Strategy Design for PE-backed Healthcare Group

Introduction

The client was a PE-backed healthcare services provider with over 30 locations across the United States. The client provided a premium service line and healthcare experience in joint partnership with local hospitals.

Brief

The client was struggling to communicate the value of their proposition to new partners effectively, leading to a very slow, multi-year business development cycle. The client needed a way to make the value of their offering irresistible to executives at large hospitals that were capable of co-investing in these large, capital intensive, long term projects. The problem for the customer was that the particular non-acute care service line they provided only accounted for less than 1% of a typical hospital’s revenue.

Actions

We were brought in to find a way to address the business development/enterprise partnership aspect of the client’s business. We needed to find a way to make the client more attractive, and their proposition more urgent, to senior healthcare executives.

We realised from the client’s service line that their audience was overwhelmingly composed of women over 30. From our research, it was clear that women were typically the ‘Chief Medical Officer’ in the home. We also recognised that whereas most hospital visits are unpleasant at best, and frightening at worst, the client was in the unusual position by their premium positioning and service line offering of providing an overwhelmingly positive hospital experience.

Consequently, we developed a strategy to position the client as a marketing arm for their hospital partners. Recognising the unique decision making power and authority of their audience, we saw that each customer of the client was essentially responsible for the health and wellbeing of multiple other dependents (including husbands).

Our theory was that this customer trust could be harnessed to encourage the client’s audience to bias the client’s hospital partner over other hospitals in the area for treatments that were unrelated to the client’s service line. We reasoned that if we could persuade the customers themselves to take this action, we could probably rely on their dependents following suit.

Outcome

This trial is still under way with a number of leading US hospital partners, with the client’s marketing team running the day-to-day implementation. The initial results are very encouraging, showing a significant uptake in the offers the client has been promoting on behalf of their hospital partners. We anticipate this being a success, and being rolled out across the client’s remaining locations once sufficient data has been gathered. Meanwhile, because of this unique and potentially lucrative new marketing channel that partnership with the client can bring, the client’s sales teams have found it significantly easier to get through the door with target accounts.