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# Interview: Dr. William Park - HealthTech SaaS CRO ## Metadata **Date:** November 15, 2024 **Duration:** 32 minutes **Interviewer:** Marcus Chen, VP Sales - Salesloft + Clari **Interviewee:** Dr. William Park, Chief Revenue Officer - MedSync Technologies **Company:** MedSync Technologies (Healthcare SaaS, $180M ARR) **Role:** CRO responsible for enterprise sales, partnership strategy, and reimbursement landscape navigation --- ## Interview Transcript **[MARCUS]** Dr. Park, thanks for taking the time today. I know your schedule is absolutely packed. We've been working with several health tech companies, and what we're hearing consistently is that healthcare sales cycles are fundamentally different from traditional enterprise. I'm curious—from your perspective as CRO of a $180M ARR company, what's the biggest friction point in your pipeline right now? **[WILLIAM]** Marcus, I appreciate the question, and you're right about the complexity. Honestly, if I had to pick one thing, it's HIPAA. And I don't mean HIPAA compliance itself—our product is compliant, we've got our BAAs in place, our infrastructure is solid. What I mean is the *qualification and pre-work* that HIPAA creates upstream of any real conversation. We spend enormous energy determining whether a prospect even has the infrastructure to work with us. **[MARCUS]** Can you walk me through what that looks like practically? Like, when your AE talks to a health system for the first time, what are the questions you're asking? **[WILLIAM]** Sure. Let's say we're talking to a mid-market health system with 15 hospitals and 200 clinics. First conversation, we need to understand: Do they have a Chief Information Security Officer? Do they have an established security audit process? Have they done third-party security assessments? Do they have a standard vendor agreement template, or do they have a legal framework we need to work within? Some health systems—especially the larger ones—have incredibly rigid security requirements. They want SOC 2 Type II, FedRAMP in some cases, annual penetration testing, right of audit clauses. The problem is: we don't know these answers until we've already spent two to three weeks of qualification calls. And if the answer is "no, they don't have that infrastructure yet," we basically have to decide: do we help them build it, or do we move on? There's no clear qualification criteria that tells us early whether it's worth the investment. **[MARCUS]** So you're looking at what sounds like compliance pre-work that's almost like a consulting engagement before you even have a deal. **[WILLIAM]** Exactly. And here's where it gets interesting: health systems know this is a pain point. They're aware they're asking for it. But they're legally obligated. Their general counsel gets involved early, and general counsel is risk-averse. They want everything locked down before clinical operations even touches the product. So we end up with this situation where we're negotiating security requirements, BAA terms, data governance, liability caps—all before we've proven any clinical value. **[MARCUS]** When you say "standard agreements"—are they demanding custom agreements, or is there a universe of standard templates you're working from? **[WILLIAM]** That's a great question, and it's where I'll be honest with you: there's not really a standard. Most large health systems have their own template. Some have 40-page vendor agreements. Some have 80-page agreements. They want indemnification clauses that basically say we're liable if any patient data is breached, even if the breach isn't our fault. We've had to get insurance riders specifically for healthcare liability. Smaller health systems, regional ones, sometimes they're more flexible. They'll use our BAA and accept our security questionnaire. But even then, it takes time. Our legal team is basically running dual tracks on every deal: one is moving the clinical evaluation forward, and the other is negotiating what amounts to a mini insurance contract with their legal team. **[MARCUS]** How does that parallel play affect sales velocity? Like, does your sales team see this as part of the process, or is there frustration around it? **[WILLIAM]** Oh, there's definitely frustration. Our AEs want to focus on clinical value, on demonstrating ROI to the medical staff. But instead, they're fielding questions about data residency, encryption standards, and whether we support their specific EHR integration. The sales team gets pulled into technical and legal conversations they're not equipped to handle. We've had to hire clinical engineers and security liaisons specifically to support the sales process. But here's the thing: it's also become a bit of a sales motion. We've learned that the health systems that have the most robust security infrastructure and the most advanced procurement processes? Those are typically the ones with the most sophisticated clinical operations. They're the ones most likely to be good customers long-term. So in a weird way, HIPAA bottlenecks are actually a filtering mechanism for us. **[MARCUS]** That's a fascinating reframe. Let's shift to something you mentioned—you're a $180M company, which means you're selling to enterprise. I'm guessing your sales cycles aren't 6 to 9 months. **[WILLIAM]** No, we're seeing 18 to 24 months pretty consistently. Some deals are three years. And it's