Socially Determined’s Guide to Creating a New B2B Category: 7 Years of Hard-Earned Lessons

Two numbers tell the story of a new market category: 63 and 525,537. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Trenor Williams revealed how these figures – representing minutes spent with and without healthcare providers – sparked a seven-year journey to transform social determinants from a nonprofit concern into core business strategy.

The Market Creation Challenge

“Maybe I’m crazy, because I knew it from the beginning,” Trenor admits about creating a new market. “It was really seen as not part of the business. It was part of what the foundation did. It was seen as a nonprofit responsibility, it was not integrated into the business operations and strategic decision making of systems or plans or life science or employers.”

Building the Data Foundation

The company built their market position on comprehensive data integration. “We use a combination of publicly available data from about 40 different public sources,” Trenor explains. “We combine that with data about every single US business in the country… then identify data on about 270,000,000 adults across the United States.”

The Sales Reality

Creating a new category meant accepting brutal sales cycles. “It is a back alley brawl every single time,” Trenor notes. “And it is not, especially in this space where you’re building a new market, for the faint of heart.” The average sales cycle stretched to 12-15 months, further extended by the pandemic.

Customer Success as Market Validation

Success came from letting customers tell the story. Their flagship customer expanded from 160,000 members and one team to “3.2 million members and 14 different teams.” This expansion validated their category creation thesis: social determinants could drive core business value.

The Ecosystem Play

Rather than trying to own every solution, they positioned themselves strategically in the ecosystem. “We can be the brains, but we have to have the arms and legs for our insights to be effective,” Trenor shares. This approach led to partnerships with navigation, referral, and intervention companies.

Market Education Strategy

Education became crucial for category creation. They invested heavily in conference presence – “32 conferences that we’ll go out and speak at, half of those this year” – while focusing on getting “customers and partners to be able to tell the story.”

The Speed vs. Adoption Trade-off

Looking back, Trenor wishes they’d moved faster on 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.”

The Future Vision

Seven years in, the category creation effort is bearing fruit. “I see us as starting to acquire some of those different point solutions across the ecosystem,” Trenor shares. Their position at the intersection of healthcare stakeholders creates unique opportunities: “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 embarking on category creation, Socially Determined’s journey offers crucial lessons: be prepared for extended sales cycles, invest heavily in customer success stories, position yourself strategically in the ecosystem, and remember that creating a new market category often takes longer than expected – but the payoff can be transformative.