What outbound strategy is right for my startup?

Let’s start with the WRONG outbound strategy. The wrong outbound strategy is not having an outbound strategy.

Unless you are an industry leader with an established brand (which I assume you are not if you are reading a blog about healthcare startup sales strategies), then going direct to customers is going to be the quickest path to generating sales.

Inbound will start to grow as a channel as your startup becomes more established and your brand becomes recognized. But in the early stages relying on inbound is going to be a reliable strategy for missing your sales goals…!

Think about it, it’s very hard for a customer to identify your product as the solution to their problem if they have never heard of your company….

Now that we’ve stated the obvious. Let’s delve into the various options that healthcare startups can use:

• Full Cycle AEs. Full-Cycle AEs manage the entire sales process from prospecting to closing. This approach can be effective when selling to companies where sales cycles are short, and deals are less complex

• Network Intros: Warm intros from connections - board members, advisors, rolodex contacts...

  This can be a quick and effective way for a startup to get some early sales momentum; with a few caveats:

  • It’s not scalable. Sooner or later those intros are going to dry up (usually sooner unfortunately…)

  • These intros are not always relevant. Often these folks are taking the meeting as a favor, not because they have indicated interest in your product. These aren’t real sales evaluations

  • The ‘we’ll hire an experienced sales person with a rolodex’ is a default go-to for first time founders. This approach can work well if you are selling commodity products to individuals (think medical device sales). However, it’s not usually effective for an enterprise level sale.

    • Unless you are selling into the exact same customer profile as the rolodex profiles, often when you peel back the layers you realize the contacts are not actually relevant to your product

    • Sales Leaders have to protect their own reputation. They are not tied to a company the way a founder might be and need to keep the future in mind. Understandably, they don’t want to burn contacts unless they know the product is going to deliver a “Slam Dunk” win

    • Many sales leaders don’t know how to leverage their network. It’s not as simple as LinkedIn contact = conversation = sales

  A core piece to remember is that a great sales person will help you close deals. This is not always the same thing as helping generate deals. In fact most senior sales people will actually expect deals to be fed to them.

  Both generating and closing deals are essential, but they are very different asks!

• Conference Based. Conferences can be an effective way to generate top of the funnel demand. This is an effective strategy but it’s cyclical and can be very expensive to execute well

  • Keep on top of timelines. The leads you will generate at HLTH 2024 aren’t much good if you are running out of cash and need investment in Q4 2023…

  • The best way to approach this is to be proactive - book meetings ahead of time.Turning up and hoping to bump into folks is setting yourself up for an expensive failure

  • Integrating conference based lead-gen into a broader outbound strategy can be an effective method for pouring gas on your sales pipeline

• SDR driven. SDR driven outreach works best in enterprise sales where there are longer, more complex sales cycles that target customer profiles with specialized roles

  • Basic unit economics make this an expensive approach when products have small deal sizes or short sales cycles (see Full Cycle AEs)

  • It’s hard and expensive to implement. SDRs need tools and constant mentoring to be effective at prospecting and delivering consistent high-quality messaging. This can be hard for startups to provide.

  • However, there’s a reason that top SaaS companies like Salesforce and Hubspot (yes, even the kings of inbound use outbound…) rely on an SDR model to drive their growth. Why….because it’s a proven strategy for driving growth when it’s done well

Ultimately, the best approach will be specific to your company but the worst strategy is not having one…

Reach out below to book some time to chat and explore what strategies your healthcare startup can employ to meet its sales goals!