https://alstonia.io
* 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.
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.
i think a lot of people have the misunderstanding that the world works under a "build it and they will come" model.
And it's very easy to deceive ourselves into believing that we're building the right thing.
Even if you have product market fit, and are experiencing the “pull” of a hot market...if you have no reliable distribution channels, you have no business.
Humans are busy, and the problems that businesses solve for in the modern world are not life or death issues. Any product that solves a problem that tons of people are already searching google for, is by definition, going to also have tons of competitors.
I'm a big fan of the cheap, audacious ad move to get a foot in the door. Know where the decision maker for your next enterprise sale works out every morning? Geo-fence very specific-to-him mobile ads around the building while he works out. That kind of thing. No ad is going to get you a sale; but ad ad can get you attention that leads to a conversation.
(Yes, that's marketing blah-blah -- send me an email at gregb(at)west-third.com if you want to talk through it. I won't try and turn you into a client; those days are behind me. Just trying to be helpful.)
Content: Content marketing has gone from a silver bullet about five years ago to being like a business card today -- you pretty much have to do it for baseline credibility, but a lot of people (particularly in B2B environments) aren't doing a great job. Their copy is too technical, too promotional, too focused on a shock-and-awe feature set instead of really talking about the problem their prospects have and how their (your) solution is a 10x improvement.
I said in a comment a couple of weeks ago: Marketing is nothing more than delivering value (education, expertise on how a technical problem fits into the larger business, a path to growth, etc.) in order to capture value (the sale). If you think about it that way and enforce it in the organization, you tend to produce content -- well, marketing across the board -- that's more effective. Don't strip mine the audience by just trying to capture value without delivering anything of value.
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)?
I partnered with large do-it-everything firms when I was at a small, woman-owned shop because the big firms didn't have our expertise in house; needed to meet a woman-owned-business checkbox; or both.
On my own, I would almost always chase business out of my local market (out-of-town solutions are generally deemed to be smarter, unfair as that seems) and find a local partner (so the client -- often a gov agency -- could feel like they were spending money in the community.
Sometimes, a bunch of small fry would team up for a large group proposal, but that had iffy results. If it was a big-enough project for that, it was big enough that the client likely wanted one of the larger firms and subbing to them was a better strategy.
* If they chased government work, they almost always needed a minority-owned or woman-owned business. Could they do the work in-house? Sometimes, but hiring us checked the box.
* The big, do-everything firms were looking at the same dynamics we were: Sometimes we got hired because we were the local partner and they needed a local partners. Sometimes we got hired even though they could do the work in-house because our reputation for that work was stronger. Stuff like that.
Don't look for the expertise gap -- look for firms big enough that they're chasing really large engagements where the value of throwing you some of the work is more than offset by the boost you'll bring to the overall team. Not every large firm is that enlightened, but plenty of them are.
Packaged/productized solutions allow you to sell a repeatable product off the shelf at higher margins (ideally) or at a lower/competitive price point (more likely in a crowded space).
Once you hit scale? Well, it depends on your strategy and what you're selling but there's no shame in your game if you leave the productized world behind or dial back on it. Bigger clients in professional services usually have more margin (because admin/overhead doesn't evolve as quickly as billable hours with them) and lots of upsell opportunity, so you may decide to focus on that.
If you do dive into productized offerings, don't just create packages -- create packages that lend themselves to natural upsell breakpoints.
What that could look like in raw consulting:
* Design an assessment package that essentially defines the problem and tells them how to think about solving it rather than solving it.
* Then design a package that lays out the plan but not the implementation.
* Then package implementation in time- or milestone-bound chunks that create breakpoints for strategic account review, which is just a 50-cent word for sitting down with the client to look things over and adjust scope upwards.
A practical suggestion: If you live in a large metro area, reach out to the city or county purchasing departments, explain that you're new to selling into the public sector, and ask if they have any procurement fairs or seminars scheduled. (A sidebar: Federal sales are a whole other ball of wax and I'm not the most qualified to talk about them.)
* If they say yes, you've got a chance to show up and meet people face to face, which is rare in government sales and can give you an edge. People buy from people they remember.
* If they say no, put on your best aw-shucks humble act and ask if perhaps you could schedule a 10-minute informational call with someone from the department, just to better understand the process.
