Successfully selling technology into healthcare and life sciences organisations

Selling technology into healthcare and life sciences companies isn’t your typical B2B SaaS play. Long, multi-party sales cycles, change and risk management, and compliance with regulation require a more nuanced approach.

But things are changing. In recent years, technology adoption in these organisations has moved from nice-to-have to must-have. Covid accelerated the shift, normalising the use of more technology solutions in the workplace, while more recent advances in AI have made its potential impossible to ignore. There is also an increasing recognition of how important digital transformation is in improving healthcare and life sciences outcomes while enabling a more productive system to close the supply-demand gap.

This creates an opportunity for tech companies selling in. However, success requires more than product-market fit; it requires understanding market timing, educating customers, and over-investing in customer success.

Timing the market

One common pitfall we see is companies trying to push the market before it’s ready. In healthcare and life sciences, timing can be just as important as the product itself.

Sales cycles are typically slow and complex. 40% of B2B healthcare buying decisions take over 24 months to complete. And purchase decisions involve an increasingly complex “buyer collective” of different stakeholders, each with their own concerns and incentives, and often working across different organisational layers. 60% of organisations report five or more people involved in purchasing decisions, and over a quarter say 10+ people. There are clinical risk teams with veto power, operational leaders managing frontline staff, IT executives who need organisational data visibility, and, increasingly, data or AI leads focused on analytics. Mapping and understanding these different voices can help create a more effective sales process.

That said, there are signs that organisations are becoming more receptive. Rising operational pressures and workforce shortages have created an environment that’s increasingly open to tech solutions.

Pricing and margin pressures have been a consistent factor for the life sciences industry, and in response to the growing costs of developing new drugs and devices, the industry faces significant pressure to enhance productivity. Nearly 60% of life sciences executives have identified optimising the operating model as a priority for 2025, according to a recent Deloitte report. In parallel, regulators are working to remove friction. In the US, the FDA is promoting data interoperability standards like ICH M11, which will help standardise clinical trial data and protocols from the very beginning of a study – the planning stage – making it easier to integrate digital tools and generative AI into traditionally manual workflows.

The same goes for healthcare. More than 70% of C-suite healthcare executives across five countries said that improving operational efficiencies and productivity gains will be priorities for their organisations this year. And workforce shortages are making this more acute. The World Health Organization estimates a shortfall of 10 million healthcare workers by 2030, and more than 80% of healthcare executives expect hiring difficulties and talent shortages over the next year.

So there’s an increased appetite for technology that can help. About 70% of health leaders plan to invest in technology platforms for digital tools and services over this year, and 60% in core technologies like electronic medical records (EMRs) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. AI is already in use across 86% of medical organisations, according to a recent report from Medscape and HIMSS, with 60% interested in its ability to diagnose and surface health patterns beyond human detection.

In short, digital adoption is moving higher on the agenda. And this is creating a platform for new technology that can address the sector’s urgent pain points: staff shortages, operational inefficiencies, and cost containment.

Bridging the gap

Even if the market is ready, individual customers might not be. Helping them build understanding and confidence can go a long way.
Healthcare and life sciences buyers are rarely traditional tech adopters. They’re carers, clinicians, scientists, and administrators. They care about outcomes, not features. So messaging that focuses on tangible ROI – how does the product or service help their teams improve care delivery and outcomes, reduce administrative work, or make faster decisions – is likely to resonate more than a technical feature set.

It can be useful to address fears upfront: how the solution integrates with existing systems, potential disruption during implementation, and – especially for AI products – how data security and patient privacy are handled. Nearly three-quarters of healthcare executives cite data privacy as a significant risk in AI adoption.
Many healthcare and life sciences organisations are still used to custom-built systems designed around their workflows, rather than off-the-shelf SaaS tools. This can create friction during procurement, especially in the public sector where tender requirements are tightly aligned to existing processes and there’s little room as a vendor to challenge assumptions. It’s not uncommon for tenders to be cancelled and reissued after market engagement reveals misaligned requirements.
Establishing trust and credibility also comes down to the people involved. Buyers may feel more confident speaking with those who understand the regulatory landscape, clinical language, and the unique dynamics of the healthcare and life sciences sector. Hiring or involving domain experts in the sales process can help bridge that gap and build credibility.

Making customer success an engine for growth

Helping end-users navigate the cultural and behavioural changes that come with digital transformation is how the potential of technology is unlocked. It is also essential for winning user acceptance and preventing ‘organ rejection’, which ultimately leads to churn. This involves investing in onboarding, training, workflow integration, and ongoing support – but, most importantly, it means having an empathetic, customer-centric culture.
Customer success done well becomes the real engine of growth. Nurturing early adopters can generate high-value expansions, referrals, and case studies that lower future CAC. In healthcare, the ability to land and expand an account drives a very high proportion of revenue growth, seen in the high net revenue retention (NRR) values across healthcare SaaS and tech-enabled services. Customer success is a growth function, not a support role.
Especially at the early stages, when there might not be enough longitudinal data to fully understand a customer’s LTV, it can help to keep a tight grip on CAC payback and NRR. These are typically the clearest signals of whether the go-to-market engine is sustainable, and whether the investment in sales, marketing, and customer success is paying off.

From vendor to partner

Healthcare and life sciences organisations are demanding, complex buyers. But they can also be among the most loyal and valuable, provided they see consistent value and trust in their partners.
Workforce shortages, cost constraints, and an imperative to modernise have created an appetite for technology that can digitalise processes and make life easier for both frontline workers and back-office staff, while enabling them to deliver better health outcomes. The opportunity is there for those who meet their customers where they are, speak their language, and embed customer success into their go-to-market strategy. Trust is the differentiator.