The Healthcare GTM Formula: Sales Secret and LinkedIn Mastery

Ayush: Suvikas you mentioned, you know, about the importance of research, and I believe, you know, I think like many salespeople would agree with it, but why not we go deeper into the how of it.

Suvikas: How of it?

Ayush: Because I, I’ll tell you, like, you know, even my sales team does that surface-level research, but I think they hit a wall when they say that they have found, they’ve done the research, which is just probably like, okay, what is the kind news of the company? Or let’s say what the company is about? Are they funded or not? Or. So, you know, some of the common hooks they’re able to find. What are the other things that you came across or, you know, that you saw that you used and were very effective?

Suvikas: Yeah, I’ll give you three different examples. One where the personal research works. One where personal plus business works and one where pure business also works.

So the first one is getting leads in, getting people to talk to you. And so in that way, the Subject line of an email is the most important aspect of the email, It’s like a bullet, If the email doesn’t get opened it’s like a bullet that didn’t fire. It’s a dud bullet, So it’s the most important aspect.

How do you make people to open your mail? And these are not junior people. I mean, again, I would actually not use the word junior. People are people. People have personal lives, people have professional lives. So our research, it took us a month to figure out when we didn’t get responses.

For example, one of the email’s subject line was, remember I told you sales enablement was the Persona? So one of the email subject lines was why is a Manchester United fan best fit for sales enablement? t’s a nonsensical statement. Right?

At that time we were just hacking it. But what we did in the hack was beautiful, which is attached a personal and a professional things of that person, to buy just United sales enablement. And the response was very funny. Said, You should be glad Manchester United won yesterday, otherwise I would not be in a good mood. I’ll give you 30 minutes.

We got seven demos, eight demos out of 65 emails. Unheard of number. All we did was we made sure that not just the subject line, but also the next two three lines were tying the personal to the business part of what we were doing.

So, for example, one of the things we were doing was coaching. So why a cycling fan is best fit for sales enablement? Each pedal is an effort just like salespeople need to do and practice. So we completely tied the personal with something where we provided value.

Ayush: So it connects with the kind of you know, giving analogy to help them understand or connect with in their life.

Suvikas: An analogy, whereby we could put our value forward. So this was about lead generation. Let’s come down to a slightly next step, which is the first call or a demo call. This company called Qualtrics, I think, acquired by SAP for $3 billion or something. They were on the verge of, we came to know later, were on the verge of signing an agreement with some other sales enablement platform, some competitor. And the most satisfying thing a salesperson can do is literally change the game at the last day of the game. This is all things we came to know later.

So during the research, we realized that the person who was responsible for the buying, the decision maker and the EB as well and who had a good sway with the founder of Qualtrics, happen to be ex entrepreneur, good. Ex entrepreneurs are always good, they are open. As I said, it’s a lot about psychographic profiling and you have to understand some human psychology.

He had spent two years in running a company in gamification. The research is all about finding connections. We were a gamified platform, he was a guy who tried gamification and probably did not succeed over there. So our research, I mean, I’ll just focus on this part, our research and our mandate, our feedback to Mohit was every five minutes, ten minutes, you have to talk about gamification. How gamification has a value.

The gentleman there were two people, we had researched both of them. The gentleman, it seems, arrived ten minutes late and the other person a lady, she started the demo call. Again, mind you Ayush, we are sitting in India we are not on the call only Mohit used to be on the call our single guy. And later on, we came to hear from Mohit that he came in and as soon as he came in and I dropped the word gamification, he almost fell out of his chair.

Had we not done the research, had we not thought as to what would be a value point? So in his about on LinkedIn and in his current profile and all that we could read and see all this. So, here’s where we took something personal and business together actually. And the leaders say we actually won Quadrix right from the last day of going some with somebody else.

A third example I would provide is a company called Lidl. it’s kind of one of the Walmarts of Europe.

They were expanding into the US. So they just started building up the sales team and I don’t recall

who we were talking to at that time. One of the areas of research, in a way it’s easier to crack the US market. There’s a lot of information available, legally mandated.

So, for example Lidl had its 10K and 10Q filings already in the US. They had to file it in the 10K 10Q which is the SEC filing. So as a salesperson you must read balance sheets and profit loss account. If you don’t know how to read it, that’s okay. Just look at revenue year over year and loss or profit year over year. Those two things and definitely look at what the leaders are saying about the business. There’s a section in every quarterly and every annual.

Ayush: But this would be for public listed companies.

