Designing your sales process: From Pilots to Revenue

M Win
Mar 18
5 min read

Many teams can get pilots but struggle to turn them into predictable revenue.

Pilots prove the product works in one corner of an organisation; they don’t automatically lead to a contract you can bank on.

I’ve seen the same problem keep showing up across teams in both large and small organisations: lots of promising pilots but no clear path from “this looks good” to “we’ve are happy to roll this out and pay for it”.

This article walks though a simple way to design your first HealthTech or Lifesciences sales process – from first conversation, through pilot, to a deal you can actually forecast.

Pilots aren’t the problem – the process is

Founders often blame the pilots for being “dead ends”. Most of the time the pilot does what it was meant to do. Clinicians use the product, feedback is positive & before and after metrics look encouraging.

The real issues are:

The person who sponsored the pilot can’t approve budget for a wider rollout.
Nobody agreed upfront what would happen if the pilot worked.
Procurement, IT or others only get involved after the pilot, and everything slows down.

If your pilot has no agreed path to a commercial decision, it isn’t a sales stage. It’s a local experiment. Useful for learning, but it is probably not going to drive revenue.

Start by defining stages

A sales process doesn’t need to be clever but it does need to match how your buyers actually move from interest to contract.

For Most HealthTech and Life Sciences products a first pass looks like this:

Discovery – Early conversations where you need to understand the problem, key people and what “success” looks like to the customer.
Validation/Pilot – A time-bound trial that proves clinical and operational value in a specific setting, with agreed success metrics.
Business Case & Internal Alignment – Turning pilot results into a story and set of numbers that make sense to decision-makers beyond your initial sponsor.
Procurement & Approvals – Contracting, information governance, security review, IT & anything other requirements. None of the information needed should be a surprise if discovery is done correctly and you are prepared.
Rollout – Deployment, training, onboarding.
Expansion – further usage across the organisation.

Without clearly defined stages you don’t have a process – just various conversations.

Treat the pilot as a stage, not a science experiment

The easiest place for deals to stall is between “pilot” and “rollout”. Your job is to design the pilot so it naturally leads into the next step.

Before anyone signs off or starts a pilot, both you and the sponsor should be able to answer three questions:

Who owns the budget if this scales?
It needs to be a named individual who can sign off if the pilot hits its goals and they need to be bought in to the project.
What does success look like and how do we measure it?
A short list of outcome metrics agreed upfront that are required to make a business case: time saved, reduction in X, fewer errors in a process etc.
What happens if we hit these outcomes? The conversation path “if we hit X & Y by month three, we move to a one-year contract across these departments, using this procurement route”.

If you don’t have answers to these, you are setting yourself up to failure and at best will just get some additional data.

Build the process around real people

HealthTech and Life Science sales cycles are long as there isn’t a single buyer. There is a network: clinical, operational, finance, IT, procurement.

For each stage, write down:

Who needs to be involved (by role).
What they care about at that point.
What you can give them to help them say “yes” to the next step.

The point isn’t to make a nice-looking stakeholder map, its to ensure you aren’t surprised by a new person appearing in the process and it grinding to a halt.

Decide what "good" looks like at each step

Without clear criteria, opportunities will linger. They sit in the same stage for months, clog your pipeline and make your forecast meaningless.

For each stage, define:

Entry – what needs to be true before you say an opportunity is in this stage.
Exit – what you need to see or have agreed upon before an opportunity moves on.

This structure isn't bureaucracy for its own sake. Its how you avoid spending half a year in "maybe" with no clear movement.

Add "momentum" anchors so deals don't drift

Long sales cycles are normal in healthcare. What hurts is when nothing happens because nobody owns the next action.

You can build momentum into your process by:

Booking review meetings before the pilot starts (for example, "we'll meet in week six to look at early data, and in week twelve to decide about rollout".
Sending short, simple updates to key people during the pilot: usage, early impact, issues and how you're addressing them.
Agreeing decision dates as well as start dates -"we start on X, and we'll decide about expansion by Y."

If a deal goes quiet despite all this, that tells you something. Either you are talking to the wrong people, or the organisation isn't ready. Better to know now than keep it in the forecast for another six months.

Turn the process into a weekly habit

A sales process only helps if you use it. This is where having a system such as EOS (Gino Wickman) is useful, even for a small team.

At a minimum:

Keep a simple pipeline that uses your own stages, not just "open" and "closed".
Pick a few sales metrics that matter at your stage: qualified opportunities, pilots live, pilot-to-contract conversion, average time in each stage.
Run a short weekly or fortnightly commercial check-in where you:
- Look at the numbers.
- Talk though the stuck deals, what's missing, how to move them forward.
- Agree clear next steps and owners.

In most early-stage teams this doesn't need to be more than 30-45 minutes. The goal is to make the process visible and deliberate, not something that happens when you have spare time.

Start small and learn from your own deals

You won't design the perfect sales process on day one. You don't need to, but the goal is to create a repeatable process that is clear to the team and organisation.

Over time, use your own data to refine it: where deals stall, which pilots convert to customers, which stakeholders really matter. That learning is worth more than any generic sales playbook.

If your current "process" is just pilots and hope

If your traction today is a mix of hopefull pilots, long email chains and an unpredictable forecast, you're not unusual. Most teams start here..

I work with founders to:

Map how their last few deals and pilots actually unfolded.
Turn that into a straightforward sales process from first meeting to a sale.
Design pilots that act as real sales stages, with clear paths to a contract.
Put in a basic rhythm so the team keeps deals moving instead of waiting and hoping.

If that sounds useful, get in touch and we can see how to turn "pilot-heavy, revenue-light" into a process that scales.