Inside Feedback PLC’s Enterprise Sales Playbook: From First Contact to 6-9 Month Deal Cycles

Your product can revolutionize healthcare delivery, but if you can’t navigate Byzantine procurement processes, it won’t matter. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Thomas Oakley revealed how Feedback PLC turned lengthy enterprise sales cycles from a barrier into a competitive advantage, driving 74% year-over-year growth.

The Reality of Healthcare Sales

Healthcare sales cycles move at their own pace. As Thomas explains, “It takes anywhere between ten to thirty engagements before you get to the point of contracting. Then you typically go through procurement, and that procurement process can take six to nine months.” Only then can implementation begin.

This extended timeline isn’t just about bureaucracy – it reflects the complexity of healthcare decision-making. “It is a very difficult thing to sell technology into any healthcare space, especially in the NHS, where there are lots of budgetary constraints and where decisions typically happen by committee because they have to involve multiple stakeholders from multiple areas of the hospital,” Thomas notes.

Building Momentum Through Customer Obsession

Rather than trying to shortcut this process, Feedback PLC embraced it by maintaining an “absolute obsession with sitting close to the customer.” This deep engagement led to breakthrough features during COVID, enabling “consultants who were treating patients in Manchester and advising on treatment plans whilst being at home with family in Delhi, India.”

Their approach turned the sales process into a collaborative product development cycle. By sitting close to customers, they identified opportunities that competitors missed. For instance, they discovered how non-radiologists use medical images in their frontline work, leading to Bleeper – what Thomas describes as “a clinical grade version of WhatsApp, which provides you with a secure, chatty environment that is patient specific.”

Managing Multiple Stakeholders

Healthcare sales involve diverse stakeholders with different priorities. Clinical teams care about patient care, IT departments worry about integration and security, and finance teams focus on budgets and ROI. Feedback PLC addresses this by demonstrating concrete value: they’ve “reduced wait times in the NHS by 70% without needing any additional clinical staff at all, and in a way that actually releases cash back to that system.”

This multi-stakeholder approach helped them win significant contracts, including “the UK’s first end-to-end care pathway between GPs in primary care hospitals, in secondary care, and these new community diagnostic centers.” They succeeded because they were “the only provider that had the capability to stitch the IT infrastructure together in the background and then present it in a collaboration environment that could bring stakeholders from hospitals and GP practices together.”

Maintaining Sales Discipline

Success in healthcare sales requires extraordinary persistence. As Thomas emphasizes, “It takes a lot of internal discipline and drive to keep pacing and chasing and pushing, and to not give up on opportunities and to ensure that you close them.”

This persistence has paid off. The company has achieved consistent 74% year-over-year growth for three years running, with an 89% increase in sales in their latest period. But perhaps more importantly, they’ve built a repeatable process for navigating complex enterprise sales cycles.

The Future of Healthcare Sales

Looking ahead, Thomas sees sales cycles evolving as healthcare becomes more interconnected. Their vision is to become “essentially a digital glue that pulls healthcare environments together.” This could streamline future sales by demonstrating value across entire healthcare ecosystems rather than just individual institutions.

The lesson for founders? Don’t fight long enterprise sales cycles – embrace them as opportunities to deeply understand customer needs and build solutions that create lasting value. As Feedback PLC’s experience shows, the patience and persistence required for healthcare sales can become a powerful competitive advantage when combined with genuine customer obsession.