We started a consultancy company 4 months back with two medium sized projects that we got as individual freelancers.
We have the expertise and experience in healthcare technology ( FHIR, interoperability ), which is a niche. But now we have zero leads from last month. We cannot figure out how to reach the potential interested clients who need this technology.
B2B consultant here for 30 years weighing in with broad truths:
* If you are waiting on leads, you die. You create leads -- every day, as your top business priority -- by working to inform and educate people. You deliver value now (information, education) to capture value (a sale) later.
* This is going to mean talking to strangers. It's going to mean experimenting with ads, native advertising, figuring out which channels your buyers frequent, etc. The failure-to-success ratio will be high and that, as painful as it is, is fine. It's part of the process.
* As others have indicated: Don't assume you can just hire someone to do sales or marketing. If the founders don't fully understand the value proposition and the pain points of potential clients, it's very hard to succeed.
* You're new and that means you're likely small. You're also specialized. Consider throwing effort at partnering with larger players who have cracked the code, have a steady stream of clients but don't have your expertise. Subconsulting is profitable and a way to keep the doors open while you figure out how to hunt and kill your own work.
* Your rates have to be high enough to support you with 50%+ of your time unsold/unbooked. During that unsold/unbooked time? You are marketing. With the possible exception of sending out invoices, nothing else is as important.
Fellow B2B Consultant here. I had the thread open to find some time to return and add my thoughts and experience.
Everything you’ve said is spot on, and I think you’ve hit everything of substance. Growing a consulting (even a tailored tech solution) business means making it a sales business first and foremost - you can prioritize delivery if you reach a point you want to plateau, but 0 leads is not that point.
Great advice. On point 4 (partner with larger players) don’t be afraid to market yourselves as subcontractors/subconsultants to companies and coworkers you’ve worked with in the past. Even if you know they already have the expertise, consulting work has ebbs and flows so they often can use some additional staff when there is high project demand, especially in more complex or niche projects.
I'm an asocial geek and even I've observed that sales or creating leads is the top priority. The best startups I've seen on my end over here in Europe have been one sales guy and one tech guy.
As a specialist, do you partner with large firms like Accenture, Deloitte, etc? Or 2nd tier firms? And how formal do these partnerships need to be (ie word of mouth, contract)?
Hey, thanks for these comments. I was wondering, if someone wanted to do a deep dive into consulting especially for government agencies, and has little to no sales experience do you know of any books that are really good?
Lots of condescending negativity in the comments here. Although a lot of it is true, it's not necessarily helpful.
I've been through this exact frustration, read everything there is on the topic, and have discovered things that work and things that don't.
First and foremost - DO NOT go hire anyone to do this for you. No one can. You MUST learn to sell your own products and services, there is no way around it. And no one can do it better than you.
Second, avoid paid advertising before you've learned how to generate high-ticket sales WITHOUT it.
Paid ads and sales people are for scaling only, once you've got your offer and your messaging down to a proven working system.
The good news is, you can get started easily and you can see results quickly, without spending a fortune on anyone or anything.
If you'd like some hand-holding through this, ping me at [email protected]
The deal with an X consulting shop is simple: you're now a salesperson first and an X second. If you don't like that reality, or expend effort appropriately, your small consultancy is very likely going to fail. That goes squared for selling into the upper midmarket / low enterprise, which is what healthcare software almost always is.
This is good advice. When you are just two people doing consulting services then you need to do your own sales probably starting with a bunch of cold calls.
At some level of scale (obviously not zero clients), a client services person can be useful for chasing down POs, checking in on clients regularly, etc. But in my experience at a couple of consulting firms, a "sales person" has trouble even selling standard packages on their own. And they really have no way at all of selling one-off projects.
This is an incredibly common story among people in tech who learn the skills to build great things and believe that's enough to start a company. Being good at building tech is only half the story. You can write the best code, build the best apps, and design the most amazing UX, but if you can't market your business and sell to people you won't make any money. To run a successful company you need to be good at getting your message in front of people who buy what you're selling.
I don't have an answer beyond the advice that you should always be marketing, generating leads, and selling even when you think you have years worth of work in the pipeline.
Not to mention that it's a common misconception in technology that a company creates value by shipping increasing complexity to the customer. I.e. "this is what we have built, this is how we know how to extend it with more features, now let's figure out how to sell that."
Starting with an idea and trying to market it is the opposite of what to do. Instead, figure out what problems your potential customers have (by talking to them!) and then set about solving those problems with as little technology and ceremony as possible.
Once you're done with that, your potential customers are practically already lined up, because they were the ones who ordered your solution in the first place.
Edit: The key thing is that in the initial exploration of the problem space, you are not selling anything. Those discussions are all about the potential customer. You have to put yourself into their minds and view yourself from the outside.
