Introducing... Unsolicited Insights! Episode 1: Sift Healthcare

Being on sabbatical gives me some more time to create content. Since I truly enjoy researching B2B companies, reverse engineering their demand, marketing and sales processes and all of that, I figured I'd share in public.

Relax -- this isn't going to be a "teardown" as I hate those. Instead, I'm going to show you some of my research process as I look through a company, their revenue strategy, how it's being executed, what sales and marketing looks like, and more.

The goal is to have some fun, learn together, and offer some free feedback to the team. So... let's give some Unsolicited Insights!

I've randomly selected from a Crunchbase list of companies that received Series A or B rounds between 6 to 9 months ago, based in North America. I have no idea how often I'll do these, but I plan to do a bunch.

First up: Sift Healthcare. The transcript for this video follows below. Enjoy!

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello, long time, no see. Haven't posted a video like this with my little talking head in the corner for a while. And I thought that I would get started on a lovely new series to take you through some of my thought process when I worked at Refine Labs in analyzing companies and doing a bit of research. So I've called it Unsolicited Insights because these are very much going to be... unsolicited insights. We're going to take a look at companies, as you can see here, I'm on Crunchbase that have raised a series A or series B sometime between six to nine months ago.

So give them some time to get the money and start spending it. Based in North America, not cryptocurrency or blockchain companies, but software as a service, SaaS, AI, machine learning, basically B2B SaaS or B2B software companies. So, why am I doing this? Very briefly, I'll let you know that I'm doing this because I want to not only share an inside look at how I think about this type of thing when I analyze a company, but also to share some... unsolicited insights. I see a lot of tear downs on LinkedIn, especially, I don't want to tear anybody down. What I want to do is share some feedback on how you can improve demand creation, demand capture, all of that.

[00:01:00] But again, peel back and just kind of share how I think about this stuff when I'm looking at these types of companies. So. Unsolicited insights. What I've done is put this list together. As you can see here at some companies listed below, and I'm going to kill this filter so you can see exactly. This big list of companies.

And way at the top was pitch li I didn't want to pick on Pitchly because they just raised the round like two weeks ago or something like that. And I thought that's pretty bad. I don't know why they showed up in the six to nine month list. They're recorded as having done their $7 million round, like nine months ago, but that wasn't true, it was a couple weeks ago.

So I settled on Sift Healthcare, which is number three in the list. These are sorted by CB rank. So let's take a look at Sift Healthcare. As you can see here, transforms healthcare payments with AI-based workflow integrations that optimize revenue cycle operations and maximize payments. I don't know what this company does. I have no idea who they are, but I do know they raised $9 million last July. And they just, congratulations by the way team, they closed another $6.75 million in March. So they've got what, $16 million, as you can see here in total funding. Let's go take a look at this business, but before we do [00:02:00] that, you can see I've got a long list of tabs open here. We're going to go through a bit of a process of research to understand what the company is first.

So we're going to go to ChatGPT. Because why not? ChatGPT, right. I have access to ChatGPT's browsing plugin as an alpha. So what we're going to do here is we're going to take a look at sifthealthcare.com. We're going to send ChatGPT there. We're going to say, determine and summarize what the company's UVP is, who is the company's target buyer, what's their core differentiating feature, and what does this company's product cost. Let's go see if ChatGPT can figure that out. While we're waiting, you can see here, it's going to start browsing the web. Yep. Okay. So it's clicked on there. It's going to take a look. Let's go take a look at G2. Now, this is Sift Healthcare, as you can see, it's not the right logo, but it is the right Sift Healthcare. I went over here and just hovered over this. You can see, it goes to sifthealthcare.com. This link doesn't go to a functioning page on Sift Healthcare's website, you can see it's health care value based reimbursement software. So this is the company we're looking for, but there's no G2 reviews and there's no G2 page. So the first thing that I would say to Sift Healthcare's teams is that you've got to [00:03:00] claim this page.

