Six key challenges and roadblocks for health IT sales growth

In our three-part health IT sales model series, we talk about market trends and challenges for growth, shortcomings that many health IT commercial leaders face with their current commercial models, and how updates to your sales model can impact results.

Seeing consistent success in the rapidly expanding health IT market has always been challenging. Leaders are faced with new entrants, new products, and raised patient and provider expectations. COVID-19 only increased pressure to maintain revenue growth and margins while offering new services to engage providers virtually and digitally.

As patient expectations continued to evolve, the situation became more complex and challenging across the entire front office (e.g., sales, marketing, service). Commercial leaders need to re-examine their sales models to ensure they are keeping up with new market standards while maintaining profit margins.

To face these challenges, health IT sales leaders must adapt their sales models to compete:

1. To fend off margin erosion and grow revenue, economic benefit value props are becoming almost as important as clinical efficacy
2. Smaller health IT companies need to act more nimbly to counteract full suite offerings and revenue portfolios
3. Larger health IT companies need to coordinate across disparate offerings and teams to provide an attractive and high-value patient and provider offering
4. While health IT selling teams may have relatively high margins, maintaining productivity over time requires strategic forethought in how to invest their winnings
5. New market entrants are competing for sales talent, willing to pay for it, and are carving off profitable niches of customers that were once well-protected
6. It’s critical to refresh value messages, coverage models, goals, and incentives to account for model and market changes

See the next blog in our series on the biggest “inside out” challenges in many health IT organization’s commercial models.