Inside Datacubed Health’s Change Management Strategy: A Playbook for Regulated Markets

Technical superiority means nothing if you can’t get people to adopt your solution. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Datacubed Health CEO Brett Kleger revealed why change management, not technology, is often the biggest hurdle in regulated markets.

The Regulated Market Reality

The clinical trials space presents a unique challenge for technology adoption. As Brett explains, “Its a highly regulated industry, so people were very slow to change and new technologies might take many more years to get introduced than other spaces.” This resistance isn’t just about regulatory compliance – it’s deeply embedded in organizational behavior.

Understanding the True Cost of Change

One of Brett’s most crucial insights challenges how founders typically think about market entry: “Don’t underestimate the change management required if it’s in this space… It might require the company that you’re working with, the customer working with, to change jobs of ten or twelve different people.”

This understanding fundamentally shaped Datacubed Health’s go-to-market strategy. Instead of focusing solely on technical capabilities, they built their approach around minimizing organizational disruption.

The Experience-First Framework

To address these challenges, Brett implemented what might be called an “experience-first” framework. “When I look at the space right now, a lot of companies are good technology companies can build it, but you need to understand the exact vertical that you’re in and that buying customer,” he notes.

This led to a crucial strategic decision: “My focus from a personnel perspective was bringing in the experience or the knowledgeable talent to surround it with an incredible product.” Rather than just hiring technical experts, they prioritized people who understood the human elements of healthcare technology adoption.

Breaking Down Resistance Through Reliability

Instead of positioning themselves as disruptors, Datacubed Health took a different approach. “We don’t want to be a sexy tool. We don’t want to be the shiny object that comes and goes very quickly but cant deliver. We want to be seen as the company that knows the space and can deliver reliably,” Brett emphasizes.

This focus on reliability over innovation might seem counter-intuitive for a technology company, but it addresses a fundamental truth about regulated markets: trust trumps novelty. As Brett puts it, “What I tell my team every day is if we can be the easiest company to work with, and we can deliver truthfully and honestly and accurately, and we can provide the clients exactly what we said, we’ll get more and more repeat business.”

The Three Pillars of Change Management

From Brett’s insights, we can distill three core principles for managing change in regulated markets:

1. Deep Market Understanding: “We really bring a lot of expertise and experience to make sure that you can do it safely so that the patients are safe and the data collected is accurate.”
2. Stakeholder-Specific Marketing: “Part of the marketing philosophy is Persona based marketing. How do you reach different buyer personalities and market what they need?”
3. Consistent Delivery: Focus on being “the company that knows the space and can deliver reliably” rather than the most innovative solution.

Looking Beyond Initial Adoption

The success of change management in regulated markets isn’t just about getting initial buy-in. Brett’s strategy looks at the long-term picture: “To me, what I really enjoy about the space is theres a lot of room for optimization, theres a lot of people that want to do it, and it’s just about how to overcome various regulatory hurdles or folks that are adverse to change management.”

For founders entering regulated markets, Datacubed Health’s experience offers a crucial lesson: successful change management isn’t about forcing transformation – it’s about making change feel less risky than staying the same. This means building trust through reliability, understanding the full scope of organizational impact, and prioritizing practical experience over pure innovation.

In the end, the most successful change management strategy in regulated markets might be the one that makes change feel like the safest option, not the most exciting one.