We have the expertise but no clients. How to reach them?

B2B consultant here for 30 years weighing in with broad truths:

* If you are waiting on leads, you die. You create leads -- every day, as your top business priority -- by working to inform and educate people. You deliver value now (information, education) to capture value (a sale) later.

* This is going to mean talking to strangers. It's going to mean experimenting with ads, native advertising, figuring out which channels your buyers frequent, etc. The failure-to-success ratio will be high and that, as painful as it is, is fine. It's part of the process.

* As others have indicated: Don't assume you can just hire someone to do sales or marketing. If the founders don't fully understand the value proposition and the pain points of potential clients, it's very hard to succeed.

* You're new and that means you're likely small. You're also specialized. Consider throwing effort at partnering with larger players who have cracked the code, have a steady stream of clients but don't have your expertise. Subconsulting is profitable and a way to keep the doors open while you figure out how to hunt and kill your own work.

* Your rates have to be high enough to support you with 50%+ of your time unsold/unbooked. During that unsold/unbooked time? You are marketing. With the possible exception of sending out invoices, nothing else is as important.

Lots of condescending negativity in the comments here. Although a lot of it is true, it's not necessarily helpful.

I've been through this exact frustration, read everything there is on the topic, and have discovered things that work and things that don't.

First and foremost - DO NOT go hire anyone to do this for you. No one can. You MUST learn to sell your own products and services, there is no way around it. And no one can do it better than you.

Second, avoid paid advertising before you've learned how to generate high-ticket sales WITHOUT it.

Paid ads and sales people are for scaling only, once you've got your offer and your messaging down to a proven working system.

The good news is, you can get started easily and you can see results quickly, without spending a fortune on anyone or anything.

If you'd like some hand-holding through this, ping me at code+hn@a115.co.uk

This is an incredibly common story among people in tech who learn the skills to build great things and believe that's enough to start a company. Being good at building tech is only half the story. You can write the best code, build the best apps, and design the most amazing UX, but if you can't market your business and sell to people you won't make any money. To run a successful company you need to be good at getting your message in front of people who buy what you're selling.

I don't have an answer beyond the advice that you should always be marketing, generating leads, and selling even when you think you have years worth of work in the pipeline.

we have zero leads from last month

I had no idea what FHIR is. I googled. I followed about five or six links without backing up to land here: http://www.hl7.org/about/gold.cfm?ref=nav

Start cold calling. Collect names. Fill a rollodex. Don't stop. Fill another. Follow up in person.

Ask about what's in their current budget. What's coming down the pipeline. How they currently handle work in your area. See their physical infrastructure. Know what the decision maker's office looks like. Get a sense of their actual problems and assure them that you can mitigate them.

Get your ass to work. Out of the chair. In the car and cheap motels. Stop pretending there are clients on Hacker News. There aren't. It's just easier to post here than cold call.

Good luck.

You won't find clients in a niche like this by setting up a website and waiting for them to show up. When clients need custom development, they turn to recommendations from friends or they turn to industry leaders. They usually don't have the expertise to evaluate a new player on their own.

So you need to either establish yourself as a recommended friend (by networking and/or completing successful projects) or as an industry leader. For the latter, you could use strategies like blogging on how a facility should deploy or consume FHIR, write about best practices in interoperability, or whatever. That might lead to people asking you questions and eventually lead to them asking for help with projects.

If you don't know many people in the industry yet, one way to get to know more people might be to partner with another company on a dev project where they need extra help. It might not be as exciting as getting your own project, but you have to start somewhere.

I have a company in this niche and may need help with FHIR and related dev work in the future. Feel free to send me an email to the details in my profile and introduce yourself.

I'm CTO at one of your target firms. Integration is a major pain point for us. We don't have a need for you now, but I've noted a few things based on what I could find on Alstonia.io. My needs are different than others, but hopefully this helps. If any consultant or agency wants someone like me to hire you, I want to see that they have used the tech we use, that I can estimate your cost reliably, that they're reliable people in general and that I can understand the code they write. The stuff about security and high availability/fault tolerance kind of comes as a matter of course.

You can check a lot of those boxes by 1) some content on your website describing previous projects (like whitepaper PDFs or long-form blog posts), 2) GitHub projects, 3) references/testimonials. Then give a giant call to action form including asking for a phone number (I hate giving out my phone number, but it seems like everyone requires it, so I imagine it would help you more than not).

