by 15% within six months”
The key is developing new ideas that reinforce the value they liked before.
2. Address the Fear of Messing Up (FOMU)
The second reason deals stall is FOMU – Fear of Messing Up.
And it’s likely to be the biggest reason why they are having second thoughts.
In the excellent book “The Jolt Effect,” Dixon Matthew and Ted McKenna show that most deals don’t stall because the customers have forgotten your value proposition but because of the personal risk the stakeholders are taking on.
If they hire you and you mess up, they could get fired.
This paralyzes some buyers. In many cases the buyer champion feels that it is less risky for them to do nothing than to take action and risk being accountable for a screw-up.
“If I do nothing and the organization does not hit its big corporate goals, it’s unlikely that they will pin it on my indecision. But if we move ahead and it goes wrong, it makes me a target for blame.”
You can overcome this by “de-risking” the selection.
For example, develop content that directly addresses implementation risks and mitigation strategies. It’s important to be realistic and lay out the risks. Your buyers are savvy and expect that things will go wrong.
It builds trust to show them you are empathetic with the risk that they are taking and you have mitigation strategies for this.
There are many ways you can calm their nerves:
- Create a “Risk Mitigation Playbook” outlining common implementation challenges and how your company addresses them
- Create programs where prospects are exposed to satisfied customers, such as dinner or reception. Nothing is more valuable than having a satisfied customer share how valuable your solution is to a prospect.
- Share best practice guides on implementation.
- By breaking down the work that needs to be done on the client and vendor sides, you can remove the fear that it is a massive project.
- Offer to introduce the key people who will be involved in the implementation so that they can establish confidence-building relationships.
- Offer pilot programs or phased rollouts to reduce perceived risk.
You can do so much once you put yourself in their shoes.
3. Maintain Visibility Through Nurture Campaigns
If the stakeholders are unresponsive, it’s time to go back to basics.
Design a long-term nurture program for stalled deals, focusing on thought leadership and industry trends. Use multi-channel approaches described in the section on deals in process, including email, social media, and retargeting ads.
For example, you could Send a monthly “Innovation in Healthcare” newsletter highlighting how your solution addresses emerging industry challenges.
Even if they do not respond directly to your sales team’s outreach, you will be able to tell if they are opening emails or going to account-specific landing pages.
4. Leverage Customer Advocacy
Who do you know, who knows them and will help you? This can be one of the most effective pipeline acceleration strategies.
Your most satisfied customers may be willing to help. Can you ask them to speak directly to prospects about their experiences? This will certainly help with the FOMU issue, and a peer’s outreach may get them to open up.
You may also want to include them in peer-to-peer events or roundtables for prospects to interact with current customers.
For example: “Host a virtual “Customer Success Spotlight” series where clients share their implementation journey and outcomes.
5. Reassess and Reprioritize
Some stalled deals may never resurface. They are just dead.
This happened to me when I was trying to expand an existing account.
We were doing great work for one division of a large firm. We were approached by the head of sales of the largest division, and they requested a proposal for them based on the work we were currently doing for the other division.
The proposal would double our business.
Over the course of three months, we had weekly meetings, including being introduced to the division President.
In my head, this deal was a cert, and I was making staffing plans accordingly. And then…
… the main stakeholder ghosted me.
This went on for weeks. I was pretty upset about it as I thought we had a good relationship.
It made my brain whir. What had I done wrong? What was happening internally that I didn’t know about?
He never got back in touch and eventually I moved on.
Don’t worry, we won enough other business to compensate for this.
I found out through the grapevine that the budget he thought he had wasn’t available to him for these purposes. I am guessing he was embarrassed about it and didn’t feel he could explain it to me. Or maybe he just was too busy. Humph!
The key thing is to reevaluate the true potential of stalled deals periodically.
If you have multiple stalled deals, use the intelligence you gather from the steps above to prioritize which to focus on.
You could develop a scoring system based on engagement metrics, intent data, and account fit to identify which stalled deals have the highest potential for revival.
If you categorize these based on a few criteria and a programmatic approach, you can be more efficient in your campaign building and effective in your outreach.
Measuring Sales Velocity
Long sales cycles and stalled deals are part and parcel of healthtech sales and marketing. I hope that by following some of the ideas above you can accelerate active deals and re-activate stalled.
One thing you should prioritize is measuring the “Big Picture.” You need to track sales velocity, measure pipeline acceleration, how deal lifecycles change over time, and do this by deal stage.
This is important. By being disciplined about this you will know whether you are being successful, what’s working and what isn’t.
We will cover how in a separate post, as it’s important and nuanced.
Give these ideas a try and let me know how it goes.
If you liked this post and want to learn more…
- Check out more posts like this in the Healthtech MarketingLearning Center. It is chock-full of articles like this on pipeline acceleration, use cases, how-to’s, and ideas. Check out our resource center dedicated to the Buyer Journey.
- Follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn. I publish videos and articles on ABM and healthtech marketing.
- See what other healthcare technology marketers are doing. Check out the State of ABM in Healthcare Technology.
- Buy Total Customer Growth: Our book on how to win and grow customers for life with ABM and ABX.
- Work with me directly. Let’s book a growth session and we can explore ways you can improve your marketing using the latest techniques in account-based marketing.