They will be really insecure. Both because they are not ready to buy something any time soon, and because they don't want to reveal sensitive information to an arbitrary third party.
You know that you care about them and their business deeply, so it's easy for you to assume that everything you say comes from a good place. They don't know that yet – and worse, they're used to awful salespeople that just want to trick them into buying more complexity – so they will interpret everything you say in the most dismissive way possible. You have to show that you're different and that you're not in it to sell stuff, but that you have a genuine interest in understanding their business, in which they are the expert.
This is seriously hard but something that can be practised.
You can write the worst code, build the worst apps, and design the most terrible UX, but if you can market your business and sell to people you can still make money.
Yes Marketing is the main challenge as you say, not technology ( for us ).
Searching LinkedIn is our only bet which is difficult.
Also we think posting google ads won't be of much use. Am I mistaken?
> You can write the best code, build the best apps, and design the most amazing UX, but if you can't market your business and sell to people you won't make any money.
This reminds me of a comment I read here: "It's why Google salespeople make more money than Google engineers."
Start cold calling. Collect names. Fill a rollodex. Don't stop. Fill another. Follow up in person.
Ask about what's in their current budget. What's coming down the pipeline. How they currently handle work in your area. See their physical infrastructure. Know what the decision maker's office looks like. Get a sense of their actual problems and assure them that you can mitigate them.
Get your ass to work. Out of the chair. In the car and cheap motels. Stop pretending there are clients on Hacker News. There aren't. It's just easier to post here than cold call.
This. In my previous company, I did ~3k cold calls to get it off the ground. In my current one, ~1k cold calls. Get on the phone. Yes it's painful, so what
You won't find clients in a niche like this by setting up a website and waiting for them to show up. When clients need custom development, they turn to recommendations from friends or they turn to industry leaders. They usually don't have the expertise to evaluate a new player on their own.
So you need to either establish yourself as a recommended friend (by networking and/or completing successful projects) or as an industry leader. For the latter, you could use strategies like blogging on how a facility should deploy or consume FHIR, write about best practices in interoperability, or whatever. That might lead to people asking you questions and eventually lead to them asking for help with projects.
If you don't know many people in the industry yet, one way to get to know more people might be to partner with another company on a dev project where they need extra help. It might not be as exciting as getting your own project, but you have to start somewhere.
I have a company in this niche and may need help with FHIR and related dev work in the future. Feel free to send me an email to the details in my profile and introduce yourself.
I'm CTO at one of your target firms. Integration is a major pain point for us. We don't have a need for you now, but I've noted a few things based on what I could find on Alstonia.io. My needs are different than others, but hopefully this helps. If any consultant or agency wants someone like me to hire you, I want to see that they have used the tech we use, that I can estimate your cost reliably, that they're reliable people in general and that I can understand the code they write. The stuff about security and high availability/fault tolerance kind of comes as a matter of course.
You can check a lot of those boxes by 1) some content on your website describing previous projects (like whitepaper PDFs or long-form blog posts), 2) GitHub projects, 3) references/testimonials. Then give a giant call to action form including asking for a phone number (I hate giving out my phone number, but it seems like everyone requires it, so I imagine it would help you more than not).
Note that these needs are very different then what I'd need from an employee. For instance, I can invest in employees and give them time to learn our tech. For consultants, I can't.
Hi there, I'm someone who builds and buys SMART on FHIR tech, albeit small potatoes in the space. A few thoughts from checking out your site to see if I should follow up with you, I hope these are helpful.
1. WHo are you? Your site says nothing about you. I'm going to give you the keys to the PHI kingdom, I need to know who's soliciting me. Are you two twenty-somethings with amazing skills and ideas, or 20 ex-Epic employees looking to fill a particular gap you found? Without this general information I wouldn't know what sort of project to think about including you in.
2. Where are you? I'm under contract with numerous health agencies that require data to be on US soil. I have no idea if you are in Romania or Virginia. (Side note, government is the biggest purchaser of health care and therefore your paths will cross at some point, even if it's simply being downstream of federal or state data.)
3. How compliant are you? Your one page tells me nothing about your understanding of HIPAA, nor how you ensure the security and privacy of the data you will be exposed to. It may seem as if anyone in the space _should_ know about this and the reader can assume compliance, but frankly it's not the case. Yell at me about your third-party audits, your ability to transact PHI, as well as any SOC/FISMA compliance you have.
4. What have you done before? There are a lot of corners in the niche, and I'd need to know what systems you've worked with, what you've built and who for, so I can get an understanding of whether or not you'd be a good fit.