Note that these needs are very different then what I'd need from an employee. For instance, I can invest in employees and give them time to learn our tech. For consultants, I can't.

Hi there, I'm someone who builds and buys SMART on FHIR tech, albeit small potatoes in the space. A few thoughts from checking out your site to see if I should follow up with you, I hope these are helpful.

1. WHo are you? Your site says nothing about you. I'm going to give you the keys to the PHI kingdom, I need to know who's soliciting me. Are you two twenty-somethings with amazing skills and ideas, or 20 ex-Epic employees looking to fill a particular gap you found? Without this general information I wouldn't know what sort of project to think about including you in.

2. Where are you? I'm under contract with numerous health agencies that require data to be on US soil. I have no idea if you are in Romania or Virginia. (Side note, government is the biggest purchaser of health care and therefore your paths will cross at some point, even if it's simply being downstream of federal or state data.)

3. How compliant are you? Your one page tells me nothing about your understanding of HIPAA, nor how you ensure the security and privacy of the data you will be exposed to. It may seem as if anyone in the space _should_ know about this and the reader can assume compliance, but frankly it's not the case. Yell at me about your third-party audits, your ability to transact PHI, as well as any SOC/FISMA compliance you have.

4. What have you done before? There are a lot of corners in the niche, and I'd need to know what systems you've worked with, what you've built and who for, so I can get an understanding of whether or not you'd be a good fit.

As for leads, with most conferences going virtual your usual approach of HIMSS is buggered, but Healthcare Datapalooza just put out a call for presentations so they're likely looking for (virtual) sponsors already. I assume HIMSS and HCDP sell attendee data, have you looked in to that? And how about FHIR aggregators like 1up and Redox, they are likely plugged in to many of your potential customers.

I'd be happy to chat more, my profile has an E-mail address you can use. Good luck with your venture!

EDIT - forgot to mention, starting out a great way to get noticed is to participate on a HIT Challenge, not sure what's up for grabs lately but challenge.gov - easy way to find the right people to start netowrking with.

Meta-advice, don't take all the advice here too seriously :) People here don't know you situation as well as you do, and following too many different advice will lead you to not have any consistent direction.

So here are my humble thoughts on the website. I have no expertise in healthcare technology, so maybe that's the reason, but I could not understand what types of problems you are solving and what you are doing from your website.

1. For example, 'Reimagining Healthcare' is an empty phrase. All your sentences seem vague to me: "Comprehensive Healthcare Solutions and Integrations with FHIR, HL7 and SMART", are you consulting on how to create these solutions? are you developing these solutions? are you selling a created solution? Are you integrating somebody's else solution?

2. There is not a lot of connection to your company in your texts: > Healthcare Data Interoperability and Analytics > Standards like SMART and FHIR allow healthcare providers to store and share data in an interoperable manner which enables organizations to derive insights to provide effective care efficiently.

This is a good description of these standards and why they are important, but what is your connection here? If you are using these standards, then mention it directly. Maybe something like this is better: > We use standards like SMART and FHIR to allow healthcare providers... All other texts in Services section have the same problem.

3. I don't understand the Solutions section. It looks like a collection of icons and slogans. Let's take one example: Cloud. So I can guess that you are developing your solutions to be deployed on the cloud. But why make clients guess? Write it directly and mention why this is good. "Our solutions are deployed on cloud. This is good because <...>.".

4. This is just a suggestion. I would add a section of Problems that you can solve. Client come to your sites with problems. So I would write: "1. You have problem X? We can solve it by doing Y."

Overall, you have to think from the eyes of the client. What is the client looking for?

But again, I do not know anything about your field. I don't know who your clients, what problems they have, and what technology you are building. So you should be very quick to ignore this advice if you think I don't have the necessary understanding.

But regardless, good luck :)

EDIT: typos

So, I work in pretty much this exact area. The main issue is you're trying to sell something that customers don't buy - any integration, FHIR or HL7 or something, is only ever needed to get one product to talk to another. Usually a new one to talk to the old one; and the business selling the new product is the one in whose interest it is to get the integration working.

