CEO Coach, Strategic Advisor & Chairman | Driving Growth & Scaling Leadership, Teams & Businesses in Healthcare & Technology.
No one in the NHS wakes up thinking about you. They’re just trying to survive the week. Their best HCP just quit. The IT system's down again. Their waiting list has doubled. And now you want 15 minutes to demo your AI? We often think our biggest challenge is explaining what our product does. It’s not. Our 'real' challenge is making them care enough to listen. Because here’s what HealthTech sales actually looks like: You’re not competing with another vendor. You’re competing with the status quo. You’re competing with fatigue. With firefighting. With the slow drip of decision inertia that’s baked into a 75-year-old institution designed to mitigate risk and protect patients. They’re not ignoring you because your tech is bad. They’re ignoring you because their world is busier than yours. So what works? Start with relevance. Not relevance to you, relevance to them: their week, their stress, their KPIs, their patients. Don’t pitch “improved workflows”. Show them how you’ll give their team back two hours on a Monday. The kind of Monday where they’re short-staffed, the printers are down, and they’re already six beds over. Don’t talk about “optimising data”. Tell them how you’ll stop three people chasing the same discharge summary. Because right now, that’s 90 minutes of phone calls, corridor conversations, and passive-aggressive emails. Don’t say you “improve patient outcomes”. Say you’ll flag deteriorating patients before someone has to run a crash call. Don’t say your tool “drives efficiency”. Say you remove the daily migraine of logging into four systems just to find out a patient’s still in radiology. And don’t talk about “more data for better decisions”. They’re drowning in dashboards already. Say you’ll surface the one piece of information that prevents today’s handover becoming tomorrow’s complaint. The NHS doesn’t want more innovation. It wants fewer problems to manage. That’s it. If you can prove that. You’ve earned that 15 minutes.
Those last couple of lines are gold. When I was doing data protection in the NHS I spent a lot of time assessing products that cause as many if not more problems than they attempted to fix.
Very well said, cannot be said any better, it’s really how NHS transformation will and can work - as you said, we must making them care enough to listen, because they are really tired of fire-fighting, serious lack of funds, whilst hearing daily that they still need to make savings!
This is so hard to actually do but it's the reality. I come across really innovative solutions from companies which want to be 'software only' and are desperately looking for partners to fill the gap. Said partners are only really interested in scaling up proven software solutions with proven implementation methodologies and proven benefits. (i.e. a 'safe bet') It's a real world problem.
Interesting words Kevin McDonnell and I see the sense in what you've said. It's such a shame the basics don't work. If they did then there could be the much needed innovation in the NHS. We barely have a network at work. And I really mean network, not internet. How can we possibly get things done when local services don't work. There is this Microsoft CoPilot trial about to happen but if we can't even connect then what's the point.
Really important message Kevin. Firefighting is the normal now. Most people on the front line would love something to ease that burden. Like you said their time is so precious those 15minutes need to show them how things can be better not just talking about a dream of better. 15 game changing minutes!
Definitely worth reading, and I completely agree! Thank you. I would say this is not only for NHS, but also almost every healthcare organization, regardless of the level... Fatigue and information overload is everywhere - to get the right information across: that is the point.
as someone who used to buy in NHS I fully agree
love your post. I laughed out loud when I read: “And now you want 15 minutes to demo your AI?“ We’re all just trying to get the data 100% accurate and beautiful to feed existing products as fast as we can.
It is an accurate take. If you are not solving an immediate pain point, you are just adding to the noise.
Operations Manager and IT Lead
4moI think your premise is correct, your solution is wrong. Healthtech sales should be ALL about asynchronous demonstration. You want a doctors time? It won't be on your business' terms. Make your product intuitive enough and allow people to play with it, to understand. The real problem I see with healtech sales is that it is a sales and when you deal with the most earnest of subjects, with candour as a fundamental - a sales pitch doesn't fit in. A concise and clinical demonstration would be my ideal. But I get that I really need to live in the real world, and developing a working test system that can be safely demonstrated is as big as having and selling the product itself.