blockit, a Series A tech company in the healthcare space, had seen early success with some of the largest hospital chains in the country. Their innovative and proprietary technology streamlined the scheduling process for patients and providers, dramatically increasing follow-through rates. Ensuring a person actually shows up to their scheduled referral appointment is a key driver in both hospital revenue and clinical outcomes.

Despite powerful software and some early wins, few things stood in their way, however:

a large incumbent with a history of closed system technology owned significant market share
a struggle to message their solution cohesively
an over-reliance on founder-led sales

As blockit looked towards the future, they realized an investment in go-to-market needed to be made. This included a key VP of Revenue hire, along with subsequent sales employees, and a 6-month contract with me, to address the messaging and positioning challenges.

The new messaging needed to do three things:

Resonate with customers, driving new multi-million dollar partnerships
Excite employees and help the founders transition
Out-position the competition, especially one in particular

The Process

With a lot of ground to cover, several in-depth deliverables, and some partnership deadlines to hit, I knew I had to put a lot of detail into the schedule and the process. Here’s how that ended up looking:

Starting with Research

Healthcare is infamous for being one of the most complex and sensitive industries, due to the amount of acronyms, terminology, and compliance requirements. (My 6-years of experience in healthcare prior to transitioning into freelance creative work definitely helped here. )

All that said though, to be able to land on messaging that resonated with customers, excited employees, and out-positioned the competition, we needed to do quite a bit of research.

6 internal stakeholder interviews, recorded and transcribed
5 external customer interviews, recorded and transcribed
Cultural, industry, and competitive audit

I like to use Mural to keep track of all the research, take screenshots, begin to organize thoughts, and then work collaboratively with the client or other creatives. Here’s how the board ended up looking:

Internal Qualitative Interviews

Why take the time to interview employees? A few reasons:

This creates internal buy-in for the entire process, and hopefully better acceptance of the new messaging
Employees hold some of the best knowledge about the brand, customers, company. They are the subject matter experts
It helps to get you in the right frame of mind before you speak to customers, learning the industry and trying to emulate the brand’s tone of voice so you can represent the company well

All told, I uncovered 15 insights, grouped them into 4 categories: Sales, Clients, Implementation & Adoption, and Culture & Brand.

External Qualitative Interviews

Drawing from their strong customer base of raving fans, I was able to get 60-minutes from 5 incredibly busy healthcare executives. These interviews uncovered the most important insights and the project would not have been successful without this step.

Overall, I uncovered 22 insights, grouped into 5 categories:

Greatest threats & opportunities
Positioning & brand
Audience
Sales
Areas for improvement

As I’ve mentioned in other places, I use Rev for my transcriptions. The nice thing about their platform is that it allows you to upload a video file, which they will then transcribe with speaker names, and give you a shareable link to see the transcription alongside the video. This proved very helpful as there were several internal blockit employees who wanted to review my interviews, learn from them, and hear the conversations for themselves.

Bonus: Customer Quotes

I talk a lot about being efficient in creative work. If you don’t need to do something, don’t do it just because it’s part of your normal process. Likewise, if you can accomplish two outputs with one input, then go for it. There’s no need to bill or scope twice we you can design a way to get both and once.

blockit wanted to build a library of customer quotes and potentially case studies. Since I was going to be speaking with customers anyways, I built in a handful of questions to help solicit quote-ready responses. Then, as part of the insights deck, I pulled out, sorted, and anonymized the most impactful quotes for their sales team.

Bonus: Design Guidelines

I’m going to tagteam my point above just to show you how efficient creative work can be. When I started with blockit they had no existing brand or design guidelines. I offered to bring in a designer and create these missing guidelines as a part of the project.

Typically, this would be a separate workflow for an agency. It would be research, stop. Then design, stop. And on and on through the project. However, I knew that we were going to need to present our research findings anyways, which would require design and style choices.

Therefore, as part of the research deliverable, I worked with my designer to develop the necessary typography, color, iconography, hierarchy, illustrations, photography style, that would go into a set of design guidelines anyways.

We pulled these decisions into their own deck, which became the working brand/design guidelines.

Bonus: Presentation Templates

And a third for good measure. Like I mentioned above, I knew we needed to present our research findings anyways, which we would do in Google Slides as that was what blockit used internally. Their team made their own presentations, which varied in their look, feel, and quality.

