The healthcare technology sale begins before procurement

The invisible sale

By the time procurement evaluates your company, someone inside the health system you’re targeting may have been working on the problem for months and already know which options they would be willing to put in front of their colleagues.

Picture a clinical informatics director at a mid-sized system trying to solve a documented medication reconciliation problem. She hears a peer describe what worked elsewhere, considers whether the approach could work in her environment, and decides whether she is comfortable taking it forward.

She is not there to sell your solution. She is trying to solve a problem without putting her credibility at risk. Our role as marketers is to give her evidence she will feel comfortable putting in front of colleagues.

Evidence from peers can help her make that case. More than four in five respondents (83%) to the 2025 HIMSS HIT Buyer’s Survey identified proven success with other healthcare organizations as an important vendor criterion, making it the most frequently selected factor, ahead of ease of use, cost efficiency, and security standards.¹

This is how preference begins to form. Peer validation gives an internal advocate the confidence to bring an option into budgeting, planning, and governance.

Formal procurement may begin after the problem is defined, support is built, and credible options have emerged, although it still shapes requirements, competition, and risk. For marketing teams, that creates a timing challenge: once an opportunity becomes visible, some of the work shaping the outcome has already happened.²

Why peer evidence works inside an organization

Proof portability means that evidence maintains its meaning and credibility when it is forwarded, summarized, quoted, or reused without the vendor present.

Healthcare technology purchases are committee-based decisions, with IT taking part in 95%, executive leadership in 76%, and finance in 73%. Clinicians, operations, and administration each appear in roughly half. Across organizations, nearly six in ten involve five or more people, and 23% involve ten or more.¹

Some of those stakeholders will never meet the vendor. What they know about the solution will come from the materials an advocate shares and how she explains them. Her case still needs to hold up when she faces questions the vendor is not there to answer.

The HIMSS survey also shows how routinely stakeholders share and reuse content. Over six months, 68% of buyers had shared content with a colleague, while 27% had placed it into internal documentation supporting a buying decision.¹ Industry peers and networks were rated trustworthy by 89% of respondents, while vendor websites ranked fourth among research resources.¹

A vendor-produced case study can still be useful, but buyers know the vendor chose the customer and shaped the story. They may not give it the same weight as hearing directly from a peer.

Who tells the story matters, but so does what the story covers. Someone making the case internally needs evidence that the technology produced a meaningful clinical, operational, financial, or workforce result. They also need to show that an organization like theirs was able to implement and sustain it. The first is outcome evidence; the second is adoption evidence, including how the organization handled integration, security, staffing, and change management.

Adoption evidence is harder to gather, and vendor materials often give it less attention. But it is what an advocate needs when the committee asks what implementation will involve and what could go wrong.

One caution about the 83%: it measures stated selection criteria, not a customer’s willingness to advocate. That willingness is scarcer, and more valuable.

Why timing matters

Preference forms early, and the evaluation window appears to be narrowing:

• The finding: HIMSS reports that 36% of organizations complete a purchasing cycle in seven to twelve months and 66% decide within a year, compared with 53% reporting nineteen months or more in the preceding survey.¹
• The inference: A shorter evaluation gives buyers less time to become familiar with new vendors, which may favor options they already know. The survey itself does not establish that link.
• The implication: Peer credibility has to be built before active demand appears.

Capital-planning guidance calls for a business plan and centralized governance approval, so an internal advocate may begin preparing before a vendor process starts. Not every technology purchase is capitalized, but the pattern applies whenever a request must pass through internal review.³

Budget cycles also vary by organization. Rather than relying on one market-wide planning season, you need to understand the timing of individual accounts.

What changes in the operating model

You do not need to produce more content to act on this. Start by making what you already have easier to circulate internally and put it into market earlier.

Make proof portable

Some buyers incorporate content into decision documents, so ask whether each priority asset still works once you are out of the conversation. Audit what you have against four questions:

• What problem does this solve?
• What credible peer evidence supports it?
• What implementation concern will colleagues raise?
• Can a buyer reuse the key points accurately without a vendor explaining or correcting them?

Improve one asset before commissioning another campaign. Start with an existing case study or executive brief and add what is missing: the initial problem, a measurable outcome, the reality of implementation, and one candid limitation.

Acknowledging a limitation does not weaken the story. It gives your advocate a balanced account that is better prepared for committee scrutiny.

Change the sequence, not the volume

Do not wait for an active opportunity to share customer stories and peer evidence. Make the results and relevant details easy to find, quote, and pass along whenever an internal conversation begins.

The team responsible for customer advocacy works with customers to build the evidence, while demand teams share it before an account becomes an active opportunity. Account teams identify likely advocates and planning windows, and product, security, and implementation teams check that the operational details are accurate.

Because this work spans teams and often happens before an opportunity exists, it will not show up neatly in campaign reporting. Much of the evidence is shared through emails, meetings, and internal documents that a vendor cannot see. You can still look for signs that it is influencing the account:

• Priority accounts with a credible advocate identified
• Opportunities where you were known before the RFP
• Peer interactions among target accounts
• Invitations into early problem definition

Be careful about judging current investment only against current closed business. That can obscure work that began long before the opportunity appeared.

There is also a practical trade-off. Credible customer evidence requires participation, approval, and access to relevant practitioners or leaders. Your content team cannot create those conditions alone; they require organizational commitment and funding.

The advocate-readiness test

The real test is whether your contact can use the material, not simply whether the material answers the right questions.

Choose one priority account and consider your strongest contact. If they had to request funding tomorrow, could they quantify the problem, describe the expected outcome, address likely implementation concerns, and point to a credible peer, without asking your salesperson to rebuild the argument?

If not, the immediate need may not be another campaign. It may be better evidence for the person making the case internally.

Healthcare technology marketing is often optimized for the person it reaches. The more demanding, and more useful, test is whether it can be accurately repeated to the people it does not.

What if we have no reference customers yet?

There is no complete substitute for referenceable outcomes. Independent validation, benchmark data, pilot results, design-partner experience, and practitioner-led education can establish the problem and reduce perceived risk while you build customer evidence. None should be presented as proof of mature deployment.