Ask HN: We have the expertise but no clients. How to reach them?
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.
https://alstonia.io
134 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadSimilarly 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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Or put another way, how to have a business.
The hardest question of all.
As Paul Graham says sell something people want.
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.
Do what you are good at, and hire someone who is good at what they do - marketing and advertising. When you realize the value of not hav ing to become an expert marketer and double your work load, it will all make sense.
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.
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)
* 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.
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.
“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.