As for leads, with most conferences going virtual your usual approach of HIMSS is buggered, but Healthcare Datapalooza just put out a call for presentations so they're likely looking for (virtual) sponsors already. I assume HIMSS and HCDP sell attendee data, have you looked in to that? And how about FHIR aggregators like 1up and Redox, they are likely plugged in to many of your potential customers.
I'd be happy to chat more, my profile has an E-mail address you can use. Good luck with your venture!
EDIT - forgot to mention, starting out a great way to get noticed is to participate on a HIT Challenge, not sure what's up for grabs lately but challenge.gov - easy way to find the right people to start netowrking with.
Having had some exposure to the healthcare interop niche before -- this whole response is great.
Came here to say #1, which is articulated well here. Basically, who are you and why should I trust you -- the info I need in order to assess that would include at minimum your experience (detailed, like you worked with X tech on Y problem with Z firm, not high level fluff) but could also include your background (experience working at $EMR, managed $TECH at $HOSPITAL, studied or taught healthcare tech at $SCHOOL).
I'm sort of looking for your resume. The fact that it's NOT here makes me think it's not all that impressive (sorry to be so negative).
I worked in this space for 12 years, this is one of two or three “correct” replies in this thread.
OP, you’re in a pretty niche market (albeit a largish niche). standard marketing advice isn’t going to do you a lot of good here. look for the responses coming from people who have anxious experience in HIT and take whatever advice they’re offering.
Meta-advice, don't take all the advice here too seriously :) People here don't know you situation as well as you do, and following too many different advice will lead you to not have any consistent direction.
So here are my humble thoughts on the website. I have no expertise in healthcare technology, so maybe that's the reason, but I could not understand what types of problems you are solving and what you are doing from your website.
1. For example, 'Reimagining Healthcare' is an empty phrase. All your sentences seem vague to me: "Comprehensive Healthcare Solutions and Integrations with FHIR, HL7 and SMART", are you consulting on how to create these solutions? are you developing these solutions? are you selling a created solution? Are you integrating somebody's else solution?
2. There is not a lot of connection to your company in your texts:
> Healthcare Data Interoperability and Analytics
> Standards like SMART and FHIR allow healthcare providers to store and share data in an interoperable manner which enables organizations to derive insights to provide effective care efficiently.
This is a good description of these standards and why they are important, but what is your connection here? If you are using these standards, then mention it directly. Maybe something like this is better:
> We use standards like SMART and FHIR to allow healthcare providers...
All other texts in Services section have the same problem.
3. I don't understand the Solutions section. It looks like a collection of icons and slogans. Let's take one example: Cloud. So I can guess that you are developing your solutions to be deployed on the cloud. But why make clients guess? Write it directly and mention why this is good. "Our solutions are deployed on cloud. This is good because <...>.".
4. This is just a suggestion. I would add a section of Problems that you can solve. Client come to your sites with problems. So I would write: "1. You have problem X? We can solve it by doing Y."
Overall, you have to think from the eyes of the client. What is the client looking for?
But again, I do not know anything about your field. I don't know who your clients, what problems they have, and what technology you are building. So you should be very quick to ignore this advice if you think I don't have the necessary understanding.
adam, i liked the way you wrote this feedback.. I was asking to myself how can I get similar one in this portfolio: http://bit.ly/bix-technology if you dont mind. Thanks in advance.. [email redacted]
So, I work in pretty much this exact area. The main issue is you're trying to sell something that customers don't buy - any integration, FHIR or HL7 or something, is only ever needed to get one product to talk to another. Usually a new one to talk to the old one; and the business selling the new product is the one in whose interest it is to get the integration working.
While it's always possible to take existing kit and do more/better automation, this kind of operational improvement tends to have little to no budget unless there's some specific project being undertaken (e.g. going to structured reporting). Generally, although people are often unhappy with internal software, the business will be operating as-is pretty comfortably. You'd need to deliver an awful lot of value to make it worthwhile paying you what you need.
I would probably look to better define your customer. You might have a better shout trying to approach ISVs who are selling new healthcare products, and asking them to use you as a delivery partner. Many ISVs have weak deployment teams and cannot deal with complex integrations, but they will be the ones with a customer and a contract. If you can speed up time to implementation, they get paid quicker and can do more.
I agree it's important to define your customer, although when starting out it can be difficult to do so as it brings a sense of closing some doors that you might want open for a bit longer, but in general I'd say your comment:
>you're trying to sell something that customers don't buy - any integration, FHIR or HL7 or something, is only ever needed to get one product to talk to another
is not entirely correct. I for one buy small scale interop product, and the FHIR space is growing quickly, more and more companies will be looking for small and medium activity in the space as new regulation starts taking hold.