Suvikas: Even other companies can also provide a lot of information. Lidl happened to be a public limited company and we quoted the CEO with something that completely impacted sales training. And we put it as the first slide in the document, she was completely surprised with it. She said where did you get that? We said, we got it from the 10K. It may not have been information for her, but she was pleasantly surprised at the efforts we had put in to understand them and their business.

Ayush: That’s how it is. It may be right or wrong. Like there’s no right or wrong, but it’s all about showing the effort and, you know, showing that you care basically.

Suvikas: And once again, if in your mind you are trying to sell, you will fail. If in your mind you’re trying to help somebody be better at what they are doing, because you know something that they may not. Then that’s different, then now we are talking. It’s never about features, it’s about the challenges you’re facing, where you want to go we’ll help you go there. So all these three examples are different areas of Kundali.

Ayush: Fairly put. So just thinking on the sequence of sales events. So once the demo is done, are there any other hacks that you did around follow ups or, you know breaking people from let’s say there’s a time, that anxious time between whether they’re signing or not signing or, you know, whether they’re interested or not interested. So anything else, you know, before we move to other orbits like any other sales hacks?

Why I asked this, I’ll just give a context, that for again sitting in India working on a USGTM, one of the problems is that your relationship is very much, you know, limited because you are not meeting in person. So it’s like, okay, it’s just a call or it’s just an email. So anything else that, you know, from your journey you saw that really worked in building the relationship further?

Suvikas: To some extent, I wouldn’t be too bothered about that. If you are selling bigger ticket items, slightly bigger. If you’re selling very big ticket items, that could be a challenge. When I say very big ticket means half a million, $1 million per year and more, that could be a challenge. But then most startups in India start with 5000, 10,000 per customer. That’s perfect. Right. Even I think from a US point of view, they don’t want to be bothered with a face to face meeting.

Ayush: Especially post Covid I think.

Suvikas: Post Covid things have changed completely, drastically. So it doesn’t matter where you are, you could be in Jhumri Tilaiya, Timbuktu or anywhere in the world and you would still have the same access. It’s about always continuously, it’s about what value are you providing to the other? Having said that, the more larger the ticket, the larger the chance that there will not be one person, there’ll be multiple people. Yeah, that is one part. Two, now the best of salespeople also are doing empathetic selling, but they might lose out on what I call the political map.

One is the political map. Two, the fact is that sales is now a science. Selling to enterprises is now a science where it’s about continuous qualification. When somebody says, oh, I lost the sale at the last day. No, you lost it way earlier. You just didn’t know about it because you did not ask the right questions during your process.

One of I hated Meddpicc and then I loved Medic. Meddpicc, If you go into the details of Meddpicc, one of the sales frameworks, it has a set of questions, each for each of these m e d d p i c c, right?

Absolutely valid. It should always be a mandatory for a salesperson. It’s like a 2025 question cheat sheet that every salesperson should have and keep checking it at every stage of the journey.

No, you can’t do. I’ve checked it once, you don’t verify it again. You have to do the due diligence. Sales is building trust through a series of conversations, but also on your side constantly qualifying, continuous qualification. So things like a legal person suddenly stepping in. Look, your buyer most likely may not know how to buy.

Ayush: How you can create that frictionless engagement.

Suvikas: You are a full fledged consultant to these people. It’s not about what value you add, it’s also about how he needs probably to look inside his own company and work with some people. I’ll give you a very big example. I mean, the first time it happened, it was like a shocker. In India, from one of the top five pharmaco, top ten pharma companies in the world in India. So by the way, we cracked the pharma industry in India big time. I’ll not name the company. We received signed agreement for a buy. From our champion, supposedly the decision maker, right. Mind you, top ten largest pharma company in the world in India.

One hour later I get an email saying, Oh sorry, I am not the authorized signator. I won’t put the blame on him. Partially the blame is on me. Did I do a proper guidance to him as to who all needed to be in the buying process? Potentially because I had experienced other pharma companies. In my hurry, in my greed or hope as a salesperson, I see a signed document and I was happy, but I hadn’t done my due diligence on how a buyer is supposed to buy.

Especially when you have decision making unit, not a single decision maker. It took them one and a half months to resolve that issue after that. So the sale that I closed moved into the next quarter. Actually, it’s a very important aspect that I think a lot of salespeople miss is guiding people not just on what value you add, but also how they should be looking at buying internally. The legal team, the tech team, the user team, they’ll all be stakeholders.

And as you’re buying, as your deal moves along at now, or later, even if you don’t, you don’t want it, but they will come in. And once somebody comes in whom you are not expecting, your deal has a problem. So the deals that close, I mean, go loss late in the stage, actually are lost much earlier. It’s just that the salesperson doesn’t know because they’re not done. The proper qualification constant.

