Don’t Hire Sales Before You Have a System

Most early-stage HealthTech and diagnostics companies don’t have a sales problem; they just have no commercial system. Hiring a salesperson into that gap is a fast way to burn cash and blame the wrong thing.

Why a sales person isn't a sliver bullet

In complex B2B healthcare and diagnostic sales, a salesperson is the final component, not the foundation. If you bring them in before the basics exist, you get activity without progress.

The typical failure pattern:

• No clear ICP, so they chase anyone who looks vaguely relevant.

• No defined offer, so every call becomes a custom pitch and proposal.

• No real sales process, so “pipeline” is just a list of conversations with no consistent next step.

  
  

The sales person looks ineffective; the real issue is that they walked into a blank sheet.

You need a system before a salesperson

A commercial system is simply a repeatable way to create, qualify, progress, and close opportunities. For an early-stage team, that system doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does need to exist before you start hiring reps with sales quotas.

As a minimum, you should define:

• Who you’re selling to - your ICP and key personas.

• What you’re selling - offers and packaging that make sense to clinicians, buyers, and partners.

• How you’re selling - a clear sales process, stages, and simple metrics from first conversation to contract.

• Basic metrics - how many accounts you are targeting, how many move to evaluation, how many convert.

If this only exists in the founders head, a sales person can't replicate it. They will improvise their own version, building everything from scratch.

Getting clear on your ICP

“Anyone who could use our product” is not an ICP! Your Ideal Customer Profile is the narrow slice of the market where you can realistically win in the next 6–12 months, with the resources you actually have.

For a practical ICP, you should be able to answer:

• What's the organisation type and context: for example an NHS Acute Trust with pathology labs and using "X " LIS provider.

• Conditions that must be true: defined problem, defined severity, internal champion, minimal IT readiness.

• Economic profile: who pays, from which budget, with what approvals needed.

• Is the sales cycle to that organisation acceptable for our goals.

Once this is agreed and written down, you can prioritise those organisations that meet your ICP and start from there. Having broad ambition is great, but its expensive and time consuming.

Spend your energy on the accounts where you can credibly win and learn.

Does your customer know how to buy you?

The buyer’s journey is usually more complex than the seller’s slide deck. There are pilots, committees, frameworks, information governance, and often national or regional constraints. Many teams design how they want to sell, but never map how their customers actually buy and if you don't map their process, your "sales process" is just guesswork.

You need a clear view of:

• Typical trigger: what forces them to seriously consider change.

• Internal path: who needs to see what, in what order – clinicians, digital, IG, IT, finance, procurement.

• Evidence required: data, pilots, references, contracts, risk assessments.

• Common stall points: where previous deals died and why.

Your sales process should mirror this. Each stage exists because the buyer has a decision to make, not because its a selectable stage in the CRM.

Without this, a sales person spends months "following up" with no structured way to help the customer mover forward.

Designing a simple, robust GTM

A go-to-market strategy is a practical plan for getting in front of the right organisations and turning conversations into revenue. A good GTM is usually narrow, testable, and ruthlessly focused.

For an early-stage HealthTech / diagnostics company, that usually means:

• One or two core segments, not six.

• Clear entry routes: your network, specific events, partner channels, and tightly targeted outbound.

• A small number of consistent plays: for example, “IG-ready pilot in one site with defined outcomes and timeline”, not bespoke science projects for every lead.

Your first salesperson should plug into this plan. If there is no plan, you do not need a salesperson yet. You need someone to help you design and test one.

A sales person should not be designing a GTM plan on the fly while trying to hit quota.

Navigating complex healthcare sales

Healthcare decisions involve multiple stakeholders with different risk, incentives, expectations and aims from a project. If your system ignores that, your deals will stall.

Expecting a new salesperson to “just hustle harder” through that reality, without structure, is naïve.

To navigate complex sales, your system needs to:

• Recognise each stakeholder: clinical, operational, IT, information governance, finance, procurement – and articulate value and risk in their language.

• Plan the sequence of proof: pilot design, outcomes, case studies, and references that reduce perceived risk over time.

• Build in feedback loops so every stalled or lost deal feeds back into refining your ICP, messaging, and process.

This is where a commercial consultant or strategic sales leader adds disproportionate value: not by closing one deal, but by making each deal you run teach you how to win the next one faster.

Why most first sales hires fail

When you hire a salesperson into an early-stage HealthTech or diagnostics business without this groundwork, you essentially give them an impossible brief. They are expected to “bring in deals” without:

• A clear territory or segment (so they try everything, and learning is slow).

• Credible messaging and offers that resonate with buyers in your niche.

• Internal alignment on what a “good” customer or a “qualified” opportunity even looks like.

The sales person is forced into three jobs at once: strategist, operator and political translator.

After 6–12 months of scattered activity, a thin pipeline, proposal churn and a lot of "great conversations", the conclusion is often: We hired the wrong person.

The pattern then repeats with the next "more senior" person.

In reality, you hired a salesperson when what you needed first was a system and a strategy.

Sales Manager vs Sales Director vs Commercial Consultant

Part of the confusion comes from titles. A Sales Manager, a Sales Director, and a Commercial Consultant can all be valuable – but they are very different jobs. Using the wrong one at the wrong stage is expensive.

Sales Manager

• Runs an existing playbook.

• Manages a team of reps.

• Focuses on activity levels, conversion rates, and day-to-day execution.

Best fit: post–product-market-fit, when you already know who you sell to, how you sell, and you’re adding headcount.

Sales Director

• Owns sales strategy across segments or regions.

• Sets targets, defines structure, works across product and marketing.

• Builds and adjusts the playbook, sometimes with managers and reps already in place.

Best fit: scaling phase, multiple markets or product lines, need for coordination and expansion.

Commercial Consultant (or fractional commercial lead)

• Works with founders to make hard choices about ICP, positioning, and focus.

• Designs the first GTM and sales process, aligned to real buyer behaviour.

• Tests messages and plays in the field, then hands a functioning system to the first permanent sales hire.

Best fit: pre–first sales hire, or when you’ve burned a couple of hires and realise you never had a clear system to plug them into.

How I typically work with founders

With early HealthTech, diagnostics, and Life Science teams, I tend to work in three phases that deliberately come before, during, or just after your first sales hire.

• Clarify: tighten ICP, segment focus, and positioning so you stop chasing everything and start learning from a defined set of accounts.

• Design: build a simple commercial engine – GTM plan, sales stages, basic metrics – that matches how your buyers actually buy.

• Deploy: run the first deals through that system with you, refine based on what happens, then define the profile of the sales hire who can operate it.

When you do hire a salesperson, you’re not asking them to guess. You’re asking them to execute, learn, and help you improve a system that already exists.

If you’re currently thinking about hiring your “first sales person”, what’s the biggest unknown for you right now: who to sell to, how to sell to them, or what role you actually need to hire?