Summary of this blog
- A company selling software to providers rarely has a traffic problem. The usual picture is marketing run as a list of activities with no revenue number behind it. So the demo count drifts, the pipeline is a guess and the budget is spent by habit.
- The fix is a HealthTech growth strategy: a revenue goal worked back to demos, a named buyer and her committee, one message, two or three channels, a conversion path that holds, customers kept, and a small monthly dashboard. What comes out is qualified demos, pipeline and revenue the founder can forecast.
- Buyers research alone. Gartner found that 75 percent of business buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience. So the site, the content and the follow-up do the early selling before anyone speaks to her.
- Seven fixes, in order. Each is described below as what good looks like and what it changes, with a one-line test the founder can run first.
A HealthTech growth strategy is the plan that turns scattered marketing activity into qualified demos, pipeline and revenue. Most companies selling software to providers do not have one. They have a budget, an agency, a content calendar and a demo form. At the end of the quarter the demo count is flat and nobody can say why. The founder reads a report full of visits and rankings and cannot find the revenue in it. This guide shows what a plan built backwards from a revenue number looks like. Then it shows what that plan changes in demos booked, pipeline created and revenue closed within a quarter.
The buyer has changed the shape of the problem. Gartner found that 75 percent of business buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience. That means a clinician, a procurement lead or an executive has read the site and the case studies before she agrees to a call. Growth is decided in that reading. A company that spends on channels before it has a plan for that reading buys visitors it cannot convert. A HealthTech growth strategy puts the plan first and the spend second. The budget then buys demos the sales team wants to take.
This guide is written for the founder or marketing lead of a HealthTech or health software company selling to providers. Our pillar on choosing a HealthTech marketing agency covers what to look for in a partner, and our guide to a simplified health marketing strategy covers the one-page plan. This article is the HealthTech growth strategy for a company whose demos went flat. Seven fixes, each shown as what good looks like and what it changes, never a playbook to run alone.
A HealthTech growth strategy starts with one number the founder already has: the revenue target. From there it works back to the demos that target needs. Everything else in the plan exists to produce those demos at a cost the business can carry.
The one-line test
Write this quarter’s revenue target on one line. On the line beneath it, write the number of qualified demos that target needs. If nobody in the company can fill the second line in a minute, the strategy is missing. Every pound spent on marketing since the quarter began has been spent on hope. A team that can fill both lines has the start of a HealthTech growth strategy. The rest of this guide shows what the plan around those two lines looks like. Each of its seven fixes is shown with what it changes in the demo count by the end of the quarter.
1. Start from a revenue goal: where a HealthTech growth strategy begins
Growth plans in HealthTech tend to start with channels: a search programme, a conference, a paid campaign. Good looks like a plan that starts with the revenue number the board has already agreed and works backwards. The deals the target needs, the opportunities those deals need and the demos those opportunities need, all on one page before a channel is chosen. What it changes is the question the founder asks. The question stops being whether marketing is busy. The question becomes whether this month’s demos sit on the line that reaches the target. A HealthTech growth strategy that begins anywhere else is a list of activities with a budget attached.
The arithmetic, in words
Take the new revenue needed this year. Divide it by the value of a typical contract and you have the deals. The deals divided by the share of opportunities the team usually wins give the opportunities. Divide those by the share of demos that become opportunities and you have the demos. Spread the demos across the months left and you have the number marketing owes each month. Good looks like those four lines on one page, in the founder’s own figures, revisited quarterly. What it changes is the budget conversation. A monthly demo number turns a budget request into a cost per demo the board can weigh. Without it, a HealthTech growth strategy cannot say whether a channel works.
What guessing costs
The usual picture is a target set in revenue and a plan set in activities, with nothing joining them. The agency reports visits and rankings. Sales reports a pipeline that feels thin. Then the quarter ends with the target missed and no way to say which link failed. Too few demos, too few qualified, or too few won. Every month in that state costs the demos a plan would have produced. Good looks like a chain the founder can read in a minute, so a miss shows up in the month it happens. Our guide to HealthTech revenue marketing covers how marketing reports in the same currency as sales. A HealthTech growth strategy is that chain, written down and owned.