not because of indecision. It's because of three things: first, the buying committee is insanely complex. Second, there are multiple budget cycles. And third, healthcare organizations are incredibly risk-averse when it comes to clinical technology. Let me give you an example. We have a prospect in the Midwest—integrated delivery network, about $8 billion in revenue. We first connected in January 2023. It's now November 2024, and we're still in evaluation. Here's why: the clinical champion—the chief medical officer—he wanted to run a pilot. Great, right? But the pilot had to be approved by the pharmacy and therapeutics committee, then the medical executive committee, then the board of directors. That's a 90-day process just to greenlight a pilot. **[MARCUS]** So even to run a test, you need board approval? **[WILLIAM]** In that case, yes. They're changing clinical workflows. Any change to clinical workflow has to go through multiple committees because it affects patient safety, liability, regulatory compliance. It's not like enterprise software where you can just spin up a sandbox environment and let a department play with it. **[MARCUS]** How are you managing that? Like, what does your nurture motion look like when you're looking at an 18 to 24-month cycle? **[WILLIAM]** We've essentially built a relationship-based sales model. We're not trying to close in three quarters. We're trying to become trusted advisors. That means our AEs are attending their conferences, they're setting up quarterly business reviews before there's even a deal, they're bringing in our clinical experts to speak at their medical staff meetings. We're sharing best practice content—research on outcomes, case studies from similar health systems, thought leadership on regulatory changes. And we're being very deliberate about stakeholder mapping. In an 18-month cycle, you have to know not just who the champion is, but who the detractors are, who's going to be affected by the change, and how to manage resistance. **[MARCUS]** Let's talk about that stakeholder piece. I imagine the buying committee is not your typical C-suite group. **[WILLIAM]** No, and that's where healthcare is really different. Your traditional buying committee might be the CIO, CFO, and the line-of-business executive. In healthcare, you've got all of that, plus the Chief Medical Officer, plus the Chief Nursing Officer, plus the Chief Pharmacy Officer. In some cases, you've got influential clinicians who have operational roles—like a department head who has disproportionate influence on clinical decisions. And here's the thing that throws people off: clinicians are not always convinced by the same metrics that finance cares about. A CFO wants to see cost savings. A CMO wants to see clinical outcomes, patient safety, and—increasingly—how it affects their medical staff morale. A CNO cares about nursing workflow and whether this adds to the workload. A Chief Pharmacy Officer cares about drug safety and compliance. **[MARCUS]** So you're essentially running multiple sale processes in parallel. **[WILLIAM]** Exactly. And sometimes these stakeholders have competing interests. I had a situation last year where we had a clinical champion who was super passionate about our product. She was a clinical outcomes researcher, very data-driven. But the Chief Pharmacy Officer was concerned because our solution required a new data integration with their pharmacy system, and the pharmacy had already committed to a different vendor integration. So suddenly, our champion had to fight with pharmacy leadership to make room for our solution. **[MARCUS]** How did that resolve? **[WILLIAM]** It took about four months of coordination between our AE, our VP of Clinical Affairs, and the prospect's clinical champion. Eventually, the CMO stepped in and said, "The clinical outcomes data justifies the integration work. Let's make it happen." But that's four months where we weren't actively negotiating a contract. We were just trying to get internal alignment on the buying side. **[MARCUS]** That's helpful color. Let's talk about something that's specific to healthcare: reimbursement changes. I know that's a huge variable in your market. How does that affect the sales pipeline? **[WILLIAM]** Oh man, this is huge. Reimbursement changes can completely requalify or disqualify a deal. Let me explain the dynamic. A lot of healthcare decisions are driven by reimbursement incentives. If Medicare or a major payer changes their reimbursement model—like moving from fee-for-service to value-based care—it can fundamentally change whether a health system prioritizes a particular clinical capability. We had a big deal in the Southwest, $4 million opportunity. The health system was really engaged with us in mid-2023. Then in July, CMS announced some changes to reimbursement around outpatient procedures. Suddenly, the health system's revenue model shifted. The CFO came back to our champion and said, "We need to pause this. We need to understand how these reimbursement changes affect our budget." The deal went cold for three months while they reassessed their entire financial plan. **[MARCUS]** Did you lose the deal? **[WILLIAM]** No, we didn't. But we had to shift our message. Instead of selling them on the clinical outcomes, we had to position our solution as a hedge against reimbursement uncertainty. We brought in our reimbursement consultant to help them model