Should healthtech sales teams run free pilots?

It’s been a five months sales cycle and you hear those dreaded words, “We’d like to move forward with a pilot.”

Do you say yes? Are there contingencies for it? Do you charge?

There’s so many questions that come up in how to run a pilot the right way.

This article is about running pilots for provider organizations (health systems, mental health orgs, FQHCs, medical groups, etc, NOT payors).

Should we do free pilots ?

Most of the time - No. The caveat to this is if you run a product led growth strategy where a provider can self-sign up for a short-term free trial. In this case, you likely sell to solo providers or small groups. It can also work well for novel technologies like AI copilots where a single provider may venture out on their own to try technology. A very well documented case of this type of growth was seen by Doxy.me. During COVID, nearly every provider around the world raced to use a compliant virtual care platform and many ran to Doxy thanks to ease of set up and free starter account. Due to this, Doxy became an approved vendor for many large organizations.

Why not do a free pilot?

I’ll talk about all the tactical reasons later but the #1 reason you should not do a free pilot in healthtech is that your prospect doesn’t have to care about the pilot. That’s right. When a prospect doesn’t pay for a pilot, there’s nothing pushing them to make the most of it. More often than not this turns into a scenario where the prospect only uses your solution in the most convenient times of their day.

People don’t value free. When people pay for something, there’s a greater emotional attachment to it working out.

If your prospect isn’t willing to pay for a pilot then there’s a few things that could be true:

1. They don’t actually have budget to buy a solution and they’re simply doing research.

2. They’d like to see if there’s a better way things can be done but it’s not a big enough pain they’re willing to pay have it fixed.

3. They want to evaluate multiple solutions at once at no to minimal cost.

Additional reasons not too…

Enterprise healthcare technology isn’t setup in an hour. It often requires complex settings and permissions to be setup and admin and provider training. Free pilots that have no commitment are a distraction to your team. There’s an opportunity cost to do pilots and that cost is that your people’s time can be better spent serving paying customers.

Now, to play devils advocate, what if you offer free pilots that don’t bring in additional human capital from your team. One of two things are likely true. Your time as a salesperson could be better spent OR your giving all this setup over to your prospect.

In sales, 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your prospects. If you strongly believe this customer is in that 20% maybe it’s worth some extra demos and effort, but a free trial? If you really think it’s worth it, I’ll run through creating an effective pilot shortly. If you’re handing over all this setup to your prospect you’re likely leaving them with too much responsibility. The worst thing you can do is take the prospect down a road where early exposure to your product leads them confused. There’s irrelevant settings, areas of your product they don’t plan to use, or permissions that they’re not fully confident they know what they do. Giving a customer too much power too early can lead to product assumptions that lead to lost sales or implementation headaches.

“But, I promise prospects need pilots to see if our product works for them.”

I promise they don’t. This is what demos, workflow mapping, and references are for. A customer that has your product in their hands unsupervised is in the driver seat and at that point you’re just taking orders - not selling. If a customer claims they need to see the product more and get hands on to see if it works for them, ask them if they had a product requirements list or a list of required workflows that you can walk through. While you want to make it easy for your prospects to buy, it can actually be constructive to set expectations of what they can experience through your sales process so they know how and when they’ll likely get questions answered.

When I worked at Mend, I was working with a small hospital system on Epic who was going to buying more than 1000 seat licenses. We didn’t give them a free pilot. Instead, we made sure we owned how we’d get their questions answered. Now of course, they wanted to see how the product worked but they did it with me 100% of the time. Since we were selling a video visit platform, I hosted video visits with members of their team. Since we were integrating with Epic we did extensive workflow mapping documents. This involved intense collaboration but did a tremendous amount of work in gaining their confidence. They would tell us exactly what they wanted to know and we built documents with exact objects on our end, the API calls or HL7 messages that would be used and what object it would end up in inside Epic.

Now, it is entirely possible you have an uneducated buyer. This is probably the toughest time to not do a pilot .They don’t really know what won’t work until they get in and test settings. This is where it’s incredibly important your sales team or solution architects know the industry. Using consultative selling, they should be able to guide the prospect into the proper settings and workflows to use your tool most effectively. I used to do this in patient self-scheduling all the time. We had all types of knowledge on what questions our customers would ask in self-scheduling so when I was working with a new organization, I’d help them think about the question tree that would work best for their practice, whether it be urgent care or mental health. This is the one area I’ll say that doing a free pilot can be required.