2. Define the buyer and the committee
A product sold to providers is bought by a committee. The clinician who will use it, the procurement lead who will contract it and the executive who will sign all have to say yes. Each needs to believe something different first. Good looks like a one-page buyer profile that names the champion and the three people she has to convince, and what each must believe before the deal moves. What it changes is the content and the conversation. Marketing stops writing for a vague decision-maker and starts arming one named person with her colleagues’ answers. Our guide to B2B HealthTech marketing covers the committee. A HealthTech growth strategy without a named buyer speaks to everyone and so to no one.
What each role needs to believe
The clinician needs to believe the product fits her day and does not add to it. A procurement lead needs to believe the contract is safe to sign and the price is defensible. The executive needs to believe the number the product moves is one she reports upward. Good looks like a profile with one sentence under each role: what she must believe, what she will ask, and the proof that answers her. What it changes is the demo. A champion who arrives with her committee’s objections already answered books the second meeting faster, and that meeting is where pipeline is made. A HealthTech growth strategy built on those three sentences produces fewer demos that stall after the first call.
Arm the champion with the blocker’s questions
The champion is usually the clinician or operations lead who found the product. She wants it and cannot buy it alone. Good looks like one page per blocker that she can forward without adding a word. The security summary for procurement, the business case for the executive, the rollout plan for the clinical director. What it changes is the sales cycle. A deal that used to wait while the champion hunted for answers moves in the week the pages are sent. At Healthora, we have seen that companies which write for the blocker as carefully as for the champion tend to see fewer deals go quiet after the first demo. A HealthTech growth strategy writes the blocker’s questions down first.
3. Sharpen positioning before you spend
Many companies that believe they have a traffic problem have a clarity problem dressed as one. Visitors arrive, read the first screen, cannot tell who the product is for or what it replaces, and leave. More spend brings more of the same visitors to the same unclear page. Good looks like one core message: who the product is for, the problem it solves and the alternative it beats. The whole company says it the same way. What it changes is the return on every channel that follows. A clear page converts the visitors the company already has before it pays for more. A HealthTech growth strategy fixes the message before it funds a single campaign.
One core message, said the same way everywhere
Good looks like a positioning line that names the buyer, the problem and the thing the buyer uses today. The line then appears unchanged on the homepage, in the deck, in the demo invitation and in the first minute of the sales call. A remote monitoring product might say: remote monitoring for heart failure services, run by your own nurses, in place of weekly phone rounds. What it changes is the demo request. A buyer who has read the same sentence three times arrives knowing what she is evaluating, and the demo starts at the product. The sentence is built once, by the founder and the people who sell. A HealthTech growth strategy then carries it into every channel unchanged.
The three-colleague test
Ask three colleagues, separately, to write the one sentence that says who the product is for and why it beats the alternative. Compare them. Good looks like three versions that differ in a word or two. The usual picture is three different products. One colleague leads with the technology, one with the outcome, one with the price, and the buyer meets all three in the same week. What it changes is spend. A company that passes the test can put its budget behind one message and measure it. One that fails is paying to confuse the buyer three ways. Run the test before approving any campaign. A HealthTech growth strategy that funds three messages funds none of them.
4. Pick the few channels that fit
A company with a clear message and a named buyer still has to choose where to meet her. Good looks like two or three channels matched to how the buyer researches, run well, in place of six channels run thinly. For a product sold to providers the default start is organic search, content that answers the committee’s questions, and the conversion work that turns readers into demos. Paid search joins when the decision-stage terms are known. What it changes is the cost of each demo and the attention of the team. A HealthTech growth strategy chooses the channels by where the buyer already looks, never by what the agency happens to sell.