different scenarios. We showed them how our platform would help them capture revenue under both fee-for-service and value-based models. That repositioning took time, but it actually strengthened our relationship. Suddenly, we weren't just a vendor; we were part of their strategic planning process. **[MARCUS]** So you have to have market intelligence on reimbursement changes? **[WILLIAM]** We absolutely do. Our revenue operations team has a healthcare policy analyst. Her job is to monitor CMS announcements, state Medicaid updates, commercial payer policy shifts. When something changes, she flags it, and we assess which deals in the pipeline are affected. We also have to think about messaging agility. If a big policy change happens, we might have to adjust our pitch for all active deals almost overnight. It's not unlike political intelligence. You have to anticipate what's coming. We monitor the Federal Register, we subscribe to healthcare policy newsletters, we have relationships with people in the industry who give us early signals. And when something shifts, we have to mobilize our team to help our prospects understand the implications. **[MARCUS]** That sounds like a pretty sophisticated operation. How do you actually operationalize that in the sales process? **[WILLIAM]** We build it into our quarterly business reviews and our account planning. When we're mapping an account, we ask: What is this health system's exposure to reimbursement changes? Are they primarily fee-for-service or value-based? What's their payer mix? Are they self-insured? Do they have risk contracts? Then, as policy changes happen, we come back to them with analysis and recommendations. It becomes part of the value we deliver, even before there's a deal. **[MARCUS]** Let me ask you about something else that's healthcare-specific: pilot conversion. With these long cycles and complex buying committees, how are you thinking about pilot success and expansion? **[WILLIAM]** Great question. Pilot conversion in healthcare is not like pilot conversion in enterprise SaaS. In enterprise SaaS, you do a 30-day pilot, and if it works, you expand. In healthcare, a pilot is often a 6-month clinical evaluation. And the success criteria are very different. **[MARCUS]** What do those success criteria look like? **[WILLIAM]** So for us, a successful pilot has a few components. First, clinical outcomes. We need to demonstrate that clinicians found the tool useful and that patient outcomes improved—or at minimum, that patient safety was maintained. Second, workflow integration. We need to show that our solution fit into their existing workflows without creating burden. Third, operational metrics—like utilization rates, adoption rates, incident rates. And fourth, financial impact. We need to show ROI, even if it's not immediate. But here's the thing: in a six-month pilot, you're not going to change outcomes for thousands of patients. You might be changing outcomes for dozens. So we're really looking for leading indicators. Are clinicians using it? Are they finding value? Would they recommend it? **[MARCUS]** How do you decide whether to declare a pilot successful? **[WILLIAM]** That's decided by the health system, not by us. We provide the data, they make the call. But we're very deliberate about setting expectations upfront. At the beginning of a pilot, we're working with the clinical champion to define what success looks like. Is it adoption above a certain threshold? Is it a specific clinical outcome? Is it feedback from clinicians? We're making sure everyone agrees on the metrics before we start. **[MARCUS]** And then when you move from pilot to expansion, what does that playbook look like? **[WILLIAM]** Expansion usually happens in phases. So if they pilot in one department or one hospital, the next phase might be: let's expand to three hospitals, or let's expand to the whole ambulatory network. But there's never a straight line to full deployment. You're always managing resistance, you're always managing budget constraints, you're always dealing with operational complexities. For example, we have a customer—major academic medical center—who started with a pilot in their oncology department in January 2023. It was successful. They expanded to cardiology in August 2023. Great. But then they wanted to expand to their outpatient clinics, and their EHR couldn't handle the integration. So we spent three months working with them and their EHR vendor to build custom connectors. The expansion happened, but it took longer than anyone expected. **[MARCUS]** Is this typical? Like, does EHR integration always become a blocker? **[WILLIAM]** Not always, but often. There are probably five major EHR systems in the U.S. market—Epic, Cerner, Athena, Meditech, and a few others. If you're integrating with Epic in a large, complex health system, you can usually do it. Epic has a good developer ecosystem. But if they're on Meditech or an older version of an EHR, integration can be a nightmare. And that's not something we can solve. We have to work with their IT teams to figure out workarounds. **[MARCUS]** So when you're qualifying a deal, you're asking about EHR early? **[WILLIAM]** Very early. Like, in the first discovery call, we want to know what EHR they're running. That tells us a lot about what the implementation will look like, what the timeline will be, and sometimes, whether the deal is even feasible. **[MARCUS]** Let's