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Navigating all the gatekeepers when selling software into hospitals

30 Mar 2025 · 1 min

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1:01

In this brief dialogue, Speaker A shares first‑hand experience implementing software in hospitals, highlighting the extreme complexity of the procurement process. He describes a 2‑3‑year, expensive cycle involving dozens of stakeholders who rarely communicate, making it hard to reach a consensus. A key friction point is the budget threshold: implementations above $30,000 require higher‑level approval, while projects under $25,000 can be signed off by a department head. However, multiple department heads may use the software, creating ambiguity over who can authorize the purchase. Speaker B adds that every deal has many “no” people but only one true “yes” person, emphasizing the difficulty of pinpointing the actual decision‑maker, who may not match the expected title on paper. The exchange underscores the practical challenges of navigating gatekeepers, budget constraints, and decision‑maker identification when selling software to hospitals.

Chapters

The problem is, is there's— I've actually worked in implementing software systems into hospitals. There's so many people that never even talk to each other that have a yes or no. And so to get all of those people, you're talking like 60 different people in a room all together at the same time to actually get a decision made, and nobody's willing to make a decision. I mean, it's a 2-3 year process and it's expensive. Expensive. So unless you're providing— the company that I was with, they charged like $30,000 to implement it within the system, and that just knocked it out right in and of itself because they're not willing to pay for it to be implemented. If you keep it under $25,000, typically like a department head can sign off of it, on it. But the problem is, is there's multiple department heads that will be using it. So who's willing to sign off on it and attribute it to their budget?
Within every deal, there's a myriad number of no people, but there's only one yes person. Once you find that—
problem. Yeah, that's the ultimate problem here is because there's multiple yes people in software deals and finding out who those people are, aren't necessarily the person you think they are on paper or on their title.