For Health Tech
You built the platform. The NHS wants it. The procurement timetable can outlast your Series B.
Health tech founders are caught between the fastest product cycles in technology and the slowest buying cycles in healthcare. Your product iterates in sprints. Your buyers buy in frameworks. Your investors expect growth at SaaS velocity. Your targets expect evidence at pharma velocity. The companies that make the jump don’t just sell harder. They rebuild commercial strategy around how the NHS actually buys.
You’re selling into a system that was not designed to buy from companies like yours.
Your deck is good. Your pilot results are good. The clinicians who’ve used the product write unprompted emails about it. You’ve been on a NICE ESF shortlist, shown up at HETT, met the right digital leads at three Trusts. And your sales cycle is still closer to two years than two quarters, because framework access depends on evidence formats you haven’t been asked to produce yet, and pilot-to-scale decisions live on a committee calendar that meets quarterly.
Meanwhile your investors ask the same question every month. Why is revenue linear when the market is so obviously there. You explain the buying process to them again. They look at your CAC and say it has to come down. You look at the Trusts you’re trying to land and think it has to go up.
The default response is to hire a commercial director from big pharma, or a healthcare sales leader who’s sold into Trusts before. Sometimes that works. Often the gap between a pharma commercial playbook and a health tech growth model is the problem, not the solution.
The NHS buys evidence, timing, and trust. In that order. Get those right and the procurement step stops being the blocker.
Sound familiar?
Most health tech founders we work with have said one of these out loud.
Getting started
Getting started.
Workshop
£2K
One-day deep dive on commercial strategy or market access.
Diagnostic
£5K
Written assessment of the shortest route to first procurement win.
Programme
From £15K
Focused engagement: market entry, sales enablement, or platform build.
Full 3 E's
From £25K
Six-month strategic and execution programme.
Questions your board and procurement targets will ask. Answers we've already prepared.
Do you know how NHS digital procurement actually works?
Yes. Framework contracts, DTAC, DCB0129, ICS digital transformation plans, Shared Care Record programme. We map buying routes into Trusts and national programmes and tell you which one is shortest for your product, not the most common.
Can you help us through NICE ESF or other evidence frameworks?
Not as the evidence specialist. As the commercial translator. We partner with evidence specialists and make sure whatever they produce lands with the commercial audiences that use it.
We’re pre-revenue. Does this still work?
Yes, if the clinical case is there and the funding runway covers the commercial build. If it doesn’t, we tell you. The worst outcome for both of us is starting something the runway can’t finish.
How is this different from a big healthcare agency?
We don’t run ads, we don’t do media buying, we don’t have a studio department. We do commercial strategy for the healthcare attention economy. Smaller remit, sharper edge.
What about US expansion?
US health tech commercial is a different animal. We’ve worked cross-Atlantic but we’ll tell you when the other side of the pond needs a different commercial lead.
How do we know it’s working?
Quarterly commercial review. Pipeline stage movement. Qualified buying conversations. First pilot-to-scale conversion. Hard numbers, read by the board.
What changes when the commercial model matches the buyer.
You stop selling into accounts that were never going to buy this year and start selling into the ones that will. Your pipeline becomes a short list of qualified buyers with identifiable procurement pathways, not a long list of warm contacts. Your founders stop running every first meeting and start running the ones that move the company forward.
Your board meetings get shorter. Not because there’s less to say, but because the pipeline is legible and the strategy is defensible. The investor asking why revenue is linear is now asking how you want to deploy the next round. The question didn’t go away. The answer got better.
A health tech company that scales commercially isn’t one that outsells competitors. It’s one that out-thinks the buying cycle.
The health tech companies running into funding winters right now are not the ones with weak products. They are the ones with great products and a commercial model that can’t keep up with the buying reality. The exit from that trap isn’t more hires. It’s a commercial architecture that matches how the NHS, ICSs, Trusts and national programmes actually buy.
The investors keeping their capital for the next round are looking for two things. Pipeline that isn’t founder-dependent. A story about growth that doesn’t depend on the buying cycle magically shortening. Companies that can show both are the ones getting the term sheet.
Every quarter you run on a broken commercial model is a quarter the next round gets harder.