come back to pilot timing, because I think that's where I hear the most confusion. In a 18-to-24-month deal, when does the pilot usually start? **[WILLIAM]** Usually around month 8 to 10. By that point, we've had enough conversations that the clinical champion is ready to do something, the CFO has preliminary budget, and there's organizational alignment on the value proposition. But we're still months away from contract negotiations. **[MARCUS]** So pilot is in the middle of the cycle, not at the end. **[WILLIAM]** Exactly. And that's a big mindset shift for people coming from enterprise software. In enterprise software, you might see pilot as a late-stage step. In healthcare, it's often midway through the sales process. Because there's so much you can't know until you actually run the clinical evaluation. **[MARCUS]** What happens after the pilot? Like, what's the contract negotiation period look like? **[WILLIAM]** If the pilot is successful and the decision to expand is made, you're still looking at 2 to 3 months for contract negotiation. Because now you're negotiating with multiple stakeholders. You've got the CFO negotiating price and payment terms. You've got the compliance officer or general counsel negotiating data security, liability, indemnification. You've got the clinical team negotiating implementation timelines and clinical support. And they don't all move at the same speed. **[MARCUS]** Is there a single person who owns the deal on their side? **[WILLIAM]** Theoretically, yes. It's usually a VP of Operations or a Chief Medical Officer. But in practice, they're coordinating with multiple people. And different stakeholders have different risk tolerances and different priorities. So what looks like one negotiation is really five or six negotiations happening in parallel. **[MARCUS]** How do you manage that? **[WILLIAM]** We've found that mapping is everything. Early in the process, we create what we call a "stakeholder influence map." It's basically a visual representation of who has what power in the decision. We assess: Who is the champion? Who is the economic buyer? Who is the user? Who has veto power? Who is a detractor? And then we map out a very deliberate engagement strategy for each person. Some people need clinical data. Some need financial data. Some need risk mitigation—they want to know that we're not going to fail them. Some want to know about our stability as a company. We're tailoring our messaging and our engagement based on what we know about that individual's concerns and priorities. **[MARCUS]** Do you do that mapping in your CRM, or is it more of a whiteboard exercise? **[WILLIAM]** We use Salesforce as our CRM, but honestly, the real work happens in a spreadsheet and a lot of conversations with the AE. The AE is the one with the relationships. They know the nuances. Sometimes they know things about the internal politics that would never make it into a formal document. So we're using the CRM to track all the factual information—who reports to whom, what their role is, what their email is. But the strategy and the nuance lives in conversations. **[MARCUS]** That makes sense. One more question on the clinical champion strategy. How do you identify the right champion? **[WILLIAM]** It's not always obvious. The person with the title that sounds right—like the Chief Medical Officer—isn't always the right person. Sometimes the right person is a department head who has credibility with the medical staff. Sometimes it's a physician researcher who's passionate about outcomes. We're looking for someone who: one, has clinical credibility; two, has organizational influence; three, actually believes in our solution; and four, has the bandwidth to be an internal advocate. And we're very careful about how we're building that relationship. We're not just pumping them full of marketing materials. We're genuinely engaging them as a thought partner. We're asking for their input on implementation. We're bringing them to advisory boards. We're including them in product feedback sessions. They're becoming a stakeholder in our success, not just a reference customer. **[MARCUS]** How does that change the dynamic? **[WILLIAM]** It changes everything. Instead of them feeling like they have to sell internally on their own, they feel like we're partners in that effort. We're bringing the clinical expertise, we're bringing the implementation resources, we're bringing the market intelligence on what other health systems are doing. They're bringing clinical credibility and internal influence. It becomes collaborative instead of adversarial. **[MARCUS]** That's a really interesting approach. Let me ask you one more thing, because this is something I think about a lot: as you're executing on these strategies—the relationship-based selling, the stakeholder mapping, the reimbursement intelligence—what's the operational impact on your go-to-market? Like, what does your sales team need to be successful? **[WILLIAM]** That's the right question, and I'll be honest: it's expensive. We need highly trained AEs. Not just sales training, but clinical training. Our AEs need to understand healthcare operations well enough to have credible conversations with a CMO. We need clinical engineers and clinical operations people embedded in the sales process. We need a reimbursement specialist who can educate sales and clients about policy changes. We also need better tools