Ayush: Well said. And that reminds me, one quote that I read from this book called sale by Subrata Bakhti. So he talks that sales is like a dance, like a ballet between two people. So it’s like you and your customer or the prospect, you know, dancing together. So, you know, like bringing it into resonance or, you know, at the right time the push or the right time the pull. You know how you can orchestrate it.

Suvikas: I wrote a small funny blog post on LinkedIn how sale is like a Bollywood movie, you know, so if I am the hero, I am going after the girl. Initially it’s a song and dance around trees. Things are good, and suddenly. okay, things can progress, but then suddenly there’s a villain. The villain could be the decision maker’s cousin because he’s got a competing platform. And if you didn’t know about the villain, you didn’t do your job. But then how do you tackle the villain now? The hero tackles the villain and then, of course, then it’s band baja barat or something. But even at that time, maybe some uncle is not happy because you have to know all these things. Otherwise, I mean, this marriage is not happening.

Ayush: So there are many characters.

Suvikas: There are characters in the play, right? You have to deal with each of them individually because each of them will have a professional and a personal. The financial guy will have their own professional and personal thing. The legal person may have their own personal and financial thing. Invariably, whichever company you go to, there will be some technology.

I mean, it’s the worst thing to assume you will be a standalone, knowing the tech, knowing the ecosystem. If you’ve not done the due diligence, at worst, the sale will not happen. At best it will be delayed by one or two quarters. That’s the best case. And from a book’s perspective, I think so to me, one of the best sales book is not a sales book. It’s a book called never split the difference.

It’s been written by an FBI lead negotiator who for 20 years, negotiated release of hostages over 20 years from terrorists and kidnappers. And in 20 years, he lost two people. There has to be something over there in that book where he was able to get the terrorists and the kidnappers to agree to all of his terms over a 20 year time period. I mean, that’s a salesperson’s ideal scenario where the other person agrees to all of the terms.

Ayush: Yeah, I have read it in the past, but it’s time to maybe revise it back. But, yeah, a fantastic book. I remember. So, because you also mentioned about building business in South Asia as well as part of your journey. So, any lessons from the south asian market? Like, so when you say south asian market, that is it. Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia.

Suvikas: So the south asian market becomes very small for two reasons. One, the countries are small, and that’s a big challenge. But also, only a few countries are English speaking where you can, you know, decently enter into English speaking because we are only running on English. So that’s makes it like, Singapore and Australia, New Zealand, some part of Philippines. Somehow Hong Kong maybe, but that’s it, right?

Ayush: So was there any difference in strategy entering these markets? Was it more channel partner kind of driven? Or was it pretty much similar to the way you would approach a US market?

Suvikas: We tried to do it the same way. Matter of fact let me step back. We had started tracking pharma in India, but then we were asked by our investors that, okay, I mean, we’re not yet cracked pharma. We just started with pharma. And in a way, it was a weird thing, right? We were tracking US tech, fast growing tech, and suddenly we have this big name like GSK or something over here in India. And the VC’s were like, what are you guys doing? Make up your mind or something like that and show us you can repeat this.

What you just did in India with GSK. So what we did was we ran ads on LinkedIn, and that’s how we got leads in indian pharma. Sorry, the asian pharma market. So from that perspective, we got leads in India as well and leads in to Southeast Asia also. The asian market.

From that perspective, the same initial conversations were the same. The challenge comes once it’s the same buying cycle we were with big brand pharma. And you had, in India, you had 400 licenses.

And over there they had barely 20 licenses per country. Our challenge was we had to sell to each country separately. Partnership would have been a fantastic way to go. I tried partnership. I completely failed at that. So I would love to see and hear stories of where category creators are able to use partnerships to move into Asia. It’s a great market.

Ayush: So you mean partnerships failing in only South Asia, specifically mentioning or partnership failing like in US also.

Suvikas: US I think we had some partners, but over in Asia we were never able to get traction on partners. It’s a good market to be in because there’s not a whole lot of negotiation. In India, the biggest thing is price negotiation. They’re not. They’re also. I’m not saying they have a lot of money like the US, but it’s decent and they genuinely have, they need help.

So our services and support was a huge value. One of the things we had, all our customers badly needed was creating content, because it’s a learning and coaching platform. But the content is expensive to create. Not in India, not as expensive. So that way it was a good one. So as any company has to realize what is the value they can provide? And the asian market will give you the value. Not as much as the US, but definitely way better than India. But then it’s a fragmented market. It’s not a very English speaking market. So partnerships should be the ideal way to go. I would say yes.