You want to take control of the narrative on review sites. Now G2 is one of the most visited websites in the world. Certainly the number one review site for B2B software and B2B SaaS. If I go over here to Capterra ,same problem. There isn't any Sift Healthcare here, right? It's Radar healthcare or whatever Compulink Solutions, Sift down here, but Sift Healthcare is nowhere to be found. So the first recommendation, the first unsolicited insight, would be that you have to take control of the narrative on review sites, and at least just put a nice, shiny coating on there because some buyers will do due diligence on these review sites.

You want to make sure that you've got your very best foot put forward on these sites. Let's go back to ChatGPT and see what it found. So you can see here, it went to the website, gave us a summary. It's a company that offers reporting, an AI solutions for healthcare payments. Okay. UVP is to equip healthcare organizations, blah, blah, blah. Target buyer is healthcare organizations and healthcare providers. Okay. So now we know who they're going after. At least that's what the website shows us. The company's focus is on supporting these organizations and providers and optimizing their revenue cycles and protecting financial [00:04:00] receivables. So again, it sounds like we're getting a little bit closer.

DIfferentiating features, use of AI and machine learning, blah, blah, blah. AI is very popular, as you can tell, regarding the cost of product promotes a services as simple, easy, and affordable offers, free data consultation, price scale with the size of the business, suggesting a flexible pricing model. Overall, the aim to empower healthcare organizations and providers with the tools and insights they need to optimize the revenue cycles and maximize their financial performance.

So as you can see here, we're trying to empower health care organizations and providers with tools and insights using AI to maximize revenue cycles. Okay. Sounds like that's what we need to know. So let's go over to Sift Healthcare in LinkedIn Sales Navigator. The next thing that I would look for is: who's on this team? Because right now we know that there isn't anybody taking care of these particular things, but that's okay. This is a company, as you can see here, that's got 24 employees in LinkedIn. They probably don't have a very big marketing team and this probably isn't a priority. It may not even have a marketing leader on board. So let's go take a look.

Alright. I use a persona in LinkedIn Sales Nav, which you can set up, I use a director+ you can see function in sales and marketing and director, VP or CXO. So what I want to see here is I [00:05:00] want to see the revenue organization and who's in it very quickly. So I use this persona so I can just see it at a glance.

We can also go here and just click on all employees and, and take a look at who's on the team. We've got a founder and CEO and you can see Bethany, vice president of marketing and accounts. So Bethany's straddling various roles. She's a VP marketing, but she also has other things to do. And she's been in this role for three years and 11 months. So she may not have a marketing team. We've got a VP product, a COO, vice president of growth.

So again, we have growth and marketing on board, but I don't know what growth does here, you can see. Dominic is also straddling two roles, ops and growth. CIO business intelligence, developer. And then when we get into is a lot of data engineers and engineers and engineers and scientists. So there isn't a lot of marketers on this team. There's also not a lot of account executives on this team, right? There isn't sales and there isn't marketing on board.

So what that tells me is the teams aren't really set up to go and do a whole lot of marketing demand creation, demand capture. They may have an agency partner. They may have external help. They may just be outsourcing it. I don't know. But we need to know how are they creating demand? How are they capturing it and how are they getting [00:06:00] revenue? Because obviously this is a going functioning concern because it's been funded twice. Remember two rounds.

$16 million in total. So let's go to their LinkedIn page. Let's take a look, Sift Healthcare. if you haven't done this before, you can see all of the ads that they're running on LinkedIn by clicking on posts, which you can see here. They've got a bunch of actual social media posts on their pages. Great. You can click on jobs. No jobs open right now. So they're not hiring any marketers, but go to post, click on ads. And what we're going to do now is take a look at the ads that they're running inside the LinkedIn feed to see how are we creating and capturing demand. So the first thing we see here at promoted was 2022, the year of multiple deferrals make 2023 different, multiple eligibility denials. So they've got a free download that they're offering here.

