How to grow your business in a digital world
How do you stand out in the technology industry?
The Challenge
Providing technology to the healthcare industry in an ever-increasing digital world is challenging. Especially, when you need to stand out against your competitors who have much larger budgets.
The problem you face is that you need to try and show how your software is superior to someone else’s. If you get your foot in the door, that can often lead to a long-lasting relationship. Great if that is you, but hard if you are the challenger.
Working in the Technology in Healthcare sector, SARD were in this situation. They have a unique solution to workforce capacity and demand for areas such as job planning, validation and e-rostering within the healthcare industry, in particular within the NHS trusts.
They had contracts for the use of their technologies with a few trusts to begin with, but they wanted to become the largest provider of this software across the UK. They had the right team and won many awards throughout the years as recognition of this, so everything was going in the right direction.
The Approach
NHS trusts want the best value for the contracts that they take on. This can make pricing strategies difficult and cause the tendering process to take a long time.
The SARD customer service team spent a lot of time and many internal sessions, breaking down the elements that delighted their customers. They had this advantage over all of their competitors.
There was one particular trust that championed SARD’s product. This was like its flagship store within the healthcare industry.
Building the relationship with the board of that trust was key to help kickstart new funding initiatives and to be provided opportunities to showcase their products at healthcare events.
We worked through the board’s requirements with the trust and client, to make sure the monthly management packs were accurate, useful and always on time.
Forecasting the profit from the contracts and how the cash was going to come in needed to be clearly demonstrated, as this was the lifeblood of how the business model worked.
Monthly strategy sessions with all key decision makers allowed the chance to discuss the key drivers and objectives and set the actions for the following month.
Separate individual contract cashflows were setup to see, on a granular level, what the cash reserves were going to be. SARD needed to see where the crunch points were and where to anticipate any shortfalls.
The Outcome
Starting from 1 NHS trust, SARD’s products have been deployed within 50 NHS trusts nationwide
Over the last 4 years the business has increased its turnover > 79%
“OutRise really got under the skin of the company. They really got to know how we work, rather than being some off-the-shelf accountancy solution.”
Naomi Liddle, Operations for SARD