The problem with giving an uneducated buyer a pilot is you’re essentially giving them an implementation for free. Buyers are using the free uncontracted pilot time as figuring out how to implement your product. It’s often why as organizations get bigger they offer professional services with a more white glove implementation. Instead of doing a pilot to confirm success/failure, they are A/B testing your product. This becomes a tremendous time suck for the salesperson and likely other teams as you answer question after question about how things are done. See if you can stay in control and if not, use the steps below to design a structured pilot.

This doesn’t sound very buyer friendly…

It’s not about putting limitations on the buyer, it’s about staying involved as much as possible to stay in control of the sales process. It’s actually about doing more work as the salesperson for the prospects that deserve it.

Instead of giving your prospect an uncontracted free pilot → Get on more demos and design workflows with them.

Instead of letting them see how it feels → Do the business work to discover the pain point that needs solved to impact their business KPIs.

Instead of handing the product over to let them give it to the end user → Invite the end user to demos and hear their pain firsthand.

At the end of all this if they don’t believe you because you’re a sales person. Setup a pilot that converts into a full contract if you’re product works.

How to setup a pilot

Sign a contract. Pilots aren’t explorations of the great frontier. Their testing your product for a very specific reason to see if it solves a business problem. If a prospect won’t agree to that, somewhere in the chain of command they don’t have all the buy-in and approvals to move forward. Your job as a salesperson is to get there.

The terms:

1. A defined timeframe. Is it one week? one month? This will likely depend on how long it takes to see the return on investment or a change in their day to day workflow. Never hand over your product without a defined end date. It reduces urgency on the prospect and reduces how much they value seeing the pilot as a defined success or failure.

2. A cost. They are taking your resources because they think you can solve a pain point for them. It is fair to charge, even if lower than your normal rate.

3. Size. Pilots are not for the entire organization to try out. Establish a subsegment of their organization to take part in the pilot. Ideally these people would be the superusers if they move forward.

4. Dedicated check-ins. If you’re handing over your product, set up metrics that you want to continually review and require check-ins to review those metrics.

5. Definition of success/failure. This is the most critical section of the pilot agreement. What does it mean for the pilot to be a success? Is it number of booked appointments? Change in denial rates? It needs to be measurable. If you’re struggling to find what the definition of success is for a pilot, do more work with your prospect to fine tune what would solve their pain point. If they can’t or won’t commit to a definition of success, they make me making the decision to move forward based on how they feel operations changed. As a salesperson, that’s not worth doing a pilot. Do more demos. Do some workflow mapping.

6. Conversion to full contract. If the pilot is a success they move into the full agreement. That’s the whole point of doing a pilot anyway, right?

In summary,

There’s really not many reasons to do a free pilot. If you sell to solo providers or small groups on the other hand, doing a free pilot in a product led growth strategy is likely cheaper than having an SMB sales team and can be a totally reasonable strategy. In an enterprise sales world, doing free pilots takes you out of the drivers seat.

This doesn’t mean you don’t test your platform with providers and end users. I would invite providers to video visits when I was selling a virtual care platform so they could see the experience as a patient and see the video platform worked. Testing is different from handing your platform over.

If there’s a strong enough need for your platform prospects will pay for a pilot. But before offering a pilot, stay involved as much as possible for the sales person. When you hand over your product you often increase resource demand across departments (especially tech/support). By staying involved as the sales person you keep yourself in a position to consult with how best to setup and use your platform.

Just because you charge for pilots, doesn’t mean you charge an inordinate amount or even full price. You want to charge enough to make prospects value the time they have to test it, get all their questions answered, and have a sense of urgency. Pilots are about confirming the final unanswered questions and should have such as a goal.

Not doing pilots may mean your sales person is much busier with a smaller number of clients. But, it should mean their spending time with higher quality clients and your clients received proper consulting on how to set up the platform in a way that leads to more effective implementations and customers that stick around for longer.

Thanks for reading, and if you learned something share with a friend!