I am going to be blunt. If you can’t get the people you used to work for to hire you or recommend you to their contacts then you are going to fail. Get on the phone to everyone you have ever worked for (assuming you left a good impression) and chase those leads.
Our existing client is very happy with our quality of service. However we never approached them directly about referring or providing us leads. Show we do that?
Exactly. For the past decade, we have been in a declining economy with no upward mobility for individuals.
So anyone who has money now already has an existing network of suppliers to keep their business running smoothly. They don't need new suppliers.
Those who have money by now don't need your expertise. If you don't have connections by now, you have no chance.
The game of capitalism is over and the results are in. If you're a billionaire, congrats, you won the game!
If you don't have your own successful business, you lost the game!
Something that hasn't been pointed out yet as far as I can tell is that there are accessibility and quality errors on your website. If I am looking to hire somebody it's one of the things I look at when I want to see if they know what they are doing. Not everybody is like me, but these problems are worth fixing anyway:
- The "Explore" button is a span with a click handler, the click handler updates the URL hash. It's not keyboard focusable, and since it's just a link to a different location in the page, it could just be a link, but if it must be JS, it needs to be a button element.
- The form does not have accessible labels. Placeholder text is not a label. Also "fullname" looks like an error.
Lighthouse reports some other low hanging fruit.
Overall vibe of that website is that somebody chose some readily-available bootstrap landing page template and didn't check it for basic errors. That combined with the scant information about the company & the fact that your website is really just a single page does not inspire confidence. Even in the small amount of copy that is on the site, there are three errors in this one sentence:
"Healthcare providers will need an infracstructure what is open, interoperable and standards-compliant, which ensures the security, confidentiality and privacy of presonal data."
If you are not spellchecking your copy & shipping valid HTML for a single web page you make for yourselves, it would be wrong of me to expect higher quality in something you are hired to build. FHIR and HIPAA are tough and I have a ton of respect for you for being able to work in that context. The quality of your website should reflect the high standard you bring to that work.
Talk as much as you can to your potential customers about their problems in your area of expertise & try to best align. Try to identify, understand and solve points-of-friction from these conversations.
Where to find potential customers? I'd try in following order:
- Talk to existing customers / contacts for referrals
- Talk to your past colleagues / friends for referrals
- Quality cold emails with decent research & pre-work
- Hang out on social wherever your potential customers hang-out and engage in meaningful conversations.
You may not strike success right away but do persist & keep identify what's working / not working. Follow-up regularly. If above gets tiring once-in-a-while - write content that can market your expertise.
Background : Been offering website speed / scalability services expertise for 3+ years.
Do: Build your visibility and credibility. Fish where the fish are. Where are your target buyers spending their time and getting their information? Find a way to publish there.
Figure out who are the best connected people in your network or vicinity and talk to them, let them know you're taking on projects and be clear in what kind of projects you can help with. Make it easy for them to refer you.
I do work in a similar space. You need to talk to the safe contacts within your clients who may know other people in the industry who are working on similar things and ask for intros.
Healthcare is really hard to sell into, that is why a few companies own so much of the paying field. The hospital system I worked for had 2,4 and 5 year cycles for their contracts, so things didn't the often and vendors had to be around at the right time to get consideration. It seemed very bizarre and antiquated to me. My best advice would be to to find vendors that have adjacent solutions and partner with them, maybe making their own sales funnel easier.
If what you do can be sold to doctor's offices instead of hospitals, that's where I would start cold calling people.
Every doctor's office is a small business. They aren't that good at the business end of things and their HIPAA training tends to be poor compared to what hospitals do.
If you can figure out how to educate doctors on why this matters and what the rules are and how you can solve their problems, I think that's your best shot at developing a solid customer base.
Larger healthcare organizations, like hospitals and insurance companies, do their own in-house training and custom solutions. It's doctors offices that can't afford their own IT department but still need to comply with things like HIPAA that are in a world of hurt and could benefit from someone coming in and serving as their part-time IT department and staff expert.
I’ve often wondered if an opinionated solution — in the Rails sense — would sell to SMEs in healthcare. Ask any physician group in the US what their pain point is and it’s probably reimbursement. They have to deal with finicky rules from different insurance providers, and usually employ a couple people dedicated to getting reimbursed. They also have to wait long periods of time for those reimbursements.
A company that could promise to improve that situation by standardizing how the practice operates and optimizing reimbursement could have a great sales value. You could also standardize data sharing/HIPAA practice.
Personally I've been researching in healthcare mainly on CVD for the past five years.
Coming from outside healthcare, I was really shocked initially on how primitive the technology in clinics and hospitals as if they are still in the 1980s especially in the hospital management and operation. I've come to conclusion that healthcare is a very well-funded area and it's ripe for disruption. Consider these scenarios in where I live:
You want a digital copy of your ECG reading, nope they give you the paper based reading of several seconds recording that will lose their ink in a few months time.
