Healthcare’s right to win
Healthcare has more ways to compete than ever. So why does everyone still sound the same?
Ideas
When every organization makes the same three promises, the promises stop setting anyone apart. A real right to win starts with an advantage you may be taking for granted.
Healthcare buyers have more choices than ever before. Employers can pick from new plan designs, direct contracts and navigation vendors and specialty point solutions. Consumers can get care from a retail clinic, an app or a subscription service before they ever see a traditional provider.
Each of those options is built on a different idea of how care should work — and a different value proposition. And yet almost every healthcare organization I meet ends up making the same three promises: lower cost, better quality and a better experience.
I understand why. Those three outcomes are the holy grail of a system that is struggling to keep its head above water. They are the most legitimate things anyone in healthcare can offer. The problem is that they've become category expectations.
If everyone can credibly make a claim, the claim itself stops being an advantage.
Your operating model isn’t your value proposition
Differentiation is understandably difficult for healthcare companies today, and there's one pattern I see again and again. Organizations lead with what I call their machinery: “We have an integrated care model.” “We do navigation.” “We offer primary care-centered care.” “We have the most expansive network.” “We’re great at care management.”
The operational distinctions are real. But your operating model isn't your value proposition. If a buyer has to understand how your machine works before they understand what it does for them, you're telling the wrong story.
Take integrated care. People talk about it constantly. Most employers and most consumers already know that truly integrated care is hard to achieve and rare in our system. So saying you have it gets a somewhat passive head nod. What earns attention is what integrated care changes.
Consider an employer that needs to bring costs down but doesn’t want to add another vendor or disrupt its employees to get there. Integration speaks directly to that problem, because it connects care without adding one more piece for the employer to manage.
Primary care works the same way. Centering primary care is part of the machinery. A patient who has spent the past year moving between an urgent care clinic, a telehealth app and a specialist wants to know something simpler: whether anyone is keeping track of the whole picture.
The model is the mechanism.
The market cares about what the mechanism makes possible.
Your best advantage may be the one you take for granted
So how do you get from an operational advantage to a value proposition someone will buy?
Start by looking for structural advantages — and I use the word structural broadly. Sometimes it’s a care model or a data asset. Sometimes it’s your brand and how much your members or patients love it. That affection is a real structural advantage, and a lot of organizations underrate it.
Advantages like these are hard to see from the inside, the same way it’s hard to see the big picture of what’s happening on a crowded dance floor when you’re in the middle of it. Part of what we do at Langrand is get you to step up on the balcony, where we can see where buyers are moving, which spots competitors are already crowding and where your organization’s strengths fit an opening nobody else has taken.
Claim your “right to win” in three steps
Finding the advantage is only the start. To turn it into something a buyer will act on, you need what we call a “right to win” — a specific, credible reason the market should choose you over everyone else making similar promises.
I love the idea of a right to win because it turns the rather passive notion of a value proposition into something with teeth.
A right to win needs three things:
1. MARKET TENSION.
Something important that is changing or breaking for the buyer. Rising costs alone won’t do it, because everyone has rising costs. A sharper tension is the one facing the employer I described earlier, who needs lower costs but is wary of adding more fragmentation or disrupting employees to get there.
2. STRUCTURAL ADVANTAGE.
Something only you can provide that reduces that tension. It should be built into how you operate or how your members feel about you, so a competitor can’t simply claim it next quarter.
3. CREDIBLE PROOF.
Evidence that the advantage is real. Many of the organizations we work with are health insurers selling to very large employers. Those are sophisticated buyers, and they’re quick to discount any marketing claims that aren’t backed by data.
Proof is often where things get interesting. Large healthcare organizations frequently have tremendous research assets that live in another part of the building and never make it into the market story. So we spend time helping clients build what amounts to a proof library.
A client we’re working with right now told us they were done waiting for other teams to hand them the evidence they needed. They wanted to define that evidence with us, find where the organization genuinely performs well and take it to market.
Build your story around the tension your buyers already feel
Most organizations start their story with what they want to say. Start instead with the tension your buyers already feel, and with why you’re the one positioned to resolve it. People listen when you talk about what matters to them. It’s a basic rule of life, and one we tend to forget when we sit down to write a value proposition.
In an industry as competitive as healthcare, it’s easy to believe you don’t have a real advantage worth building on. In my experience, healthcare organizations almost always do. It’s just a matter of uncovering it.
Once you figure it out, the story gets much easier to tell, because you’re translating an advantage you already have into terms the market understands and will buy. That’s also when you stop sounding like everyone else.
Your right to win is probably closer than you think. Let’s get up on the balcony together and find it.
Shannon Langrand
Founder, CEO
Shannon is dedicated to helping senior leaders in highly dynamic industries to innovate and solve problems in the face of change.
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