About six months ago, we made a deliberate bet on healthcare. It was a space we were thrust into, and we quickly realized that a lot of what we'd built across Devtools, AI, Cyber, and Deeptech still applies here. The fundamentals of good go-to-market don't evaporate when you enter a new vertical.

But they do require something extra.

That's the core insight we've spent the last six months earning: healthcare isn't a different game. It's the same game played on a much harder difficulty setting. With longer sales cycles, more stakeholders, higher trust thresholds, more regulatory landmines, and buyers who have seen enough vendor pitches to know immediately when they're being sold to. The GTM infrastructure you've built elsewhere still matters. What changes is the specialized layer you have to put on top of it.

To go deep, we brought on Kori Bivens, who spent her career leading high-growth teams inside healthcare organizations, most recently as a Vice President at RVO Health, where she navigated nearly every sector of the healthcare system. We also added Morgan Abreu as a GTM Lead, who has touched virtually every GTM function you can think of, from demand gen to sales ops to growth strategy, at companies like Thorne. Between the two of them and the broader QC Growth team, we've spent the last six months pressure-testing whether the GTM engine we've built in other verticals translates to B2B HealthTech.

It does. But only if you know where to apply the healthcare layer and who to put in the room.

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The Market Context

Healthcare isn't one market. It's several, and they behave very differently from each other.

Health systems and hospitals are navigating unprecedented cost pressure, margin compression, and a relentless push to demonstrate clinical and operational outcomes. This differs slightly depending on their value-based care contracts versus fee-for-service, grant funding, and much more.  Payers: commercial insurers, Medicare Advantage plans, Medicaid managed care organizations, etc., are navigating one of the most complex regulatory and financial environments they've faced in years, in some cases making them more willing to adopt technology that drives operational efficiency. Employers, especially self-insured mid-market companies, are past their interest in point solutions and seeking relationships that drive real health outcomes via comprehensive, integrated solutions. And pharma and life sciences organizations are building out commercial and patient engagement infrastructure faster than their internal teams can staff it.

The demand is real across all of these buyer types. But the commercial motion that works in one sector rarely works in another without modification. A GTM playbook built for health systems will not land with a VP of Benefits at a self-insured employer. An approach calibrated for payers won't translate directly into life sciences. We like to believe that all HealthTech companies are in some way aiming to make patients’ lives better, yet knowing what parts of the healthcare system you are interacting with on that journey will lead to a faster GTM motion and faster impact on patients.

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What we actually learned

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We didn't come in with a hypothesis and leave with the same one. Here's what shifted.

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Segmentation is the foundation, not a nice-to-have.

In most verticals, good segmentation gets you to better conversion. In healthcare, it's the difference between getting meetings and getting ghosted.

"Healthcare" is not an ICP. Neither is "health systems" or "payers" or "employers." The buyer inside a 600-bed academic medical center operates with completely different constraints, timelines, and success criteria than the buyer at a 150-bed community hospital. A national commercial payer and a regional Blue plan have different vendor appetites and procurement processes. A self-insured employer with 2,000 employees and a pharmacy benefit they control is a fundamentally different conversation than one with 20,000 employees outsourcing everything to a PBM.

The healthcare specialization layer starts here: you need a segmentation model that accounts for the specific characteristics that actually predict buying behavior in your category. Bed count matters for some solutions and is irrelevant for others. Value-based care contract penetration matters enormously if you're selling outcomes-linked technology. Risk model (fully insured vs. self-insured) determines everything in the employer benefits market. The tighter your definition, the faster you can build real proof points, and proof points are what close the next deal.

Start absurdly narrow. Earn a few strong wins. Then earn the right to expand.

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Buyer mapping isn't optional. And it changes by sector.

The person who loves your product usually can't buy it.

We've seen this play out repeatedly across every buyer segment. In health systems, a clinical champion can be deeply enthusiastic and completely unable to move a purchase through a CFO, an IT security review, a legal team, and a procurement committee, each of whom has different success criteria and different risk tolerance. In payer organizations, a medical director may champion a solution that ultimately stalls because it didn't clear the actuarial team's ROI threshold or because it created workflow dependencies that IT wouldn't support. In employer benefits, a Head of Benefits may love the solution but have no authority to displace an incumbent broker relationship.

The healthcare specialization layer here means building a multi-stakeholder map on day one of every active deal, not after your third meeting. It means understanding who the economic buyer is, who controls implementation, who has veto authority, and who your champion needs to bring along to win internally. It means giving your champion the CFO version of your ROI model, not the clinical version you built for them. And the ROI model itself needs to be built on the buyer's own cost structure, not generic industry numbers that no CFO is going to believe.

This changes by sector. Health system deal governance looks very different from a payer procurement process, which looks very different from the employer benefits buying cycle. Knowing which map you're navigating is part of what the healthcare layer provides.

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Signal-based targeting matters more here, not less.

Generic outbound doesn't work in healthcare. Full stop.

Healthcare buyers have been burned by vendors who oversold and underdelivered, and they've built real defenses against undifferentiated outreach. The volume plays that work in some tech verticals generate almost nothing in this market. What works is showing up at the right moment, with the right message, for the right buyer, and that requires knowing which signals indicate a buyer is actually in motion.

