5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a Healthcare Analytics Category

Creating a new market category is like walking into a back-alley brawl – you need conviction, resilience, and a clear strategy to emerge victorious. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Trenor Williams shared how Socially Determined built a healthcare analytics category from scratch and achieved 70% year-over-year contracted ARR growth in 2023. Here are the key go-to-market lessons from their journey:

1. Build Your Market Through Customer Stories

In risk-averse industries like healthcare, early customer success stories become your most powerful market-creation tool. “In healthcare, most people are risk averse, most people don’t want to go first,” Trenor explains. “Hearing and seeing what their peers who look like them, act like them, have businesses like them are doing, has probably been the biggest thing that turned the opportunity for us.”

One flagship customer expanded from 160,000 members and one team to 3.2 million members across 14 different teams. This story became their blueprint for market expansion.

2. Accept the Reality of Long Sales Cycles

Enterprise sales cycles in healthcare are brutal. “The average sales cycle was twelve to 15 months,” Trenor shares. “I would say since the pandemic, it’s gotten even longer.” The key is understanding that it’s not about resistance to technology – “It’s not that people don’t want technology, but there’s the tyranny of the urgent. And just everybody is so focused on the day to day, it is hard to be able to pick your head up and think about what’s next.”

3. Plan for Founder Sales Transition Early

Transitioning from founder-led sales requires systematic preparation. “You’re going to make mistakes,” Trenor admits about hiring salespeople. The solution isn’t finding perfect sales hires – it’s building robust support systems. “Because this is all I think about. It’s all I’ve been doing, like two years before I started the company. We’re seven years into this. There’s nobody that’s going to be able to tell the story in the same way.”

4. Strategically Approach Market Education

With 32 conferences in one year, Socially Determined takes an intentional approach to market education. “We know that some of them are purely just about eminence and being there,” Trenor explains. “We know that some of them are going to be about building our partner ecosystem… And then there are others that we are really explicit, like what do we do ahead of time meetings to set up driving to very specific, targeted leads.”

5. Accelerate Customer Adoption Over Early Revenue

Looking back, Trenor’s biggest lesson was about speed of adoption: “I would invest earlier in getting faster customer adoption, to try more things out at lower cost, just to test the market and worry less about any early revenue and more about established use cases and valued propositions as fast as we could.”

Bonus: Think Ecosystem, Not Just Product

The most successful category creators think beyond their initial product. Trenor sees consolidation opportunities across their ecosystem: “I see us as starting to acquire some of those different point solutions across the ecosystem.” Their unique position comes from understanding that “a provider thinks of them as a patient and a health plan thinks of them as a member and a life science as a clinical trial practitioner, somebody who takes their drug and employer as an employee, it’s the same people.”

For founders building new market categories, these lessons underscore a crucial truth: market creation is a marathon, not a sprint. Success comes from methodically building customer proof points, creating systematic sales processes, and maintaining unwavering focus on accelerating market adoption – even when the sales cycles seem endless and the market education process feels like a constant uphill battle.