You want to transfer your health data record to another hospital or clinic, nope that's impossible since the hospitals or clinics don't perform any proactive data sharing even between government's hospitals, paper based or digitally.
You want the over crowded hospital outpatient section to send you SMS or at least make an online/website call numbers, nope you have to wait physically, and if you've missed your turn when you're away then you are basically screwed.
You have a disabled family member who cannot even move to attend the hospital, nope you need to pay expensive third party doctor to make a visit to your house.
I think you get the idea by now, and since your expertise in healthcare IT and depending on where do you live just talk to the hospital management or govt appointed organization (e.g. NHS in the UK) about any of the above issues and how you can you solve the above mentioned problems or others for the benefit of hospitals/clinics and the society in general.
1- Offer over funnels : Funnels are important, but if I have to choose between a funnel or an offer, I’d choose the OFFER FIRST. You can close 6/5 figure deals over text message, PDFS, ugly 1-page websites, and emails. The offer is the key. Don’t create offers that you “think” people will like, instead, find out exactly what they want, do some digging… and give them exactly what they are looking for, and don’t overthink it.
2- It’s not all about the “one close call” : High Ticket clients have a different psychology. Part of attracting high-paying clients is knowing what triggers them to buy (exclusivity, high perceived value, emotional, psychological, time investment, etc..)
3- Don’t sell, select : Everything in your funnel should be designed with you SELECTING them, not you begging for their business.
4- Break the rules! You can go through copying what works, and try it out to get some quick success but eventually you’ll get to a point where you create something new in the marketplace, and you are the first one to offer it (angle wise, position wise, offer wise), so take it! First mover advantage is risky, but that’s where all the upside is, if you get it right.
[+] [-] gwbrooks|5 years ago|reply
* If you are waiting on leads, you die. You create leads -- every day, as your top business priority -- by working to inform and educate people. You deliver value now (information, education) to capture value (a sale) later.
* This is going to mean talking to strangers. It's going to mean experimenting with ads, native advertising, figuring out which channels your buyers frequent, etc. The failure-to-success ratio will be high and that, as painful as it is, is fine. It's part of the process.
* As others have indicated: Don't assume you can just hire someone to do sales or marketing. If the founders don't fully understand the value proposition and the pain points of potential clients, it's very hard to succeed.
* You're new and that means you're likely small. You're also specialized. Consider throwing effort at partnering with larger players who have cracked the code, have a steady stream of clients but don't have your expertise. Subconsulting is profitable and a way to keep the doors open while you figure out how to hunt and kill your own work.
* Your rates have to be high enough to support you with 50%+ of your time unsold/unbooked. During that unsold/unbooked time? You are marketing. With the possible exception of sending out invoices, nothing else is as important.
[+] [-] JacobAldridge|5 years ago|reply
Everything you’ve said is spot on, and I think you’ve hit everything of substance. Growing a consulting (even a tailored tech solution) business means making it a sales business first and foremost - you can prioritize delivery if you reach a point you want to plateau, but 0 leads is not that point.
[+] [-] yed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] INTPenis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tixocloud|5 years ago|reply
As a specialist, do you partner with large firms like Accenture, Deloitte, etc? Or 2nd tier firms? And how formal do these partnerships need to be (ie word of mouth, contract)?
[+] [-] ablekh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pandabob|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dimmke|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jd115|5 years ago|reply
I've been through this exact frustration, read everything there is on the topic, and have discovered things that work and things that don't.
First and foremost - DO NOT go hire anyone to do this for you. No one can. You MUST learn to sell your own products and services, there is no way around it. And no one can do it better than you.
Second, avoid paid advertising before you've learned how to generate high-ticket sales WITHOUT it.
Paid ads and sales people are for scaling only, once you've got your offer and your messaging down to a proven working system.
The good news is, you can get started easily and you can see results quickly, without spending a fortune on anyone or anything.
If you'd like some hand-holding through this, ping me at [email protected]
[+] [-] x0x0|5 years ago|reply
The deal with an X consulting shop is simple: you're now a salesperson first and an X second. If you don't like that reality, or expend effort appropriately, your small consultancy is very likely going to fail. That goes squared for selling into the upper midmarket / low enterprise, which is what healthcare software almost always is.
[+] [-] throwaway4good|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klft|5 years ago|reply
Could you share some of your insights?
[+] [-] nmfisher|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|5 years ago|reply
I don't have an answer beyond the advice that you should always be marketing, generating leads, and selling even when you think you have years worth of work in the pipeline.