While it's always possible to take existing kit and do more/better automation, this kind of operational improvement tends to have little to no budget unless there's some specific project being undertaken (e.g. going to structured reporting). Generally, although people are often unhappy with internal software, the business will be operating as-is pretty comfortably. You'd need to deliver an awful lot of value to make it worthwhile paying you what you need.

I would probably look to better define your customer. You might have a better shout trying to approach ISVs who are selling new healthcare products, and asking them to use you as a delivery partner. Many ISVs have weak deployment teams and cannot deal with complex integrations, but they will be the ones with a customer and a contract. If you can speed up time to implementation, they get paid quicker and can do more.

I am going to be blunt. If you can’t get the people you used to work for to hire you or recommend you to their contacts then you are going to fail. Get on the phone to everyone you have ever worked for (assuming you left a good impression) and chase those leads.

There are a lot of useful comments already.

Something that hasn't been pointed out yet as far as I can tell is that there are accessibility and quality errors on your website. If I am looking to hire somebody it's one of the things I look at when I want to see if they know what they are doing. Not everybody is like me, but these problems are worth fixing anyway:

- The "Explore" button is a span with a click handler, the click handler updates the URL hash. It's not keyboard focusable, and since it's just a link to a different location in the page, it could just be a link, but if it must be JS, it needs to be a button element.

- The form does not have accessible labels. Placeholder text is not a label. Also "fullname" looks like an error.

Lighthouse reports some other low hanging fruit.

Overall vibe of that website is that somebody chose some readily-available bootstrap landing page template and didn't check it for basic errors. That combined with the scant information about the company & the fact that your website is really just a single page does not inspire confidence. Even in the small amount of copy that is on the site, there are three errors in this one sentence:

"Healthcare providers will need an infracstructure what is open, interoperable and standards-compliant, which ensures the security, confidentiality and privacy of presonal data."

If you are not spellchecking your copy & shipping valid HTML for a single web page you make for yourselves, it would be wrong of me to expect higher quality in something you are hired to build. FHIR and HIPAA are tough and I have a ton of respect for you for being able to work in that context. The quality of your website should reflect the high standard you bring to that work.

Talk as much as you can to your potential customers about their problems in your area of expertise & try to best align. Try to identify, understand and solve points-of-friction from these conversations.

Where to find potential customers? I'd try in following order: - Talk to existing customers / contacts for referrals - Talk to your past colleagues / friends for referrals - Quality cold emails with decent research & pre-work - Hang out on social wherever your potential customers hang-out and engage in meaningful conversations.

You may not strike success right away but do persist & keep identify what's working / not working. Follow-up regularly. If above gets tiring once-in-a-while - write content that can market your expertise.

Background : Been offering website speed / scalability services expertise for 3+ years.

Collected some suggestions here: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/consulting-advice/

Read: Million Dollar Consulting, by Alan Weiss.

Do: Build your visibility and credibility. Fish where the fish are. Where are your target buyers spending their time and getting their information? Find a way to publish there.

Figure out who are the best connected people in your network or vicinity and talk to them, let them know you're taking on projects and be clear in what kind of projects you can help with. Make it easy for them to refer you.

Without trying to be provocative I just looked at your website and this leapt our at me.

“Lean Development methologies and modern cloud deployment startagies enable fast paced development with shorter iteration cycles.”

Apart from the buzzword bingo, you’ve misspelt “strategies”.

Your copy is incredibly bland and nebulous and doesn’t really say anything about what you do.

I do work in a similar space. You need to talk to the safe contacts within your clients who may know other people in the industry who are working on similar things and ask for intros.

Healthcare is really hard to sell into, that is why a few companies own so much of the paying field. The hospital system I worked for had 2,4 and 5 year cycles for their contracts, so things didn't the often and vendors had to be around at the right time to get consideration. It seemed very bizarre and antiquated to me. My best advice would be to to find vendors that have adjacent solutions and partner with them, maybe making their own sales funnel easier.

I worked in insurance for 5 years.

If what you do can be sold to doctor's offices instead of hospitals, that's where I would start cold calling people.

Every doctor's office is a small business. They aren't that good at the business end of things and their HIPAA training tends to be poor compared to what hospitals do.

If you can figure out how to educate doctors on why this matters and what the rules are and how you can solve their problems, I think that's your best shot at developing a solid customer base.