Targeting healthcare professionals or folks that are dealing with this and a great time to check and ensure health system has the appropriate solutions to handle multiple eligibility denials. They're painful 2022 saw spikes of them. Download Sift's denials insights report for a year's worth of data.

So they put together some primary research and they're sending an ebook download, right. Capture demand strategy, captured [00:07:00] demand. the next one annual data review gets to the root causes of CARC 197 denials. I love the specificity of this ad. Get to the root of your denials, right? Is the payer responsible, whatever, what I don't love about it is as a download, because nobody wants to download anything in this day and age.

So this is fantastic. The insights that are buried inside of this denials insights report, we want to bring them out and put them in the feed. So again, the next unsolicited insight I would share with you is to test advertising the insights from the download just directly in the feed to your buyers, especially if you know exactly who they are, I would assume you do.

And your targeting is very sharp because you're using terms like CARC 197 denial, and nobody is going to know what that is, unless they know exactly what that is. One code, multiple causes, again, same things. So we're just targeting people who know what this means. Now this ad here is very generic, turn revenue loss into restored cashflow. You have to be careful with your targeting on this because revenue loss means any business. Right? So if you're loose with your targeting, you're going to get a whole bunch of.

Unwanted junk inside of the inbounds you're going to get from here, but just remember sign up. Right? So it's, it's very much sign up, [00:08:00] sign up, download downloads, all demand capture, Becker's healthcare webinars so we're doing like a joint co-marketing with another organization here. Join Dominic. So we got a VP of growth and client operations, this is on Wednesday, April 12th so this is very recent, which is fantastic. It's good to see that this is something's happening nowadays.

Sift analytics, 86% of collectible denial dollars, blah, blah. And it's a download. So what's the unsolicited insight here. There's no demand creation advertising happening, and you're a business with two rounds behind you now, got some marketing on board and you are running ads. So we want to go ahead and just make sure that there's demand creation ads, right?

Talk about what Sift Healthcare does why it's important, right? Why data science for healthcare payments are transforming healthcare pains all this word salad is important to the buyer and how it's going to change their life. Looking at meta and Facebook ads, there aren't any. So again, you're missing the boat here on some cheap, inexpensive advertising. If you can sync up some lists using a tool like Metadata or Clearbit or something like that, to go and target those folks in healthcare payer organizations you want to sell to. And then two more things we're going to do here. We're going to look at the capture of demand now. So we're going to go to Google ads and I [00:09:00] just looked up Sift Healthcare to see if anybody is cross bidding against this organization. And they're not, which is great.

For now. Because they will, as soon as your competitors sniff out that you're not paying to defend your brand on here, they're going to slip inexpensive ads right in front of you. The next one I would do is just same brand, but then pricing. And now you can see all of a sudden, oh, there's Phreesia right. There's just sift.com and they're kind of missing the boat on, on fixing their targeting. Cause this has nothing to do with them specifically, they're probably thinking sift pricing and healthcare is getting slipped in the middle and they're paying the cost of that ad. Automated ENB checks for healthcare payment solutions, gotta be really careful here. I don't know Phreesia's a competitor, but if so, it says healthcare and it says revenue cycle, and those are some keywords that we saw in the review from ChatGPT. So if this is a competitor, they're slipping in front of you to capture demand, and this is in a term that's very important to your business, right?

So you're getting your lunch eaten here by Phreesia. So another unsolicited insight would be to make sure that you're either paying attention to if you're going to get qualified demos coming through, uh, query like this. And if so, then you're going to have to do some work on defending that [00:10:00] query from people like Phreesia and potentially DeepScribe.

Down here is obviously where we were looking at and you could see Sift Healthcare does show as the first organic search result. And then there's the press release from the round they closed back in July. Okay. Last but not least we go to their actual website. Yay. 10 minutes into this video and we're finally here. The only thing I want to see on this website, two things actually, the first is we're going to take a look at the tags that they've got. And you can see on tag explore. We've got a Facebook pixel GA4, Tag Manager, HubSpot. So they're probably using HubSpot as their CRM. And then some fonts. What I don't see here is the LinkedIn insight tag. And even if you're going to run ads on LinkedIn, which they are, but if, even if you're not, you can get a lot of demographic information about your visitors and you can retarget them later on, on LinkedIn.