and systems. We need ways to track stakeholder engagement that are more sophisticated than just "did we have a call?" We need to know: What did we learn about their concerns? How did we address them? What's the next action? We need visibility into where we are in the buying committee alignment process, not just where we are in the sales process. **[MARCUS]** Are you finding that tools like Salesloft and Clari are helping with that? **[WILLIAM]** Salesloft has been useful for call tracking and engagement sequencing. But if I'm being direct, most CRM and revenue intelligence tools are built for faster sales cycles. They're built for companies selling in 90 days, not 18 months. We've had to get creative about how we're using them. The thing that would be most valuable to me is better stakeholder mapping and influence tracking. Like, if I could have a view that showed me: Here's the stakeholder map, here's who we've engaged and when, here's what we know about their concerns, here's the campaign we're running for each person, and here's the alignment status—that would be transformational. Right now, we're doing that manually, and it's a lot of work. **[MARCUS]** That's really valuable feedback. Let me dig into that a bit. When you say alignment status, what do you mean? **[WILLIAM]** So in a normal sales process, you have a progression. In healthcare, you have that, but you also have stakeholder alignment. Like, the clinical champion might be ready to move forward, but finance isn't. Or the CFO is ready, but there's a detractor in the clinical governance structure who is raising concerns. What I need to know is: Which stakeholders are aligned? Which ones still need to be convinced? What are the remaining concerns? What's the likelihood that we'll get full alignment? And what's the timeline? Because if I know that stakeholder alignment is the constraint, I can work on that specific problem instead of just applying more sales pressure. **[MARCUS]** That's a sophisticated way of thinking about it. Let me ask the inverse: when deals fail or stall in healthcare, what's usually the root cause? **[WILLIAM]** It's rarely product. It's almost always one of three things: One, loss of a champion—the person who was driving it internally leaves the organization or gets reassigned. Two, a significant organizational change—like a merger, or a new CFO comes in with different priorities. Three, budget constraints or reimbursement changes that make the decision less clear. We had a deal that was moving really well. We were in implementation planning. Then the organization announced a major hospital closure due to financial pressure. Suddenly, all decisions went on hold. Six months later, the organization was in restructuring mode, and they decided to delay all new vendor initiatives. The deal never reactivated. **[MARCUS]** Is that something you could have anticipated? **[WILLIAM]** Not really. We couldn't have known they were going to close a hospital. But what we could have done better was understand their financial position earlier in the process. Like, in discovery, we could have asked more about their debt levels, their payer mix, their margins. That might have signaled financial stress. **[MARCUS]** So your account intelligence process needs to be more sophisticated? **[WILLIAM]** Definitely. We need to understand not just what they're buying, but their financial health, their strategic priorities, their organizational stability. We need to monitor news about them. We need to understand their competitive environment. Are they losing market share? Are they gaining it? That all affects whether they're in the right mindset to make a major technology investment. **[MARCUS]** That sounds like something where revenue intelligence could be really valuable. **[WILLIAM]** It absolutely could be, if it were configured right. Most intelligence tools are giving us news and public financial data. That's useful, but what I really want to know is: Is this organization financially stable? Are they growing or contracting? What are their real priorities based on their recent strategic initiatives? And how should that affect how we position our solution? **[MARCUS]** That's a really interesting perspective. Last question: if you could redesign your sales process from scratch, knowing everything you know about healthcare, what would it look like? **[WILLIAM]** Good question. I would design it around three phases. Phase one is strategic alignment: we're trying to understand their strategic priorities, their organizational structure, their decision-making process, and we're identifying the right stakeholder group. Phase two is clinical and operational validation: we're running a pilot or a detailed evaluation, and we're gathering evidence that our solution solves their problem. Phase three is contracting and expansion planning: we're negotiating commercial terms, planning implementation, and identifying how this will expand over time. But within each phase, I would embed the stakeholder engagement strategy much more explicitly. I would have structured touchpoints with each stakeholder group. I would have specific success criteria for each phase that are agreed upon upfront. And I would have much better visibility into where we are in each stakeholder's decision-making process. I would also build in regular strategic account planning meetings where we're assessing: Are we still on track? Have