Match the channel to the buyer’s research
The clinician asks peers and searches for the problem by name. Procurement leads search for comparisons and security questions. The executive reads what her peers forward to her. Good looks like a channel list drawn from those three habits. Pages that rank for the problem and the comparison, content written for the person who will forward it, and a follow-up sequence that keeps the champion moving. Google’s guidance on helpful content asks for pages written for people first: the same instruction. What it changes is waste. The conference nobody’s buyer attends and the social channel nobody’s buyer reads are cut. The budget goes where the committee is already looking. A HealthTech growth strategy earns its keep in that cut.
Sell the outcome, never the channel
The channel is never the promise. The usual picture is an agency selling a search programme, a content calendar or a paid campaign as the thing the company buys, reported in visits and rankings. Good looks like a plan that buys qualified demos each month at a cost the arithmetic in section one allows. The channels are only the means. What it changes is the agency conversation. A partner asked for demos reports demos, and a channel that produces none is cut however well it ranks. The founder stops approving activity and starts approving outcomes. A HealthTech growth strategy written this way survives a change of agency, because the plan belongs to the company and the channel is only hired.
A specialist’s read of your plan
Demos flat and a marketing report that never mentions revenue?
Book a free consultation with Healthora. We will work your revenue target back to the demos it needs. We will read your site and your follow-up as the clinician, the procurement lead and the executive would, and tell you plainly where the pipeline leaks. Then we will share the three HealthTech growth strategy fixes that would bring the most qualified demos first. You keep the list whether you decide to work with us or not. Healthora specialises in health, so the advice comes from plans that have been measured in pipeline rather than visits.
Book a Free Consultation5. Build a conversion path to pipeline
Traffic only matters for what it becomes. Between the page a buyer lands on and the demo on the calendar there is a path: landing page, form, confirmation, follow-up, booked call. Good looks like each step built for the committee and tested before any money is spent sending people down it. What it changes is the price of every demo. A path that loses most of its visitors at the form raises the cost of every channel feeding it. Fixing the form is cheaper than raising the budget. Our guide to healthcare conversion rate optimisation covers the method in depth. A HealthTech growth strategy fixes the leaks before it buys the water.
Where the path leaks
Nielsen Norman Group found that on an average visit readers get through at most 28 percent of the words on a page, so the first screen and the form carry the decision. Good looks like a first screen that names the buyer and the problem, and a form that asks only what sales needs. Then a confirmation that says what happens next, and a same-day follow-up carrying the page the champion needs. What it changes is the share of visitors who become demos, and the share of demos sales wants. A missing hold on a climbing wall stops the climb however strong the climber. A HealthTech growth strategy walks the path as the buyer would and fixes that hold first.
What a fixed path changes
At Healthora, we have seen this with a telemedicine brand we support on retainer. Fixing the path from landing page to form to follow-up brought more qualified demo requests from the same traffic. Good looks like a path the founder can walk on her own phone, from search result to confirmation email, with nothing on the way to make a procurement lead hesitate. What it changes is the order of spending. Conversion work comes first, channel spend second, and every later pound buys more because the path holds. Our case studies show the form the work takes. The leak is usually one missing step, so a HealthTech growth strategy starts with a walk-through rather than a redesign.
6. Keep customers and grow their value
Growth is cheaper from the customers the company already has. A provider that renews, expands to a second site or adds a second product costs a fraction of the marketing spend of a new logo, and tells the next buyer the product works. Good looks like onboarding that delivers the landing page’s promise within the first thirty days, an account plan that names the next expansion, and lifetime value read beside acquisition cost. What it changes is the revenue target in section one, because expansion revenue reduces the number of new deals the target needs. A HealthTech growth strategy counts the customer kept as a demo the company did not have to buy.
Onboarding delivers the promise in the first thirty days
The landing page made a promise and the demo repeated it. Onboarding is where the clinician finds out whether it was true. Good looks like a first month planned around the one result the champion promised her committee, with a named person responsible for her seeing it. The same words as the landing page, so nothing she reads after signing contradicts what she read before. What it changes is renewal and reference. A customer who saw the promised result in the first month renews without a negotiation and takes the reference call that wins the next deal. Churn in the first year is usually a marketing failure wearing an operations badge, and a HealthTech growth strategy treats it as one.