[+] [-] kqr|5 years ago|reply
Starting with an idea and trying to market it is the opposite of what to do. Instead, figure out what problems your potential customers have (by talking to them!) and then set about solving those problems with as little technology and ceremony as possible.
Once you're done with that, your potential customers are practically already lined up, because they were the ones who ordered your solution in the first place.
Edit: The key thing is that in the initial exploration of the problem space, you are not selling anything. Those discussions are all about the potential customer. You have to put yourself into their minds and view yourself from the outside.
They will be really insecure. Both because they are not ready to buy something any time soon, and because they don't want to reveal sensitive information to an arbitrary third party.
You know that you care about them and their business deeply, so it's easy for you to assume that everything you say comes from a good place. They don't know that yet – and worse, they're used to awful salespeople that just want to trick them into buying more complexity – so they will interpret everything you say in the most dismissive way possible. You have to show that you're different and that you're not in it to sell stuff, but that you have a genuine interest in understanding their business, in which they are the expert.
This is seriously hard but something that can be practised.
[+] [-] zepolen|5 years ago|reply
You can write the worst code, build the worst apps, and design the most terrible UX, but if you can market your business and sell to people you can still make money.
[+] [-] ghoshbishakh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meigwilym|5 years ago|reply
This reminds me of a comment I read here: "It's why Google salespeople make more money than Google engineers."
[+] [-] dgb23|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|5 years ago|reply
I had no idea what FHIR is. I googled. I followed about five or six links without backing up to land here: http://www.hl7.org/about/gold.cfm?ref=nav
Start cold calling. Collect names. Fill a rollodex. Don't stop. Fill another. Follow up in person.
Ask about what's in their current budget. What's coming down the pipeline. How they currently handle work in your area. See their physical infrastructure. Know what the decision maker's office looks like. Get a sense of their actual problems and assure them that you can mitigate them.
Get your ass to work. Out of the chair. In the car and cheap motels. Stop pretending there are clients on Hacker News. There aren't. It's just easier to post here than cold call.
Good luck.
[+] [-] bald|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway_kufu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ageitgey|5 years ago|reply
So you need to either establish yourself as a recommended friend (by networking and/or completing successful projects) or as an industry leader. For the latter, you could use strategies like blogging on how a facility should deploy or consume FHIR, write about best practices in interoperability, or whatever. That might lead to people asking you questions and eventually lead to them asking for help with projects.
If you don't know many people in the industry yet, one way to get to know more people might be to partner with another company on a dev project where they need extra help. It might not be as exciting as getting your own project, but you have to start somewhere.
I have a company in this niche and may need help with FHIR and related dev work in the future. Feel free to send me an email to the details in my profile and introduce yourself.
[+] [-] brudgers|5 years ago|reply
Good clients just call the people who they've worked with before...if the people they've worked with before haven't called the good client first.
[+] [-] CapriciousCptl|5 years ago|reply
You can check a lot of those boxes by 1) some content on your website describing previous projects (like whitepaper PDFs or long-form blog posts), 2) GitHub projects, 3) references/testimonials. Then give a giant call to action form including asking for a phone number (I hate giving out my phone number, but it seems like everyone requires it, so I imagine it would help you more than not).
Note that these needs are very different then what I'd need from an employee. For instance, I can invest in employees and give them time to learn our tech. For consultants, I can't.
[+] [-] mynameismonkey|5 years ago|reply
1. WHo are you? Your site says nothing about you. I'm going to give you the keys to the PHI kingdom, I need to know who's soliciting me. Are you two twenty-somethings with amazing skills and ideas, or 20 ex-Epic employees looking to fill a particular gap you found? Without this general information I wouldn't know what sort of project to think about including you in.
2. Where are you? I'm under contract with numerous health agencies that require data to be on US soil. I have no idea if you are in Romania or Virginia. (Side note, government is the biggest purchaser of health care and therefore your paths will cross at some point, even if it's simply being downstream of federal or state data.)
3. How compliant are you? Your one page tells me nothing about your understanding of HIPAA, nor how you ensure the security and privacy of the data you will be exposed to. It may seem as if anyone in the space _should_ know about this and the reader can assume compliance, but frankly it's not the case. Yell at me about your third-party audits, your ability to transact PHI, as well as any SOC/FISMA compliance you have.
4. What have you done before? There are a lot of corners in the niche, and I'd need to know what systems you've worked with, what you've built and who for, so I can get an understanding of whether or not you'd be a good fit.
As for leads, with most conferences going virtual your usual approach of HIMSS is buggered, but Healthcare Datapalooza just put out a call for presentations so they're likely looking for (virtual) sponsors already. I assume HIMSS and HCDP sell attendee data, have you looked in to that? And how about FHIR aggregators like 1up and Redox, they are likely plugged in to many of your potential customers.
