How Figur8 Cracked Healthcare Sales: Building a Multi-Stakeholder GTM Strategy

Healthcare sales isn’t just complex – it’s a three-dimensional chess game where every move must satisfy multiple stakeholders simultaneously. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Figur8 founder Nan-Wei Gong revealed how they cracked this challenge by rethinking their entire approach to market.

Understanding the Stakeholder Triangle

The first breakthrough came from recognizing the true complexity of healthcare decision-making. “There are three different parties to serve,” Nan-Wei explains. “There’s the payer provider and the patient. So everyone needs something different.”

This insight led to a crucial realization: “It’s very easy for a technology founder like myself to think that the doctors are the buyers and they are just not.” This misconception often derails healthcare startups before they even begin.

The Detective Approach

Instead of relying on assumptions, Nan-Wei took an unusual approach to understanding these stakeholders: “I just went to a physical therapy clinic that is friendly and said that, can I pay you whatever you make for 3 hours and just watch how money flow.”

This “detective work” revealed critical friction points: “I learned that there are different types of payers, I learned at different types of patients and I learned their frustration of not knowing how much they will get paid, the frustration of not being able to tell the patient what’s happening, the frustration of faxing the data to the payers.”

Building a Solution, Not Just Technology

These insights transformed how Figur8 approached the market. Rather than selling technology, they built a comprehensive solution addressing each stakeholder’s needs. “I call it a solution instead of a hardware or a medical device,” Nan-Wei notes. “Because what we do is not just about here is a device that helps you measure something. After that, well, help yourself.”

Aligning Stakeholder Incentives

The key to their GTM strategy became understanding and aligning incentives: “How do we align incentive and really understand how information flows and how money flows, where we stand within those three parties so that we reduce as much friction as possible.”

This meant building features and workflows that created value for each stakeholder:

• For providers: Tools to quantify and assess patient progress
• For patients: Clear demonstrations of treatment effectiveness
• For payers: Data-driven proof of treatment value

Navigating Technology Adoption

Healthcare’s resistance to new technology presented another challenge. “The only technology in a clinic that you see is a fax machine,” Nan-Wei observes. Success required more than just superior technology – it needed deep industry knowledge: “We have been successful because first we have very strong, like the team knowledge about how healthcare works.”

Building the Right Commercial Team

The breakthrough in executing this strategy came from finding commercial leadership that understood these complexities. “When you build a product and then you find someone that is a sales leader in an industry for like 30 years, when they are willing to quit their jobs and join your company, that means you’re solving a big problem for their industry.”

Results and Scale

Today, Figur8 operates in 15 states, working with multiple physical therapy clinics. Their solution helps clinics “quantify and to assess the severity and progress of the patient, and to be able to show that progress to the patient and to the payers to really demonstrate the value of these treatments.”

The key lesson for founders entering complex B2B markets? Success requires more than understanding your immediate customer. You need to map and address the needs of every stakeholder who influences the buying decision, then build solutions that create value for each of them.

This multi-stakeholder approach might take longer to execute, but as Figur8’s experience shows, it’s often the difference between market success and failure in complex B2B environments.