In healthcare, make sure you meet the stakeholder most likely to kill your deal

You've heard the multi-threading advice a hundred times: find the economic buyer, thread a handful of stakeholders around them, and never let a deal rest on one person. When selling to healthcare providers, it goes a step farther. Not only do you need to multi-thread, but you need to ensure that one key decision-maker is included in every deal: the clinical leader.

I've spent years selling in the pharma and medical device diagnostics industries, and now I sell revenue technology to healthcare organizations. Selling to healthcare provider organizations differs from other B2B sales for a few reasons. Compliance is one; a longer-than-typical sales cycle is another. But the one difference that can make or break a deal is ensuring you bring the clinical leader in. By this, I mean the chief medical officer, the lead physician, or the provider who actually runs the practice. They need to be bought in from the very first conversation, or you're building on sand.

Enterprise healthcare provider deals now commonly involve six to 10 decision-makers spanning clinical, financial, IT, and operational functions, and they play out over 12- to 24-month cycles. That's a wide field, and it's getting wider.

Roughly 82 percent of physicians are now employed by a hospital, health system, or corporate entity rather than an independent practice. When providers work for a centralized organization, buying authority moves upward.

A critical buyer may be a VP of ambulatory operations or a corporate medical director who oversees standardization across five to 200-plus sites, not the administrator at the location you first walked into.

That's where deals stall. Reps engage a site-level administrator, feel good about the relationship, and never reach the centralized buyer who actually signs. You can run a flawless process at one clinic and still be invisible to the person who decides for the whole network.

A clinical leader can veto your deal, and most sellers don't see it coming. Here's the part that trips people up: this stakeholder may never touch your product, so reps assume they don't need to be sold.

But that’s not quite right. Your solution is usually used by providers, often as part of the job they like least. And it can have a significant impact on the business.

I watched a physician so opposed to switching electronic health records that the change drove them to retire rather than adopt the new system. If anyone had simply asked whether they wanted the new software, the answer would have been no. Nobody asked, so the objection surfaced far too late to save the relationship.

That's the clinical veto. It rarely appears on a stakeholder map, and by the time it does, it may be too late.

In almost every other industry, the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) is your number one target. In healthcare, that assumption can be a trap. A "CRO" here frequently oversees claims and insurance reimbursement, such as what pays best or what's on Formulary, which makes them closer to an accountant than a sales leader. If you anchor your deal on that title, you've spent your energy on someone with limited authority over your purchase.

Instead, re-map the committee to the real power centers of healthcare. A useful lens is to follow how the organization actually makes money: seeing patients, billing insurance, and running procedures. That will lead you to the people who hold power.

Before you build your account plan, know which roles genuinely matter here:

• The person who provides the care, often a physician or chief medical officer, has a say in nearly everything.
• Commercial operations, which govern how the business runs day-to-day.
• The VP of business development, who owns growth priorities.
• Emerging roles like chief AI officers and directors, who increasingly weigh in on technology decisions.

Threading the decision-makers isn't enough. You need the end users to be bought in, too, because they're the ones who'll sell your solution internally once you've left the room. That's change management again, and it's how good deals survive a long cycle.

Hidden detractors kill deals more often than tough negotiators. It might be a physician with an informal pull you never knew about, or a supply-chain and procurement function that can overrule even a champion doctor. A single unthreaded skeptic near the money can stall everything.

The good news is that the missing stakeholder is usually already in the account's history. Look at past deals and lost opportunities and check who was talked to before, where the deal stalled, and who the last real decision-maker turned out to be. Then re-engage those warm contacts. A key persona you didn't know existed is often sitting in a closed-lost record from months ago.

At Gong, customers come to us because they feel the pain of gaps in multi-stakeholder engagement across complex healthcare deals. The value is in being able to surface which personas have and haven't been engaged, flag hidden detractors, and see who was contacted in past deals that were lost, so your team can multi-thread before a decision is made without you in the room.

If you take one thing from this, take this: in healthcare, the clinical leader needs to be included in your cycle, even if they never touch what you sell.

Go back to your top three opportunities this week and ask a hard question of each one: Have you actually threaded the clinical leader, or have you just assumed the economic buyer speaks for them? If you can't answer with a name, you have your next call.

Learn more about how Gong’s Revenue AI can help you have full visibility into every healthcare deal.