Lifetime value beside acquisition cost
Good looks like one line per customer segment on the monthly page: what it costs to win a customer in that segment and what she is worth over the contract. Read together, the two numbers tell the founder which segment to pursue and which to stop paying for. What it changes is where the growth budget goes. A segment that churns in the first year is cut however cheap its demos are. A segment that expands is funded however dear they are. No email copy is needed for this fix; the work is a page, a plan and a person. A HealthTech growth strategy that reads lifetime value beside acquisition cost stops confusing a cheap demo with a good one.
7. Measure what moves pipeline: the HealthTech growth strategy dashboard
A plan nobody measures is a wish. Good looks like a small monthly dashboard on one page: demand created, demos booked, the share of demos sales wanted, win rate, and revenue influenced, each beside the line the arithmetic requires. What it changes is the meeting. The monthly review stops being a tour of channels and becomes four questions. Are we on the demo line, are the demos qualified, are we winning them, and what do we change. Before any number reaches the site or a deck, a specialist checks every claim before it goes live. A HealthTech growth strategy is only as good as the page it is read from.
The four numbers on the page
Demand created: the named people from target accounts who asked for something this month, a guide, a comparison, a price. Demos booked: how many, against the monthly line. Win rate: the share of opportunities that closed, by segment. Revenue influenced: the contracts that touched marketing before they signed. Good looks like those four on one page the founder reads in a minute, last month beside them. What it changes is speed. At Healthora, we have seen that founders who read a small monthly page tend to change course earlier than those who wait for the quarterly board pack, while the demo line is still reachable. A HealthTech growth strategy that reports a long list reports nothing anyone reads.
What the dashboard protects
The figures on the dashboard also reach the website, the deck and the case study. A claim about a provider’s result is read by the clinician who will champion it, the procurement lead who will check it and the executive who will repeat it. Good looks like every published figure traced to its source, with a specialist checking each claim. This article is marketing guidance and never medical advice; anything the company says about care belongs to its clinical team. What it changes is trust, the asset the whole plan draws on. A figure the committee cannot verify costs more demos than it wins. A HealthTech growth strategy guards the numbers it publishes as carefully as the ones it chases.
HealthTech growth strategy in practice: seven fixes in order
A HealthTech growth strategy in practice begins with the one-line test at the top of this guide: the revenue target on one line and the demos it needs on the next. A plan for the next quarter contains the arithmetic on one page, the buyer profile and her committee, and one core message tested on three colleagues. Then two or three channels matched to how she researches, the conversion path walked and fixed, an onboarding plan that keeps the promise, and a monthly dashboard of four numbers. By the end of the quarter the founder can say which month missed and why. The demos are ones the sales team wants, and the board hears about pipeline rather than visits.
The seven fixes, in order
- Start from a revenue goal. Deals, opportunities, demos, then the monthly line marketing owes, revisited every quarter. A HealthTech growth strategy starts with the number the board already has.
- Define the buyer and the committee. One page that names the champion, the three people she must convince and what each must believe before the deal moves.
- Sharpen positioning before you spend. One core message, said the same way on the site, in the deck and on the call, tested on three colleagues. The HealthTech growth strategy fix that makes every channel cheaper.
- Pick the few channels that fit. Two or three matched to how the committee researches, bought as demos rather than activity. Organic search, content and conversion are the default start.
- Build the conversion path to pipeline. Landing page, form, confirmation, follow-up, walked as the buyer would and fixed before the budget grows. The HealthTech growth strategy fix with the fastest return.
- Keep customers and grow their value. Onboarding that delivers the promise in the first thirty days, and lifetime value read beside acquisition cost for every segment.
- Measure what moves pipeline. Four numbers on one page, read monthly, every published figure checked by a specialist before it goes live. The HealthTech growth strategy an owner can run.