Ayush: And what about Europe? What were your experiences in Europe?

Suvikas: So I frankly did not look at Europe. I mean we once we had some traction in the US, I had focused myself onto the indian market, but we did crack Europe. Because again, even though Europe is fragmented, I think the normal way would be you start with UK and maybe France or Germany. That’s where you go. But, yeah, I’m not. We were able.

Then you have to have a presence over there. You have to have somebody over there. In that way, you had Mohit in the US, so in the US, we had Mohit and then we had to have somebody in the Us- European market. Now another thing, if you’re cracking the us market then most likely you are cracking Europe as well because a lot of brands in the US are also in the, in Europe. So that also helps, that can help a lot.

Ayush: So in this whole, you know, journey of ten years with mind tickle that you had, you know, can you think of like few major milestones uh, in your learnings or you know, any experiments that gave you those 100x results or 10x results at least, you know that we started doing this and that just catapulted us to the next unlocked the next level of growth and then we did this and you know, that was the next level growth and any such experiments or any such aspects.

Suvikas: I would say the, the fact that I was talking about. To be able to attract large ticket, which is enterprise. If you are a relatively newer two year three years old SaaS startup in India, you don’t need a lot of customers, you maybe need one a month, maybe maximum, right? So if you close a logo max once a month, one logo a month or one in two months, even at a maybe 15,000, right, which is at some point in the journey. That is great.

Work backwards. Say ten detailed conversations will get you one logo. So you need ten detailed conversations. One in ten, right? Bad case. One in ten. Let’s go with one in ten. Now to get ten conversations, how many Leads do you need again? Let’s do another one in ten. That’s hundred. So to close one or two deals, all you need is a hundred conversations which means you should be literally personalizing every single content.

At that point. Never ever think of scale. I would say at that point think unscale, manual efforts because the objective, I mean I’ve seen even in Pune company saying oh, I’m trying to send 2000 emails a day. You want to up close one enterprise client in a month. Why do you need 2000 emails? You need only 20 emails a day. Literally I would, I would put a handwritten note to every single one of them and just mail it if I, if it were up to me. You don’t need that.

Ayush: So basically you have to stand out.

Suvikas: You have to stand out. You have to stand up by providing value. And when you think scale, you are never providing value. You are thinking of selling and that is what will not happen. So the part that worked very well was, I mean look at you can see our, not just our email, but our LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn ads were absolutely on the mark of a key problem of somebody who was dealing with the sales pharma people.

Ayush: So tell me quickly one thing, that what happens as a, it could be a good problem, but sometimes a bad problem as well. That I think if you’re doing good as a SaaS company, you start getting a lot of inbound, which means that you could be sitting on an inbox where, you know, there’s a hundred demo requests. So did you like see that problem? And then if yes, then how do you qualify or prioritize or again especially talking about personalization. So do you send any feelers to just get the seriousness.

Suvikas: Yeah, I’m laughing. I started laughing when you said 100 leads in your inbox, because I am yet to come across. Again, I have not worked in large SaaS startups. Mindy cool was the biggest one. But to me that never happens. You never have sufficient, sales team never has sufficient leads, especially when the medium or enterprise space. So there’s some, something is wrong somewhere. Now, being good at what you do versus getting leads are two different things.

Ayush: What I mean to say just to give a context would be that, let’s say you just got published in say economic times. For example, you got some good press or let’s say you just got funded. So you know, like a good PR came out. Which means that suddenly there’ll be a lot of companies got to know about you. And then each of those companies happen to sign up on your platform and say request a demo. Especially if your product is say hundred dollar a license, for example, or something like that. So how would you solve that? Just to make sure that you are, you know, at your best with each of them or justify yourself for the best ones, or that, that way I was thinking.

Suvikas: Yeah, again, look, I would consider that as a blip. It’s always a spike and that will die away. Now that I’m looking at marketing, I have a perspective on what could have been done better where that’s something we can fix. And again boils down to your customers have problems. As you grow as a company, you have a better perspective on the problems to get leads in. Those people should be one aware of their problems. Look at, be able to look at what can solve them. Then you should be able to answer why you.

Right, a common number is 95% of people are not in market. You could be in a business where people don’t even know they have a problem right now. From a spike perspective, there’s no other way except that you have to make sure that your turnaround times are fast. But those spikes are rare. A funding or something like a spike like that is a rare thing to happen. It will be some major event happening. The rest of the 364 days of the year. You have to ensure that the leads keep coming in. If we can address that, that will be a bigger point.

