Atlanta’s Digital Health Sales Institute teaches founders how to close deals
ATLANTA, October 21 (Hypepotamus) - Raising capital gives a digital health startup money to build. But founders still have to figure out how to sell before that money runs out.
That is the challenge the Digital Health Sales Institute, created by Atlanta-based entrepreneur Kirk Barnes (in featured photo), wants to solve. The eight-week training program developed by Barnes, a healthcare sales veteran, was launched earlier this year to help digital health founders build the sales skills needed to turn customer interest into revenue.
For founders without sales experience, the learning curve can be expensive, Barnes explained to Hypepotamus. An unsuccessful sales hire can consume precious capital, while a stalled deal can leave a startup waiting on revenue it needs to keep operating. Barnes wants founders to develop the discipline to navigate both challenges.
He brings three decades of healthcare sales experience. Barnes previously served as Healthcare Start-Up Catalyst and Mentor at ATDC and is CEO of TransPharMed. Through that work, he saw a gap in how founders prepare to commercialize their products. Startups have plenty of reasons to celebrate a funding round. The work that follows deserves just as much attention.
“What happens after that is even more critical,” he told Hypepotamus. “How well do [startups] know how to sell and get things across the finish line so that they can generate revenue.”
Building A Healthcare Sales Process
Selling into healthcare often means navigating multiple stakeholders, competing priorities, and a lengthy buying process. Barnes said digital health founders face the additional challenge of establishing credibility for products that may not follow the regulatory path familiar to buyers of drugs or medical devices.
“Healthcare is already difficult to sell. Digital health is even more complex because unlike a therapeutic, drug, or medical device, [a lot of] digital health products don’t have to go through clinical trials or get FDA approval. So it takes a lot more savviness to convince all the stakeholders,” Barnes added.
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Founders also need to identify the right buyers, which can mean looking beyond hospital systems and healthcare providers. The institute’s curriculum is designed to help them understand a buyer’s problem, quantify its cost, and build a business case for addressing it.
“AI can’t replace B2B sales” because “the relationship and the networking precedes the technology,” he added.
Bringing Sales Training To A VC Portfolio
Barnes is now bringing that approach to founders backed by Nashville-based venture capital firm Jumpstart Health.
He told Hypepotamus that having a concise, 10-second pitch for the program helped him first get the idea in front of the Jumpstart team. That connection led to a partnership making DHSI the firm’s official sales enablement partner and giving its 138 portfolio companies access to the training.
The eight-week program uses two frameworks Barnes developed: the CAP Selling Model, which structures the enterprise healthcare sales process, and Monetize Problem Solving, which helps founders quantify a buyer’s challenges and make the case for budget approval. Participants also learn from senior health system decision-makers serving as guest faculty.
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For Jumpstart, the partnership adds commercial training to the support it provides early-stage healthtech companies. In the announcement, Co-Founder and CEO of Jumpstart Health Marcus Whitney emphasized the importance of helping founders earn buyers’ trust and connect their products to specific customer needs.
“Features don’t close enterprise healthcare deals. Trust does. Relationships do. Credibility does,” said Whitney in a press statement. “Kirk has built a repeatable, teachable process for earning that trust. He then shows founders how to use it to understand a buyer’s needs and position their product against the buyer’s real pain. That is how a company finds product-market fit and becomes a scalable, profitable business. We’re excited to work with Kirk to bring that discipline to our founders.”
Barnes said the goal is to give founders a process they can put to work in their businesses.
“Success looks like founders that are in Jumpstart are able to generate sales faster and shorten their sales cycle.”
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