Either way: Selling to the government means keeping some things in mind. The following is cut/paste from an answer to a similar question I provided about two weeks ago:
* Do not wait wait for them to decide they need a solution and then engage; your business will die. Success comes from educating prospects, helping them understand the benefits -- hell, even helping them write the RFP, if they'll let you -- and being the preferred solution before the bidding process formally begins.
* Related: All of your meaningful sales will come from formal proposals submitted as part of an RFP process. You need to get good at being the insider who helps them write the RFP or you need to get good at writing better, more compelling (not cheaper, not fancier -- more compelling) proposals. Even better? Get good at both.
* You'll have high insurance requirements. Don't let them faze you too much -- commercial liability is cheap. Errors and Omissions, on the other hand, can be pricey and you want to avoid having to have that if possible.
* Get very good at finding local partners, even if you don't need them. Big projects that leave some of the money in the community are more compelling.
* If you are not a woman or a minority, get good at finding local partners who are certified as women-owned or minority-owned businesses. Some public agencies set up their RFPs with an automatic point deduction from your score if you can't tick this box.
Happy to chat more if it's 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 code+hn@a115.co.uk
Could you share some of your insights?
Then people can email you for their specific situation.
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.
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.
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.
what if you prove that you're different by making your sales model different - i.e., you create a solution for a problem of theirs (and hand-hold the implementation and deployment etc), and if/when said solution is shown to have value, then you get paid?
When I hear founders talk about starting companies so they can "give up the 9-5 grind" and "spend more time coding and less time in 'pointless' meetings" I hear alarm bells. Someone in the business has to actively enjoy meeting customers and discussing what they need for any tech company to succeed.
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.
This reminds me of a comment I read here: "It's why Google salespeople make more money than Google engineers."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
Here’s the expanded URL: https://www.beautiful.ai/player/-MFqstolmpEWkDs-Y_mv/Bix-Tec...
I’m not Adam but your portfolio uses a non-traditional style which is akin to a presentation.
Overall, it was easy to navigate for me as a human but doubtful if its current format is friendly to web crawlers like Googlebot. More specific feedback below.
1. The 1st & 2nd demos could use an “Introduction” explaining what the demo is about, similar to how you have it in your 3rd demo.
2. Even better would be to copy the “Introduction” text just below each demo link so the reader can decide for themselves that the demo will be relevant to their interests enough for them to click-through to a third-party website.
EDIT:
3. It turns out Beautiful.ai is a third-party presentation tool—I initially thought it was your domain. Might be better to embed/host the Beautiful.ai player (if one exists) showing your portfolio on your own domain. This would give your online presence additional credibility and avoid the mild brand confusion I experienced.
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.
>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.
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!
Companies everywhere are using inferior products and inferior processes. It's obvious even in academia. Social networking is the only force which drives business nowadays. Social networks are not based on skills, they're based on kin selection. If you want to get business from psychopaths, you need to be a psychopath (or act like one).
Faking psychopathy worked for me. My bosses didn't like me for years when I was a nice guy trying to make things better, never promoted me then one day I blew up and quit the company in a really bad way which probably scared the crap out of them, then they ended up indirectly helping me with my next venture. Maybe they did it out of fear but it worked.
It's not about value creation, it's about being an asshole. Assholes respect assholes.
Real assholes are real predicable, that works out ok if you are already in a position of power or are up against others not trying to play the game, but not if you are trying to maintain or gain on other psychopath types.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another thing you might want to consider doing is open sourcing some stuff to help setup FHIR/HL7 integrations. Pretty much the only fully fledged HL7 "solution" you can get for free HAPI [0]. You might want to make some open source tools around all of this. For example: a reverse proxy that prints all to a log that's censored for PII for debugging. Make that for free, push that to github and open source it.
This will get you:
1. Lead generation: People in this space will know who you are
2. Trust: Hiring consultants is difficult if you cant see the quality of their work. If you do a good job on these OSS tools you can prove to people that your code quality is high. This demands a much higher price tag.
Something else you might consider discussing is what EMRs you have direct experience with. For instance Epic [1] provides "training services". HL7 has a "HL7 Certified" exam you can take to prove you can memorize it's obtuse message structures. Taking, passing, and displaying this might make some buisnessy-people happy.
The other tactic is that your customers know other companies and contacts in the space. Ask them for help - "as a new consultancy we're trying to build our contacts in healthcare, is there anyone in the industry you think we should speak to?".