circumstances changed? Do we need to adjust our approach? Because in an 18-month cycle, things change. Priorities shift, people leave, new information emerges. You need to be agile while maintaining momentum. **[MARCUS]** That's really helpful. One last thing: are there changes you'd want to see from a vendor like us—from Salesloft and Clari—to better support this kind of motion? **[WILLIAM]** Honestly, yes. I'd love to see better stakeholder tracking and mapping. I'd love to see more sophisticated pipeline analytics that account for long sales cycles and the complexity of buying committees. And I'd love to see better integration between your platform and the clinical and operational data that health systems care about—like EHR integration, outcomes data, compliance data. But beyond that, I'd love to see you build more industry-specific functionality. Healthcare sales is different enough that a generic enterprise tool is always going to require customization and workarounds. If you could give us out-of-the-box functionality for healthcare-specific challenges—like reimbursement tracking, clinical validation workflows, compliance requirement management—that would be really valuable. **[MARCUS]** We've heard that from other health tech leaders too. I appreciate the feedback, and I'd love to explore that further. This has been incredibly insightful. **[WILLIAM]** Happy to help. Let's stay in touch. And hey, if you do build that healthcare-specific functionality, I want to be in the beta. That's something we'd actually use. **[MARCUS]** Deal. Thanks again, Dr. Park. --- ## Summary of Key Takeaways ### Sales Cycle Dynamics - **18-24 month cycles** are standard for enterprise healthcare deals, not an anomaly - **Pilot timing** occurs at cycle midpoint (~8-10 months), not as a late-stage step - Multiple parallel negotiations happening simultaneously with different stakeholder groups ### HIPAA and Compliance Bottlenecks - **Pre-qualification complexity**: Security, legal, and compliance assessment often happens before clinical value is discussed - **Dual-track selling**: Sales and legal teams run parallel negotiations on security, BAA terms, and data governance - **No standardized agreements**: Each health system has unique vendor agreement templates, making contracting unpredictable - **Filtering mechanism**: Rigorous compliance requirements often correlate with sophisticated buyers and strong long-term customers ### Stakeholder Complexity - **Multifaceted buying committees**: CMO, CNO, Chief Pharmacy Officer, CFO, CIO, and influential clinicians with overlapping but competing priorities - **Clinical champion strategy**: Success hinges on identifying a champion with clinical credibility, organizational influence, and bandwidth—not necessarily the highest title - **Influence vs. authority**: Organizational politics matter as much as formal roles; stakeholder mapping is critical - **Competing incentives**: Different stakeholders prioritize different metrics (finance wants cost savings, clinicians want outcomes and workflow integration) ### Pilot Conversion and Expansion - **Success criteria must be collaborative**: Health systems define success metrics upfront; leading indicators matter more than outcomes at 6-month mark - **Phase-based expansion**: Movement from pilot to full deployment typically happens in incremental phases with 2-3 month intervals - **EHR integration complexity**: Technical feasibility often depends on EHR vendor and version; can block expansion and requires custom development - **Post-pilot negotiations**: 2-3 month contract negotiation phase remains after pilot decision, with multiple stakeholders moving at different speeds ### Reimbursement Intelligence - **Policy changes trigger deal requalification**: CMS and payer announcements can shift health system priorities and budgets immediately - **Proactive market intelligence required**: Revenue team needs healthcare policy analyst monitoring Federal Register, CMS updates, Medicaid changes - **Strategic messaging agility**: Sales team must be able to quickly reposition solutions based on policy shifts - **Value expansion opportunity**: Serving as strategic advisor on reimbursement implications deepens relationships and strengthens deals ### Operational Requirements for Success - **Highly trained sales teams**: AEs need clinical operational knowledge to credibly engage with CMOs and medical leadership - **Embedded clinical resources**: Clinical engineers and clinical operations specialists required in sales process - **Sophisticated account intelligence**: Need to track financial health, strategic priorities, organizational stability, competitive position - **Stakeholder tracking systems**: Manual processes create bottlenecks; need better CRM and pipeline tools designed for multi-stakeholder, long-cycle sales - **Structured account planning**: Regular strategic reviews (monthly or quarterly) needed to adapt to changing circumstances ### Industry-Specific Needs - Healthcare sales tools and processes lag behind generic enterprise SaaS solutions - Opportunity for vendors to build healthcare-specific functionality: reimbursement tracking, clinical validation workflows, compliance requirement management, EHR integration intelligence - Traditional enterprise sales metrics (pipeline velocity, deal size, cycle time) are less predictive in healthcare than stakeholder alignment status and clinical champion health