I'd be happy to chat more, my profile has an E-mail address you can use. Good luck with your venture!
EDIT - forgot to mention, starting out a great way to get noticed is to participate on a HIT Challenge, not sure what's up for grabs lately but challenge.gov - easy way to find the right people to start netowrking with.
[+] [-] thex10|5 years ago|reply
Came here to say #1, which is articulated well here. Basically, who are you and why should I trust you -- the info I need in order to assess that would include at minimum your experience (detailed, like you worked with X tech on Y problem with Z firm, not high level fluff) but could also include your background (experience working at $EMR, managed $TECH at $HOSPITAL, studied or taught healthcare tech at $SCHOOL).
I'm sort of looking for your resume. The fact that it's NOT here makes me think it's not all that impressive (sorry to be so negative).
[+] [-] karmajunkie|5 years ago|reply
OP, you’re in a pretty niche market (albeit a largish niche). standard marketing advice isn’t going to do you a lot of good here. look for the responses coming from people who have anxious experience in HIT and take whatever advice they’re offering.
[+] [-] adamsvystun|5 years ago|reply
So here are my humble thoughts on the website. I have no expertise in healthcare technology, so maybe that's the reason, but I could not understand what types of problems you are solving and what you are doing from your website.
1. For example, 'Reimagining Healthcare' is an empty phrase. All your sentences seem vague to me: "Comprehensive Healthcare Solutions and Integrations with FHIR, HL7 and SMART", are you consulting on how to create these solutions? are you developing these solutions? are you selling a created solution? Are you integrating somebody's else solution?
2. There is not a lot of connection to your company in your texts: > Healthcare Data Interoperability and Analytics > Standards like SMART and FHIR allow healthcare providers to store and share data in an interoperable manner which enables organizations to derive insights to provide effective care efficiently.
This is a good description of these standards and why they are important, but what is your connection here? If you are using these standards, then mention it directly. Maybe something like this is better: > We use standards like SMART and FHIR to allow healthcare providers... All other texts in Services section have the same problem.
3. I don't understand the Solutions section. It looks like a collection of icons and slogans. Let's take one example: Cloud. So I can guess that you are developing your solutions to be deployed on the cloud. But why make clients guess? Write it directly and mention why this is good. "Our solutions are deployed on cloud. This is good because <...>.".
4. This is just a suggestion. I would add a section of Problems that you can solve. Client come to your sites with problems. So I would write: "1. You have problem X? We can solve it by doing Y."
Overall, you have to think from the eyes of the client. What is the client looking for?
But again, I do not know anything about your field. I don't know who your clients, what problems they have, and what technology you are building. So you should be very quick to ignore this advice if you think I don't have the necessary understanding.
But regardless, good luck :)
EDIT: typos
[+] [-] ghoshbishakh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _pmqr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ealexhudson|5 years ago|reply
While it's always possible to take existing kit and do more/better automation, this kind of operational improvement tends to have little to no budget unless there's some specific project being undertaken (e.g. going to structured reporting). Generally, although people are often unhappy with internal software, the business will be operating as-is pretty comfortably. You'd need to deliver an awful lot of value to make it worthwhile paying you what you need.
I would probably look to better define your customer. You might have a better shout trying to approach ISVs who are selling new healthcare products, and asking them to use you as a delivery partner. Many ISVs have weak deployment teams and cannot deal with complex integrations, but they will be the ones with a customer and a contract. If you can speed up time to implementation, they get paid quicker and can do more.
[+] [-] mynameismonkey|5 years ago|reply
>you're trying to sell something that customers don't buy - any integration, FHIR or HL7 or something, is only ever needed to get one product to talk to another
is not entirely correct. I for one buy small scale interop product, and the FHIR space is growing quickly, more and more companies will be looking for small and medium activity in the space as new regulation starts taking hold.
[+] [-] danieltillett|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghoshbishakh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptica|5 years ago|reply
The game of capitalism is over and the results are in. If you're a billionaire, congrats, you won the game! If you don't have your own successful business, you lost the game!
[+] [-] newmnhn|5 years ago|reply
Something that hasn't been pointed out yet as far as I can tell is that there are accessibility and quality errors on your website. If I am looking to hire somebody it's one of the things I look at when I want to see if they know what they are doing. Not everybody is like me, but these problems are worth fixing anyway:
- The "Explore" button is a span with a click handler, the click handler updates the URL hash. It's not keyboard focusable, and since it's just a link to a different location in the page, it could just be a link, but if it must be JS, it needs to be a button element.
- The form does not have accessible labels. Placeholder text is not a label. Also "fullname" looks like an error.