So, as my designer was making the presentation elements for my decks, I also had her turn these into styles and templates that could be used by other employees. By the time we were done, she had created a massive library for them to pull from. This included photography, headline and title slides, tables, multiple layouts, iconography — everything a person would need to make a great looking and on-brand presentation.

Change can be hard, especially in the visible areas like design and messaging. Little value adds like this, to make employees’ lives easier, goes a long way to earning their trust and buy-in.

Developing Positioning

With the research completed, insights uncovered, and a solid look and feel developed, it was time to tackle messaging.

The first step — positioning.

As referenced in the intro, the industry was dominated by other tech companies whose goal it was to lock health systems into their closed technology ecosytems. Almost everyone wanted to be a hospital’s all-in-one solution, even if they weren’t very good at all the parts.

This made dislodging the existing solution challenging because it was a huge multi-stakeholder decision, a massive potential risk, and then a complicated integration process if the contract was won.

So how do you develop positioning for a situation like this? Start with a pithy saying.:

And then give the executive team a range of options, one of which has to be the status quo. There always needs to be a conscious and deliberate choice to move away from what they’re doing now. If you don’t force them to make this choice, it tends to stay in the back of the mind and undermine buy-in at later stages (especially when the process gets a little messy).

I presented five options and they chose a combination of two of them. The final positioning I developed for them really created a moat around their largest competitors because it took a stance that went completely contrary to the industry norms. It’s a positioning that would require a massive business model shift for the established competitors to copy.

Developing Messaging

This was the most difficult stage of the project. Mostly because previous messaging efforts had failed to produce alignment, so we were met with a healthy dose of skepticism. Thankfully we were able to overcome this, and a big milestone was reached when I showed them their positioning in messaging form.

Short

We are built to bring systems together — not keep them apart.

Long

Unlike other closed border, walled garden solutions, we are built to play well with others.

We bridge the gap between patients, providers, data, systems, and departments.

If you want to connect it, we can do it.

We are designing a better way forward in healthcare technology — with open access, seamless integration, and the ability to platform any workflow.

—

You can see this new messaging come to life in some of their more recent career related materials.

The entire messaging deck ended up being a comprehensive 42-pages, covering everything from purpose and personas, to archetype and value propositions.

This was a necessary document, because they really had no cohesive foundation to work from, however I don’t expect most employees to refer to this deck very often. That’s where the pitch deck comes in…

The pitch deck…finally

If you’ve read this long, you may have been asking, “Wait, I thought this was a pitch deck project?” And you’re correct, however the previous steps were all necessary to be able to make a truly compelling pitch deck.

At this stage in my career, I’m not interested in pretty decks and strategic theory. I want whatever I work on to be as useful as possible. That’s why I’ve started spending more time making pitch decks.

I cannot think of a better single piece of creative that has the power to:

Create alignment between multiple teams
Showcase messaging and positioning
Display the design and brand guidelines
Impact revenue and growth

If you are going to invest in one thing, invest in the pitch deck.

For blockit, the pitch deck needed to be simple enough for even an entry-level sales person to use, yet convincing enough that it produced a desire for a second sales call, where a more in-depth and customized conversation could be had.

It also needed to lean into the new positioning in a way that made the prospect start to nod their head. I can’t share the whole deck, but here are two slides showing the positioning in action.

In Summary

The words above represent ~6 months of time. I love where we ended, but at times it felt like we were never going to get there.
This project reinforced for me the power of narrative-based positioning and the role of the pitch deck to bring it all together.
As a result of this project, I came into contact with a local incubator, who asked if I would be interesting in putting together a slimmed down, more formulaic version of my positioning, messaging, and pitch deck service for their startups. After some thought, I said yes, and recently launched that service with a creative director friend of mine. Reach out to me directly for details.
Bringing on a designer with me was one of the best decisions I made on this project. It made me seriously consider this as something worth repeating or requiring in the future.

LOOKING FOR A STRATEGIC COPYWRITER TO ASSIST YOUR TEAM?

My name is Derek and I write all kinds of things for businesses of all sizes in many different industries. Do you have a writing or strategy need? This is what I love to do.

Send me an email: derek@plain.run

Developing a Healthcare Technology Pitch Deck