HSES Checklist – LionBird

Navigating HSES barriers to adoption

The 67 questions to answer before starting a company that sells software to hospitals.

This guide covers practical issues such as

Marketing

How do you segment, prioritize and hone in on your ideal customers?

The early days of lead gen

What are the specific tactics and channels that work well for HSES?

Sales Pipeline Management

How do you segment, prioritize and hone in on your ideal customers?

GTM Hiring

When should you bring on your first SDR and how important is their existing rolodex?

Bottom of Funnel Sales

Getting through value committees and past the “Midwesterner” problem

Pilots vs Trial Periods

& much more…

Read the guide we've been providing to our own portfolio companies.

A must-read

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Picture this: you’re an HSES* company ready to take over the world.

Then, you make an avoidable mistake in your go-to-market strategy, and suddenly you’re spinning your wheels for 3-6 months.

We’ve been there.

*HSES = Health System Enterprise SaaS

Hard earned lessons from the trenches

Written by a founder for founders: this guide provides practical, tactical sales and marketing advice for navigating the complexities of selling to hospitals that we learned the hard way.

As a VC, LionBird has invested in some great HSES companies.

We also built a couple ourselves, and so we know how difficult your journey is.

Contributing our unique combination of experience, network, and tools, we help exceptional founders lay the best foundations for their companies to scale and succeed.

This is not a "sales playbook"

By narrowly focusing on the specific challenge of selling to health systems we aimed to go deeper.

The focus is on the scrappy early days of founder-led marketing, sales and customer success, before the systems for scaling are in place.

We created this because we couldn’t find anything like it when we started, and we want to help the next HSES entrepreneurs.

Learn how to grow from one hospital customer to hundreds

About the Author

Before joining LionBird as a Partner, Robert co-founded Protenus, a healthcare compliance analytics company from LionBird’s second fund, named the 2022 KLAS Category Leader in Patient Privacy Monitoring and Drug Diversion.

Robert is a featured thought leader in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and the Baltimore Sun, among others, and was named to the Baltimore Business Journal’s “Tech 10” and Becker’s Hospital Review’s “Healthcare Entrepreneurs to Know.”

At LionBird, he serves on the board of HSES companies such Protenus, Phrase Health and Chiefy.

LionBird is a venture capital firm investing exclusively in pre-scale digital health companies.

Since its inception, the firm has invested in more than 35+ founding teams and now has over $150 million in AUM. Our focus is on helping founders lay the best foundations for their companies to scale and succeed.

DISCLAIMER: By signing up for this eBook, you’ll also be subscribed (if you aren’t already!) to our once-a-month LionBird Wings digital health founder newsletter which provides digital health founders with practical, tactical advice on GTM.