Your buyers are most certainly on LinkedIn with a software tool, regardless of whether or not they're in healthcare. So You want to make sure that you're going have the LinkedIn insight tag on there just for the demographic information, even if you don't use it for targeting purposes? As you can see the Meta pixel's here, Facebook pixel, but we don't have them running ads on Facebook, which is a surprise, right? Very inexpensive retargeting inventory is going to be available [00:11:00] there. And you can retarget people that are a little bit, you know, one to two pages deep, maybe on this payer reimbursement, whatever.

But again, only one tag in this Facebook pixel. Oh, okay. The last thing we want to do is check their primary CTA. So I don't see it in the menu bar, which is a problem because as I scroll, I'm losing the CTA now. There's also multiple CTAs on this page, or schedule a demo here and down the bottom, there's contact us. Those are different, but they probably go to the same place.

But the primary call to action is schedule a demo, so we're going to click it. And the first thing I see here is that I can't schedule a demo and that makes me mad. So this is setting a false expectation with the buyer that they can schedule a demo. They can't. this is filling a form. Request a demo would be more accurate with this. So another unsolicited insight would be that you don't set an unrealistic expectation for your buyers ever. You want to make sure that you're very clear about what's going to happen next every time you ask them to take an action. So when you ask them to take an action and schedule a demo, there should be a calendar tool here to schedule a demo. I'd also encourage you to think of putting a Chili Piper or Calendly or HubSpot meetings, whatever you want to use to actually [00:12:00] schedule the demo for the buyer. And the reason why is because your sit rate is going to be so much higher for your sales team. If you allow the buyer to pick the time that they want to go, what this says right here is please fill out this form and we'll be in touch to schedule a demo.

So what happens now is I fill in the form and I'll wait. Some undetermined amount of time. I have no idea how long it's going to take you to get back to me. And then when you do get back to me, I might not respond. So you're never going to sit a demo with me. I can now just leave and go and find your competitors and fill in their forms and talk to them whenever I want my convenience.

So I'm not going to fill in this form just because I don't want to put a fake lead into their CRM and irritate them. But also you could see down here there's no self-reported attribution, right? There's no. How did you hear about us? I would also encourage you to put that field in just to collect some information on how people heard about you.

So that's it. Unsolicited insights. So what did we get out of this? We got that ChatGPT, who knew who you were. You're not doing anything on G2 or Capterra or probably TrustRadius, Software Advice, et cetera. You want to go take care of all the review sites and start filling in all the information, claim the pages and make [00:13:00] sure that you will own the narrative there.

We noticed that there wasn't really much of a marketing team on board, which is fair they're probably gonna hire some marketers. Now they got their second round in, but they do have LinkedIn ads running and all of those LinkedIn ads were capture demand. LinkedIn ads are all ebook, downloads and register now.

And all of that, we want to get some demand creation, advertising going. If you're gonna spend that money on LinkedIn. We saw nothing on Facebook ads, but we did see a Facebook pixel on the website. We didn't see the LinkedIn pixel, but we saw that. LinkedIn Ads were running. So we got to get the pixels fixed up and make sure you're collecting demographic information. You can view later and also retargeting your visitors appropriately to the pages of visitors that you see fit. And then the last thing was around the demand capture ads, running on Google, which there are none for this particular company, at least not that I could see in the United States.

And that allows competitors to slip in front of you on very important terms like pricing. So there you go. That's my thought process for how it very quickly research company like this. I will do some more of this on our unsolicited insights list. You can expect me to burn through more of these companies as we go. We've got, as you can see a couple of hundred of them here, so we'll pick some fun [00:14:00] ones over the next little while, and I will share those results on LinkedIn.

Thanks for watching.