Larger healthcare organizations, like hospitals and insurance companies, do their own in-house training and custom solutions. It's doctors offices that can't afford their own IT department but still need to comply with things like HIPAA that are in a world of hurt and could benefit from someone coming in and serving as their part-time IT department and staff expert.

I’ve often wondered if an opinionated solution — in the Rails sense — would sell to SMEs in healthcare. Ask any physician group in the US what their pain point is and it’s probably reimbursement. They have to deal with finicky rules from different insurance providers, and usually employ a couple people dedicated to getting reimbursed. They also have to wait long periods of time for those reimbursements.

A company that could promise to improve that situation by standardizing how the practice operates and optimizing reimbursement could have a great sales value. You could also standardize data sharing/HIPAA practice.

You still have to sell it to buyers, one by one.

Personally I've been researching in healthcare mainly on CVD for the past five years.

Coming from outside healthcare, I was really shocked initially on how primitive the technology in clinics and hospitals as if they are still in the 1980s especially in the hospital management and operation. I've come to conclusion that healthcare is a very well-funded area and it's ripe for disruption. Consider these scenarios in where I live:

You want a digital copy of your ECG reading, nope they give you the paper based reading of several seconds recording that will lose their ink in a few months time.

You want to transfer your health data record to another hospital or clinic, nope that's impossible since the hospitals or clinics don't perform any proactive data sharing even between government's hospitals, paper based or digitally.

You want the over crowded hospital outpatient section to send you SMS or at least make an online/website call numbers, nope you have to wait physically, and if you've missed your turn when you're away then you are basically screwed.

You have a disabled family member who cannot even move to attend the hospital, nope you need to pay expensive third party doctor to make a visit to your house.

I think you get the idea by now, and since your expertise in healthcare IT and depending on where do you live just talk to the hospital management or govt appointed organization (e.g. NHS in the UK) about any of the above issues and how you can you solve the above mentioned problems or others for the benefit of hospitals/clinics and the society in general.

1- Offer over funnels : Funnels are important, but if I have to choose between a funnel or an offer, I’d choose the OFFER FIRST. You can close 6/5 figure deals over text message, PDFS, ugly 1-page websites, and emails. The offer is the key. Don’t create offers that you “think” people will like, instead, find out exactly what they want, do some digging… and give them exactly what they are looking for, and don’t overthink it.

2- It’s not all about the “one close call” : High Ticket clients have a different psychology. Part of attracting high-paying clients is knowing what triggers them to buy (exclusivity, high perceived value, emotional, psychological, time investment, etc..)

3- Don’t sell, select : Everything in your funnel should be designed with you SELECTING them, not you begging for their business.

4- Break the rules! You can go through copying what works, and try it out to get some quick success but eventually you’ll get to a point where you create something new in the marketplace, and you are the first one to offer it (angle wise, position wise, offer wise), so take it! First mover advantage is risky, but that’s where all the upside is, if you get it right.

For HIPAA integrations you're going to need to a lot of security auditing. Something that might work well is publishing a white paper of your personal security practices. Things like full-disk-encryption for developers, password policies, hardware 2FA for ALL company accounts, SSO for all logins with a single place to delete a credential set, mandatory monthly/weekly HIPAA training, etc.

Another thing you might want to consider doing is open sourcing some stuff to help setup FHIR/HL7 integrations. Pretty much the only fully fledged HL7 "solution" you can get for free HAPI [0]. You might want to make some open source tools around all of this. For example: a reverse proxy that prints all to a log that's censored for PII for debugging. Make that for free, push that to github and open source it.

This will get you:

1. Lead generation: People in this space will know who you are

2. Trust: Hiring consultants is difficult if you cant see the quality of their work. If you do a good job on these OSS tools you can prove to people that your code quality is high. This demands a much higher price tag.

Something else you might consider discussing is what EMRs you have direct experience with. For instance Epic [1] provides "training services". HL7 has a "HL7 Certified" exam you can take to prove you can memorize it's obtuse message structures. Taking, passing, and displaying this might make some buisnessy-people happy.