Lighthouse reports some other low hanging fruit.
Overall vibe of that website is that somebody chose some readily-available bootstrap landing page template and didn't check it for basic errors. That combined with the scant information about the company & the fact that your website is really just a single page does not inspire confidence. Even in the small amount of copy that is on the site, there are three errors in this one sentence:
"Healthcare providers will need an infracstructure what is open, interoperable and standards-compliant, which ensures the security, confidentiality and privacy of presonal data."
If you are not spellchecking your copy & shipping valid HTML for a single web page you make for yourselves, it would be wrong of me to expect higher quality in something you are hired to build. FHIR and HIPAA are tough and I have a ton of respect for you for being able to work in that context. The quality of your website should reflect the high standard you bring to that work.
[+] [-] geekybiz|5 years ago|reply
Where to find potential customers? I'd try in following order: - Talk to existing customers / contacts for referrals - Talk to your past colleagues / friends for referrals - Quality cold emails with decent research & pre-work - Hang out on social wherever your potential customers hang-out and engage in meaningful conversations.
You may not strike success right away but do persist & keep identify what's working / not working. Follow-up regularly. If above gets tiring once-in-a-while - write content that can market your expertise.
Background : Been offering website speed / scalability services expertise for 3+ years.
[+] [-] gk1|5 years ago|reply
Read: Million Dollar Consulting, by Alan Weiss.
Do: Build your visibility and credibility. Fish where the fish are. Where are your target buyers spending their time and getting their information? Find a way to publish there.
Figure out who are the best connected people in your network or vicinity and talk to them, let them know you're taking on projects and be clear in what kind of projects you can help with. Make it easy for them to refer you.
[+] [-] saaaaaam|5 years ago|reply
“Lean Development methologies and modern cloud deployment startagies enable fast paced development with shorter iteration cycles.”
Apart from the buzzword bingo, you’ve misspelt “strategies”.
Your copy is incredibly bland and nebulous and doesn’t really say anything about what you do.
[+] [-] ethanwillis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtnGoat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|5 years ago|reply
If what you do can be sold to doctor's offices instead of hospitals, that's where I would start cold calling people.
Every doctor's office is a small business. They aren't that good at the business end of things and their HIPAA training tends to be poor compared to what hospitals do.
If you can figure out how to educate doctors on why this matters and what the rules are and how you can solve their problems, I think that's your best shot at developing a solid customer base.
Larger healthcare organizations, like hospitals and insurance companies, do their own in-house training and custom solutions. It's doctors offices that can't afford their own IT department but still need to comply with things like HIPAA that are in a world of hurt and could benefit from someone coming in and serving as their part-time IT department and staff expert.
[+] [-] projektfu|5 years ago|reply
A company that could promise to improve that situation by standardizing how the practice operates and optimizing reimbursement could have a great sales value. You could also standardize data sharing/HIPAA practice.
You still have to sell it to buyers, one by one.
[+] [-] teleforce|5 years ago|reply
Coming from outside healthcare, I was really shocked initially on how primitive the technology in clinics and hospitals as if they are still in the 1980s especially in the hospital management and operation. I've come to conclusion that healthcare is a very well-funded area and it's ripe for disruption. Consider these scenarios in where I live:
You want a digital copy of your ECG reading, nope they give you the paper based reading of several seconds recording that will lose their ink in a few months time.
You want to transfer your health data record to another hospital or clinic, nope that's impossible since the hospitals or clinics don't perform any proactive data sharing even between government's hospitals, paper based or digitally.
You want the over crowded hospital outpatient section to send you SMS or at least make an online/website call numbers, nope you have to wait physically, and if you've missed your turn when you're away then you are basically screwed.
You have a disabled family member who cannot even move to attend the hospital, nope you need to pay expensive third party doctor to make a visit to your house.
I think you get the idea by now, and since your expertise in healthcare IT and depending on where do you live just talk to the hospital management or govt appointed organization (e.g. NHS in the UK) about any of the above issues and how you can you solve the above mentioned problems or others for the benefit of hospitals/clinics and the society in general.
[+] [-] saadalem|5 years ago|reply
2- It’s not all about the “one close call” : High Ticket clients have a different psychology. Part of attracting high-paying clients is knowing what triggers them to buy (exclusivity, high perceived value, emotional, psychological, time investment, etc..)
3- Don’t sell, select : Everything in your funnel should be designed with you SELECTING them, not you begging for their business.
4- Break the rules! You can go through copying what works, and try it out to get some quick success but eventually you’ll get to a point where you create something new in the marketplace, and you are the first one to offer it (angle wise, position wise, offer wise), so take it! First mover advantage is risky, but that’s where all the upside is, if you get it right.