The signals exist across every buyer segment, but they're different. In health systems: a new VP of Innovation hired, active LinkedIn posts on AI use within a particular specialty, prospect involvement in relevant foundations’ chat boards.. In payers: a shift in their risk mix, a new CMS star rating pressure point, a leadership change in their care management function. In employer benefits: open enrollment planning season, a CFO focused on benefits cost reduction, a public announcement about employee health initiatives.

These aren't hard to find if you know what you're looking for. They're invisible if you're running generic outreach. The healthcare specialization layer means building your pipeline around these signals, not around raw volume.

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Relationships Are Still the Distribution Channel

Mass outreach doesn't work in healthcare. We've watched companies send thousands of emails into health organizations and get almost nothing back. Meanwhile, a single warm introduction from a trusted operator can get you a meeting in a week that cold outreach couldn't buy in six months.

The trust gap between a cold and a warm introduction is wider in healthcare than in almost any other market. Healthcare buyers are making decisions that affect patients, members, and employees. They've been burned by vendors who oversold and underdelivered, and the defenses they've built against undifferentiated outreach are real and justified.

So where do relationships actually get built? In person. At the conferences, summits, and convenings where your buyers already gather.

Every major healthcare buyer segment has its own circuit. Health system CMOs and CNOs are at HIMSS, ViVE, and HLTH. Payer leaders convene at AHIP and Becker's Payer Issues. Benefits and HR leaders show up at the Employee Benefit News Forum and regional SHRM events. These aren't networking opportunities — they're concentrated windows where the right people are already away from their desks, already in a mindset of exploration and peer conversation, and already open to a discussion that doesn't feel like a pitch.

The mistake most early-stage HealthTech companies make is treating conference presence as a marketing activation: sponsor a booth, scan badges, add names to a sequence. It looks like pipeline. It rarely becomes pipeline.

The companies that actually build relationships at conferences do something different. They do the work before the event:  identifying the five or ten specific people they want to sit down with, researching what those people have publicly said about their challenges, and sending a direct, specific outreach asking for thirty minutes over coffee or lunch. Not a booth meeting. Not a badge scan. A real conversation with a real agenda.

That pre-event outreach is where the healthcare specialization layer matters most. Knowing which sessions a CMO is likely to attend, which roundtable a VP of Care Management will be on, which dinner a self-insured employer benefits leader always shows up to. That kind of signal intelligence only comes from people who have worked inside these organizations and know their conference rhythms. It's the difference between cold outreach with a conference as context and a warm, specific ask that feels like it came from someone who understands your world.

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Performance-based pricing changes the conversation.

Healthcare CFOs and COOs are, rightly so, more risk-averse. Asking them to make a large upfront commitment to an unproven vendor is a hard sell, no matter how good your demo is. This is the hardest hurdle to overcome for even the best products when just entering the market. 

What we've seen work consistently across buyer segments: a reduced base fee paired with outcome-linked upside that puts financial risk on your side of the table. This isn't just a pricing tactic, it's a trust signal. It says you believe in what you're building enough to share the downside. In a market where buyers have been burned before and are making decisions that affect patients, employees, or members, that matters more than almost anything else you can say in a pitch.

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Advisory councils compound over time.  And healthcare buyers expect them.

One of the highest-ROI investments an early-stage HealthTech company can make is building a formal clinical or operator advisory council. In most verticals, this is a nice-to-have. In healthcare, buyers often expect it.  They want to see that people who have lived inside organizations like theirs have pressure-tested your solution.

Done right, an advisory council generates credibility with prospects who don't know you yet, surfaces product feedback from people who actually work inside the systems you're selling into, and creates a warm referral network that builds over time. Advisors become champions. Champions open doors. Doors become deals. It's not a fast lever, but it's one of the few that genuinely compounds.

The composition matters too. A health system-focused company needs health system operators and providers on their council. A payer-focused company needs people who have run care management or network operations inside a plan. A solution targeting self-insured employers needs benefits leaders who understand that buying environment. The healthcare specialization layer includes knowing whose credibility you're borrowing.

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The Through Line

We came into healthcare with a strong GTM foundation and a real question: does it translate?

Six months in, the answer is overwhelmingly ‘yes’.  But only if you apply the healthcare layer intentionally.

The engine that works across other verticals (signal-based targeting, tight ICP definition, relationship-first motion, multi-stakeholder navigation, performance-aligned pricing) works here too. What it requires is understanding that healthcare is not one market, that each buyer segment operates with different economics, different governance structures, different trust thresholds, and different definitions of value. And it requires operators who understand those environments well enough to apply these tools with real judgment, not just execute them mechanically.

For founders building in HealthTech, the biggest mistake we see is treating GTM as something to figure out after product-market fit, or assuming that the commercial motion that worked in their last vertical will translate directly here. In this market, the commercial strategy and the product strategy have to be built together, and the healthcare specialization layer has to be wired in from the start.

These aren't post-Series-A questions. They're right now questions, and the founders who treat them that way are the ones walking into their Series A with real ARR, a defensible pipeline, and a commercial story that investors can actually believe.

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ABOUT QC GROWTH

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QC Growth is a go-to-market consultancy helping Pre-Seed through Series A companies build the commercial foundations that make growth repeatable. Our healthcare practice, QC Health, is led by Kori Bivens and supported by a team of operators who have built GTM inside healthcare organizations and know what it takes to earn trust in this market.

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If you're building in digital health and want to talk, reach us at luke@qcgrowth.com or visit qcgrowth.com/health.

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