You did it. After years of designing, testing, modifying, re-designing, re-testing, etc., you finally launched your health tech product into the world. You’ve dreamed for a long time about offering something to the industry that does so much for so many, and now it’s finally a reality.

Unfortunately, while you know your product can make a real difference, physicians and purchasing committees don’t seem to care.

It’s not your fault. You had a passion to help. Perhaps you thought if you created something that truly aided healthcare providers, that people would find you, or at least you thought getting it in front of them would be a little easier.

In truth, it can be, if you focus on these often neglected steps:

1. Write to the Right Person About What They Truly Care About

The problem for most struggling health tech founders is they’re so close to their product, they can’t see it through their customers’ eyes. They don’t know how to translate information about their solution into language that attracts their ideal prospects.

But you can catch these busy people’s attention if your website and emails make a clear connection between what you’re offering and the specific problems it solves for these customers.

Dave was facing these problems with his digital biotech company. The idea of using technology to help prevent dementia had been burning in his mind and heart for almost a decade. He envisioned a platform that would enable clinicians to identify changes in patients’ speech and help detect early indicators of disease.

Years of research, design and development went into launching his company, and he went to market with a tool able to help prevent neurodegeneration in those who are vulnerable.
But after months of networking and sales meetings, the thrill of the launch was only a memory. Dave had to face the fact that his platform wasn’t getting traction.

He couldn’t understand it. Considering the size of the market, the hundreds of thousands of people who knew they faced dementia and all the physicians who treated them, shouldn’t he have thousands of doctors and health systems banging down his door?
He should, but they weren’t. He watched as his funding dwindled, knowing he wasn’t attracting enough inquiries to even begin to reverse the situation. He had a serious problem and needed to solve it – fast.

In his first session, Dave learned the fatal flaws of his approach to communicating:

  • His website proposals and social media all spoke to the features of his product, not the pain of the problem he solved and the ease with which he solved it.
  • He hadn’t been explaining the life benefits after the implementation along with the cost savings long term.
  • Without realizing it, he had been assuming his audience would somehow mentally translate lists of facts about his platform into the solutions they needed.

Over the next two months the way that Dave and his team communicated received a substantial facelift:

  • Combining their knowledge of the market, they reworked their sales and marketing to speak directly to the problems most concerning to their audience.
  • They revised all marketing content to use the language geriatricians, primary care physicians and neurologists would find relatable.
  • They incorporated stories that vividly illustrate how the platform is a means to early diagnoses and provided instruction in how it can be used in preventative care protocols.
  • And they made an important mental shift: Instead of developing marketing documents to sell, they began to think of them as opportunities to inform, educate and provide value for their audience.

Within two months, things turned around. Focusing on market relevant content, Dave started to notice that prospects were initiating contact. Leads were pouring in. Over the following six months, his company had boosted revenue by more than $370,000. His anxiety about running out of money is now gone, and he’s happy to report his dream of making a difference for people at high risk of dementia is alive and well.

2. Get the Message Right


Health tech is a competitive industry and making your message heard over all the noise can quickly grow into a labor-intensive operation. Your energy gets sucked into various marketing initiatives that may or may not help you connect with prospects, and you may feel uncertain about your approach or how to determine what’s actually working so you can do more of it.

This is a common problem for startups, but luckily it’s solvable. The trick is to understand your customers so well that you know their problems better than they know them themselves. That’s how you create messaging that resonates with the individuals who most need your solution right now.

And that’s how Will made his marketing work for his company — instead of the other way around. He’d developed a remarkably effective billing platform to help small healthcare providers improve reimbursement from insurance companies, but his marketing efforts just weren’t producing.

Fortunately, this was a simple fix.  Like I suggest to all my clients, he really just needed to pick up the phone to understand. The next week Will made several phone calls to past customers and gathered details about exactly how his solution helped – from their perspective. He asked questions that helped him get to know them more as people, not just as customers. This gave him the nuanced understanding he needed to speak more effectively to his prospects. 

Now, Will truly knows his target market. When he goes to networking events – which had always been so frustrating before – he knows exactly what to say. Because he knows where his best potential customers hang out, he can focus less time on fewer events because they’re the right ones. Now, the person who never liked networking loves it. 

And his business is exploding. Turns out a lower-effort approach can produce higher-quality results. Will’s customer roster has expanded by 47 and revenue has increased as well, from high five figures to nearly $700,000. Knowing how to take on marketing gives him confidence. He looks into his company’s future and feels like the sky is the limit. 


3. Share the Information in the Right Places

Taking your offering to market requires different skills from the ones you used to design and develop your technology. Too often founders launch with loads of enthusiasm, only to come to the painful realization that the feeling isn’t reciprocated.

Their valuable offering falls on deaf ears and a demoralizing reckoning sets in.

The good news is that the deaf ears were really just the wrong ears, and with a little insight into your customers, it’s often much easier than you think to reach your exact right prospect at the exact right time.

Susan’s experience illustrates how that works. Her career in software as a service (SaaS) combined with the frustrations she’d experienced interacting with her doctors lit a fire in her belly.

She knew a provider’s patient portal could aggravate patients, and the inconveniences they experienced as a result created a negative experience and could even prompt them to look for a new doctor. She became nearly obsessed with an idea for how she could help healthcare providers do better for their patients.

She plowed her family’s life savings into the endeavor, hiring the best developer available. They worked nights and weekends for a year to finish the tool. Tapping her network, she was able to secure her first several customers quickly, but at that point she was unsure how to expand the roster.

She experimented with content marketing, trying a “post and pray” strategy, but it was not working.

Unfortunately, after two and a half months of spending 15+ hours per week writing and managing her marketing, she had no serious prospects to show for her efforts. The several clients she’d landed just weren’t going to be enough to keep the lights on for much longer.

And then life happened: her husband was laid off and her family’s only source of income dwindled down to his unemployment payments.

The stress of the situation was overwhelming, making creative thinking around new approaches to reaching and securing prospective customers feel impossible.

Fortunately in the first session, she had a valuable realization. No matter how good her content was, if it didn’t get in front of the right people, she may as well have not bothered. Instead, she needed to spend less time writing new blog posts and more time discovering where her ideal customers would be looking for a solution like hers.

Turns out fewer content pieces leveraged the right way could do more work. Today, her client list has grown exponentially, all with inbound inquiries. As a result, her company managed to bring in just over a million dollars in the year after re-tooling her marketing. She’s been able to close that stressful financial gap for her family, and the relief she feels has energized and excited her about what’s possible for the future of her business.

Healthcare is a tough business.

But you can apply the passion you have for helping the industry to the marketing problem and come out on top. You just need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and understand key tactics for reaching them.

It is doable. Taking it on will put you ahead of many of your competitors. If you’d like more custom guidance, you can schedule a free call with me by clicking here: https://calendly.com/irenehatchett/45min