4 things health tech and med tech companies should do to drive NHS sales
We all know that the NHS is currently experiencing a multitude of challenges.
There are record waiting lists (and ‘hidden waiting lists’), an under pressure striking workforce and, exacerbated by inflation, a growing misalignment between how much money the NHS needs to function and what the Treasury deems sufficient.
The resulting lack of budget is making it much harder for health tech and med tech businesses to sell their digital health solutions to the NHS, preventing the roll out of technology that would lead to improved and faster care, reduce costs, ease capacity and, ultimately, enhance patient outcomes.
So, based on our extensive experience of helping health tech and med tech companies generate MQLs, SQLs and convert into tangible revenue, how can health technology and medical device businesses give themselves the best possible chance of securing NHS contracts?
Here are four steps to attracting and engaging MQLs and SQLs.
Step 1: Know thy NHS
People talk about the NHS as if it is a single entity.
However, the truth is that there are many thousands of NHS organisations, including:
42 Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), who are each responsible for planning, funding and commissioning NHS services in their local area
224 NHS Trusts, who provide hospital services, community services and can also act as commissioners (including around 124 acute trusts, 50 mental health trusts and 10 ambulance trusts)
930 NHS hospitals, including 220 general acute, 49 specialist hospitals and 246 community hospitals
826 community providers, offering services such as district nursing and health visiting
6,925 GP practices, many of whom work together in Primary Care Networks (PCNs)
That’s a lot of potential customers. And, while regional and organisational variations, and differing levels of maturity within ICBs, can make securing sales more challenging, the alternative of a single NHS system would likely reduce innovation and limit opportunities to just a few key players. So the variety presents an opportunity.
It’s also important to understand how money flows through the NHS. Money talks after all, and those that provide it will usually see their priorities taken into account by those who receive it. That’s true in almost any setting.
When it comes to the NHS:
The Secretary of State allocates an annual budget to NHS England and outlines objectives in the NHS Mandate (here’s the latest one).
NHS England allocates most of its budget to NHS Integrated Care Boards, based on local needs. It can give ICBs direction on any of its functions, its management and its use of financial resources. It also publishes an annual business plan, which outlines priorities (here’s the latest one). NHS England does also buy some services directly.
NHS Integrated Care Boards allocate funding to NHS Trusts and Foundation Trusts. ICBs also publish their ‘five year forward plans’ (here’s an example one from NHS Black Country ICB)
If you can combine an understanding of how the NHS is structured, how it is funded and the priorities of the organisations offering the funding, you will get a good understanding of the contextual factors influencing your target prospects. This can be very useful when defining a Value Proposition, sales strategy and marketing and communications programmes.
Step 2: Know thy target customer and what their challenges are
Innovators should be proud of their innovations, but one of the biggest errors we see health tech and med tech companies make is focusing on themselves rather than their target customer.
It is possible that you are doing this very thing, but just aren’t realising it.
Some reflective questions to ask yourself are:
Do I know the job profile of all of the people who might be involved in a buying decision around my product?
Do I understand their job ‘in the round’ or just the potentially small amount that is relevant to my product?
If I were given 60 seconds to describe my product to a customer, how long would I spend talking about its ‘features’?
If you want to sell to people (and you do) then you need to understand them.
The first step to health communications that drive sales is to understand who your customers are.
Usually, to persuade an NHS organisation to purchase a product, you will need to convince several people. This will usually include the people responsible for clinical outcomes, operations and finances.
In a hospital, that might be the Head of Nursing, the General Manager and the Financial Director.
For an Integrated Care Board, it could be the Chief Information Officer, the Transformation Lead and the Chief Medical Officer.
In a GP Practice, it might be the principal GP and the Practice Manager.
Next you need to understand their challenges. Please don’t jump to your product features here. This isn’t about what you can offer yet, but about what they need and care about.