There are also tools like https://hunter.io/ and https://rocketreach.co/ which attempt to automate the process for you. I've had very mixed results with those kinds of tools, but they're worth knowing about.
However... hospitals have partners, contractors, vendors, processors. In your shoes I would be looking at people who want to interop with hospitals.
Some ideas:
- State Medicaid agencies. Generally do not have the tech staff, but they do have money and contracts, and much of it is set-aside for small business.
- Anyone with an NQIIC contract. All tasked with reducing provider burden and imprving care transitions. FHIR to the rescue. https://www.g2xchange.com/statics/cms-awards-25b-network-of-...
- Case in point. I need a legacy data dictionary transposed to FHIR elements so that instead of manual record abstraction I can ship an HL7-ready spec for data abstraction.
- Case reporting. There are FHIR-aware case reporting frameworks, no-one knows how to use them. There's a global pandemic on at the moment, so lots of case reporting is needed. Public health agencies exist in just about every county and city in the US.
Voted #1 business book by Inc. 500 CEOs.
https://www.amazon.ca/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/...
Cool, but what's the value you offer? Who needs it? Why? What do they usually do? What's their title? Where do they usually look for solutions to their problems?
Selling expertise vs selling value is the difference between being an laborer vs a business owner. If you're trying to sell your expertise, you're thinking about it wrong.
Also I find it not clear from the webpage what would be the benefit of hiring you. (What pain do I have which is solved by you)
This is the easy part. The really hard part is to get customers.
It means having a network, a good reputation, to reply to tenders in time with a ready to use solution that is competitive, adapt to the cursomers needs, etc... We have more employees doing sales and support than software.
You may find work as a contractor for a healthcare company though.
Or put another way, how to have a business.
The hardest question of all.
As Paul Graham says sell something people want.
I assume there are places where your customers gather too.
Similarly potential clients are hospitals, clinics, or EMR development companies seeking solutions on FHIR.
This is your website claim.
>Reimagining Healthcare & Digitizing Businesses
>Comprehensive Healthcare Solutions and Integrations with FHIR, HL7 and SMART Digitizing Businesses through Cloud, Mobile, and Automation.
But since you have this insight from your customers:
>The clients we started with are online nutritionist and dietitian providers. The had to integrate with FHIR to get referrals from other medical practitioners.
Wouldn't it be better to point that you're helping healthcare businesses get more referrals by making them integrated with standards?
Something like:
>We will help your healthcare business generate more referrals
>By setting you up to standard integrations - FHIR, HL7 and SMART - and make you more effective with Automation, Cloud and Mobile.
This was just something I thought quickly, the point is to show how you've added value to other businesses. This is closer to their reality, just like you, they might be struggling to get referrals and their lack of integrations could be costing them business.
Good luck :)
No service/product is so good that it automagically sell itself.
Edit (since reply depth is reached): more ppl might have also different ideas what to do
I still mantain one of the problems is not enough ppl in sales. There there might be more problems: probably, but it is not my company (meaning if other people want to figure out the other problens: go ahead)
Of course also one of the programmers can take over this role. (Aptitude assumed)
>a) the textbook answer for not enough sales is to add sales power
Yes, but ff your lead generation isn't working, or if the current sales team can't turn them into clients, then the problem isn't lack of sales power. You could throw 10 sales guys at this problem and still get the same results, because your conversion rate is 0%.
b)any important function should have at least 2 ppl (so if one is at a trade fair, sick holiday etc, the other can continue) and also the team can discuss ideas how to progress
I understand that, but for some companies that's a luxury they can't afford - they need something to sustain that person. Else every business would start with 2 of each role, because every role is important.
In my opinion, if the marketing/sales isn't working properly, they need to fix that first. Throwing more people at the problem won't fix it.
If you ask a running coach to coach me and then find out that I am slow as a snail, you might conclude that the running coach sucked. But if you hire another one and find the same result then you know I suck.
It's a tricky position as you want somebody with the right mix of tech knowledge, business knowledge and bullshiting ability.
Sadly, in my limited experience, there seems to be a large amount of people that excel at the latter but not so much at the other categories.
As a CEO, when you start a company, you are the only one that need to sell until you consolidate Product Market Fit. A biz dev will be only 50% efficient after months of training.