Now that is where now I am realizing there’s a huge advantage India has that your US competitors do not have. Which is, I don’t like the word very much, but let’s go with SEO, Search engine optimizers. My take on that is all the SEO content that is being created to optimize for search is 50% okay 50% not okay. I’m not saying that the 50% okay part is okay. Create content, optimize for search. The part I’m not okay is that you are just when you create content just for the SEO part then you let it giving answers to. No, you could be giving answers, but once again you’re trying to sell and that’s where you are failing.

In India, having a good content writer is hugely advantageous and there are very good content writers. What is this whole story about selling? The whole story about selling is somebody has a problem. And he goes on Google. Now, I would point everybody to something called a challenger sales thing. But then along with Harvard Business Review, Challenger has a what is called the drowning cycle. My mother in law says that (some hindi). It’s a closest relationship, yet there’s a pain involved and only then there’s a benefit. So the idea is you have to talk about the pain first, whether you’re talking it in person or you’re talking it in a digital mechanism. I still don’t understand how sales and marketing is different. Marketing is all about saying the same things in a sales just in additional format.

So from that perspective, you had to talk about the pain. You cannot let it go there. That’s a drowning part. So first is identify pain but I think Challenger or whatever sales is they call it the rational drowning. But even the best of salesperson stopped there. No, there’s one more step, which is what is the impact of the pain on their life.

Ayush: So it’s like vitamin or antibiotic, what do you need?

Suvikas: Yes, because without the vitamin, you can’t go to the second step. You have to point out not just the pain but also the personal or professional impact due to the pain. So for example, with Pass gear, we are basically helping employees with both personal and financial health. And one of the areas of personal and financial comes together is health insurance from companies.

Now one of the nightmares of Hrdez is at 12:00 on a Sunday, Radko, they get a call saying I am at a hospital, I don’t know, I I have an emergency, I don’t know which hospital to go to. What is covered or what is not covered, right. And Pascare platform has one clickways. All this is available. Your hospitals around you. What’s your coverage? Which one is the ideal one to go to? What is the outcome for the HR whom you are selling to, the Persona you are selling to.

The pain is that the employee doesn’t know the information. But what is the personal impact? The HR’S personal life gets decimated now with so many calls happening. So if we do the first thing but not the second thing, we still leave things out. You identify the pain ,you identify the impact and then present the solution. That’s what content should do. That is exactly how content should be structured.

Ayush: In fact, they say, and I believe in that, you know, you know, even the language has to be something that can be understood by a fifth grader rather than over complicating it with jargons or large words or long sentences.

Suvikas: I’ve learned very recently from my new manager that there’s a actually a scale that identifies, you can just paste the content and it identifies whether it’s a fifth grader content or a third grader content, or even difficult for a college. Unfortunately, with British English in India, you mostly end up with a 12th grader plus content, or rather college quantity. (Some Hindi). Totally with you.

Simple to the point, it’s not about how many words it is about are you addressing the person’s challenges? Right, totally with you. I can’t recall what that scale is called K something. It starts with a K but I’ll let you know. But it’s interesting that I didn’t even know. It just scores your. So my mandate to my team now is every piece of content has to go through that scale. And it cannot be over anything over a fifth grader.

Ayush: So to that, as they say, like, you know, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Suvikas: Secondly, I’m hoping everybody watches Bollywood movies, but I don’t think you realize that 90% of the movies are the same. It’s the same cycle. There’s a hero, hero-heroine, good life or even a superhero Marvel movie. Something happens, they fight it out and they emerge victorious. Your content should work in the same way, right?

Ayush: Well, thank you So Vikas. This has been great. I think a masterclass on sales and very exciting, great points that you have touched upon, which sometimes I think could go in as common sense.

But as you say, common sense is not so common unfortunately that is why it’s called common sense. Thank you.

In this episode of Healthtech With Purpose, we have Suvikas Bandari, VP of Strategy and GTM at Pazcare, shared his insights on the sales landscape and effective sales strategies. He emphasized the importance of personalized research to build meaningful connections with potential customers. Connecting with prospects based on shared interests or experiences. Understand the buyer’s journey and address their specific needs.

He also discussed about the challenges of selling in the South Asian market, including language barriers and fragmented markets. He emphasized the importance of partnerships and understanding local market dynamics, navigating the political map as well as about content creation that addresses the customer’s pain points and provides solutions.

Overall, the interview provided valuable insights for sales professionals looking to improve their strategies and build stronger relationships with customers.