[0] - https://hapifhir.github.io/hapi-hl7v2/

[1] - https://www.epic.com/services

I’ve never been in your exact position and won’t claim to be an expert but I have a fair bit of sales experience and a few close friends who’ve started their own businesses. One thing that stood out to me is that if I were to stumble across your website I’d have no idea what you’re actually providing or looking to provide. It could easily be my personal lack of healthcare industry knowledge and not an issue for your target market. My advice would be not to try and rethink the strategy that seems I see as “if you have a tech need in the medical field, we can handle it” and create something specific. Find a specific problem, create something that solves it, and sell that. Once you have customers for that you can move on to try and grow your business with them. The other big thing is with a field with such sensitive data as the medical field, you need to establish some level of trust and a relationship before a business like a hospital is going to take a gamble like that.

I'm sorry to say this but, in my experience targeting very niche needs, a well targeted Google Adwords campaign is hard to beat and gives you the data to help structure the rest of your marketing. If you have the expertise you will learn to get the search terms right.

One of the ways that sometimes works well is to find big potential client, and then hire (or even partner with) someone that works in their product team. You can use his network. I know it sounds silly. But, that's one of the tactics that many companies use.

The easiest customer to 'do more with' is the existing customer you have. You have two projects (presumably two companies), reach out to them and ask them where else they need more help, "what other projects could we help with?" If you're doing a good job then it's natural. It's all about forming a strong relationship at different levels in your customer and having them advocate to use you in other projects.

The other tactic is that your customers know other companies and contacts in the space. Ask them for help - "as a new consultancy we're trying to build our contacts in healthcare, is there anyone in the industry you think we should speak to?".

Did you try to connect with your prospective customers via LinkedIn? What do they say to you?

Random internet advice (not an expert) is to call everyone you know who might know someone. Also would it be so bad to take a contract from a job site or even a job in the intermediate time. Maybe one of you does a job the other biz dev.

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Voted #1 business book by Inc. 500 CEOs.

https://www.amazon.ca/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/...

The core expertise in a consulting company is getting the clients. Half of the consultants have absolutely no idea what they're talking about and do fine, domain expertise is 1/10th of the job, getting clients is 50% of the job, and putting together a work product that feels like it could represent domain expertise is 40%. So I'd approach the problem from "I have no expertise in consulting, how do I build some" which will be more fruitful.

> We have the expertise and experience in healthcare technology ( FHIR, interoperability ), which is a niche.

Cool, but what's the value you offer? Who needs it? Why? What do they usually do? What's their title? Where do they usually look for solutions to their problems?

Selling expertise vs selling value is the difference between being an laborer vs a business owner. If you're trying to sell your expertise, you're thinking about it wrong.

While I believe even a good webpage wont currently help you, your current one is missing vital information. First: you business location and email. I mean you use .io, are you in the indian ocean? Are you a UK, US or India based company (this matters a lot to possible customers).

Also I find it not clear from the webpage what would be the benefit of hiring you. (What pain do I have which is solved by you)

I work for a IT company in healthcare. We also do FHIR, interoperability, and such.

This is the easy part. The really hard part is to get customers.

It means having a network, a good reputation, to reply to tenders in time with a ready to use solution that is competitive, adapt to the cursomers needs, etc... We have more employees doing sales and support than software.

You may find work as a contractor for a healthcare company though.

If you can spare the time, get actively involved in HL7 FHIR standards development by participating in work groups, showing up at Connectathon events, and volunteering to write sections of implementation guides. This will raise your visibility among customers who hire interoperability consultants.

How to get clients.

Or put another way, how to have a business.

The hardest question of all.

As Paul Graham says sell something people want.

The best way to get leads is to ask you customer to introduce you to other potential customers. If they say yes, get the intros done quickly and make sure you do a great job with the new prospects so your customer refers you more.

You need to go where your customers are. Our customers are startups so we went to every startup meeting we could find in our area, talking to people, perfecting our pitch.

I assume there are places where your customers gather too.

Give free presentations (webinars), youtube videos, show your work, demos, working products. Meet people in the health industry. Try to reach them and show what can you do. Ask for intros, show what you can do.

You should look at basic marketing 101. Identify market segments, identify customers, who makes purchasing decisions and how do they decide, target those people.

Who are you targeting?

Why are so many people starting businesses without even knowing how to sell their service/product?

No service/product is so good that it automagically sell itself.

If you are based in Europe drop me an email. We might have something for you.

Market yourself on B2B forums of your industry and create a funnel.

How many people are in your sales team?

Link: https://alstonia.io

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