For example, when we interviewed Nutrition Nurses as part of our work with NGPod, whose innovative device will, we’re sure, one day replace pH strips and x-rays as the most common way to check for correct placement of NG tubes, we uncovered an important insight:
Obtaining and testing ‘aspirate’ is fraught with problems and causes high clinician anxiety.
The fact that NGPod enables ‘aspirate-free’ testing is, therefore, a key selling point.
The resulting campaign generated organic leads and huge excitement from nurses who made it Nursing Times’ most engaged with social media post of the year, when around 1,500 of them commented, shared or reacted to the post. See the case study here.
Step 3: Capture their attention and show them how you can help
At the top of this article, we talked about how busy the NHS is. As a result, the people that work in it often don’t have an enormous amount of time to read about the latest technologies and what features they offer. They are too busy supporting patients.
We also talked in step 2 about the job profile of the people we need to convince. It’s worth noting that technology experts, while part of it, are in the minority.
The hard truth is that no one cares about the tech like you do - they care about what it enables. Therefore communications activity should be less focused on talking about technology and more focused on showing how it impacts.
An example of this in action is when we worked with Meddbase to demonstrate how their clinical software could drive increased engagement with the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme (NDPP) and, if managed at ICB level, could also enhance efficiencies.
We worked directly with Meddbase and the NHS Humber and North Yorkshire ICB to develop a communications programme with a high quality Evaluation Report at the centre, with recommendations for other ICBs, and a strategic media, stakeholder and digital communications programme to capture attention.
This framing was of interest to Chief Information Officers, Chief Medical Officers and Financial Directors because it provided a real world example of how the technology had improved patient engagement and outcomes, and could increase efficiencies (therefore reducing costs).
The campaign generated 16 highly targeted media articles, 1,300 report reads in a week, 100+ organic NHS prospects attending an educational webinar and, ultimately, converted sales of the product to NHS ICBs. Read the full case study and testimonials here.
Step 4 - Fast Funnel prospects with a coordinated user journey
Another big mistake we see health tech and med tech businesses make is siloing their PR, marketing and communications activity. This is particularly common with ambitious start-up organisations who often wrongly assume they just need to turn on the ‘awareness’ tap and customers will come flooding in.
The result of not joining up their activity is a slow and inefficient sales funnel. If media relations activity is being driven by a PR agency over on the left and webinar activity is being organised by an event company over on the right, or internally, and the two elements are never brought together, then there is a vast space of missed opportunity somewhere in the middle.
The reason that integrated communications are so important when it comes to speeding up the sales funnel process is that it enables the deliberate design of a user journey from awareness to engagement to consideration to conversion.
To use the Meddbase campaign example again, that was effective because we delivered high impact media relations activity that cut through the noise with an array of top tier system, clinician and health tech titles (awareness) and pointed people to an optimised website landing page where they could find out more by reading a report or signing-up to a webinar (engagement).
The content of that report and the webinar - including the expert guests - were carefully designed/briefed to provide high value education that demonstrated Meddbase’s expertise and its effectiveness as a real-world solution that was already proven in an NHS ICB setting, leading to consideration.
Someone asked about buying the software on the webinar (action)! The full campaign funnel only lasted for around a month and the first sale was secured in under three months - this from a standing start by an organisation that hadn’t previously worked with the NHS.
Of course every health tech and med tech company is different, however, the integrated communications format outlined in this article is proven to deliver results with NHS organisations.
The start point should always be the interests and priorities of your target customers, which can inform creative campaigns that win attention of busy prospects, provide opportunities for engagement and education that also demonstrate your effectiveness and expertise. The icing on the cake is a smartly designed user journey that moves people down the funnel quickly and in a seamless and helpful way.
Do this right and your health communications campaigns really can drive MQLs, SQLs and sales and in short timeframes, too.
To find out more about our work helping helping health tech, med tech and digital health companies to develop integrated communications activity that generates NHS sales, visit our health tech and med tech page. Or book a free 30-minute consultation below.