Why a specialist gets there faster
The seven fixes can be made by the company’s own team, by a specialist, or by the two together. The difference is who has done the arithmetic before. A specialist in health has worked enough revenue targets back to demo lines to know where the chain usually breaks. She has read enough buying committees to know which blocker goes quiet. She has walked enough conversion paths to know which hold is usually missing. The fixes run side by side while the founder sells. Our services page describes what a HealthTech growth strategy engagement contains and how it is reported, in demos and pipeline.
A specialist in health understands that a company selling to providers is bought by a committee that researches alone and checks every claim. The revenue target already exists; the plan is what joins it to the demos the committee books. Work the number back, name the buyer and fix the message. Choose the few channels, close the leaks, keep the customer and read one page a month. Then a HealthTech growth strategy is the reason the demo count moves in the same quarter the plan is written.
Ready for a plan that starts at the revenue number?
HEALTHORA SPECIALISES IN HEALTH
Book a free consultation with Healthora. We will work your revenue target back to the demos it needs. We will read your site and your follow-up as the buying committee would, and show you where the pipeline leaks and which fix comes first. Then we will share the three HealthTech growth strategy changes that would bring the most qualified demos and pipeline first, whether you decide to work with us or not. You leave the call with the arithmetic on one page and the first fix named.
Book a Free ConsultationFrequently asked questions
What is a HealthTech growth strategy?
A HealthTech growth strategy is the plan that joins a revenue target to the demos, opportunities and deals it needs, and then says who the buyer is, what the message is, which channels will reach her, how the conversion path turns visitors into demos, how customers are kept, and which numbers are read each month. The measure is qualified demos, pipeline and revenue, never visits or rankings.
Why did our demo requests go flat?
Usually because marketing has been run as a list of activities with no revenue number behind it, so nobody can say how many demos the quarter needs or which step of the path is losing them. The fix starts with the arithmetic: revenue to deals to opportunities to demos. Then the conversion path is walked as a buyer would walk it. A HealthTech growth strategy makes the flat month visible in the month it happens.
How many demos does our revenue target need?
Divide the new revenue by the value of a typical contract for the deals, divide the deals by your win rate for the opportunities, and divide the opportunities by the share of demos that become opportunities. Spread the result across the months left in the year. Those are your own figures; no benchmark replaces them, and a HealthTech growth strategy revisits them every quarter as the contract value and the win rate move.
Which marketing channels work best for a HealthTech company selling to providers?
The ones that match how the buying committee researches. Gartner found that 75 percent of business buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience, so for most companies the default start is organic search, content that answers the committee’s questions, and the conversion work that turns readers into demos, with paid search added once the decision-stage terms are known. Two or three channels run well beat six run thinly.
Should we fix our website before increasing the marketing budget?
Yes. Nielsen Norman Group found that on an average visit readers get through at most 28 percent of the words on a page, so the first screen, the form and the follow-up decide most demos. A path that leaks raises the cost of every channel feeding it. A HealthTech growth strategy fixes the conversion path first and grows the budget second, so each later pound buys more.
How do we measure whether the growth strategy is working?
Four numbers on one page, read monthly: demand created, demos booked against the monthly line, win rate by segment and revenue influenced. Each is compared with the line the revenue target requires. A specialist checks every figure before it is published on the site or in a deck. A HealthTech growth strategy leaves visits and rankings off the page, because they say nothing about whether the quarter will land.
What does Healthora charge for a HealthTech growth strategy?
Fees depend on scope. At the small end, the arithmetic worked back from your revenue target with a written list of the fixes in order. At the large end, a HealthTech growth strategy engagement that builds the buyer profile, the message, the channel plan, the conversion path and the monthly dashboard, and runs them. The consultation is free and includes the one-line test on your own numbers, whether you decide to work with us or not.
Keep reading
More on HealthTech growth strategy and the people who run it. These three guides cover when a growth consultant pays for herself and what to ask before hiring one, how to choose between an agency and an in-house team by the stage the company is at, and what a fractional marketing lead does for a company between two stages of growth: