Francis Moran Founder at Francis Moran & Associates

I have in the past developed cost-savings calculators and they can be one of the most effective tools in moving an enterprise software prospect through the sales funnel to a closed deal. So I understand why you are so keen to get a handle on these numbers.

Unfortunately, you are in a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. It reads as though this will be your first deal. By definition, then, you have not yet had a deployment allowing you to properly quantify and document the benefits and cost savings accruing to insurers when their patients use your tool. Without such data, on the other hand, closing this first customer is all the more difficult.

What you do have is a golden opportunity to work with this early adopter of your technology to develop those metrics. Make it worth this customer's while to work with you by offering it a steep discount, or a modest up-front fee combined with payments down the road based on how much they actually save. Or collaborate with this customer on a study that will quantify such savings and will provide this insurer with some effective competitive positioning it can use in its own marketing.

The challenge here is that savings on the mediation of lifestyle diseases like diabetes can take an awfully long time to accurately establish. What metrics, such as weight stabilization, could be harvested in the shorter term? And how convincingly could you extrapolate from those early metrics to estimate eventual cost savings?

You are certainly thinking the right way. Now you just need to figure out how you can collect actual patient data and turn that into a cost-savings calculator that will help you more easily close the next customer, and the scores of customers thereafter.

I hope this helped. If you have further questions, I am only a phone call away.

I've worked with a couple of startups targeting the veterinary medicine marketplace; one was in the imaging field, the other was a drug-development company.

There are effective channels to reach this market but, as with all marketing, your messaging and positioning need careful consideration. Because of the far lower regulatory hurdle, it's a lot easier to launch a medical device here than in the human health market. However, your unique selling proposition needs to be as much (maybe even more) about the value you're going to create for the practitioner as it is about the therapeutic or diagnostic efficacy of the device.

I'd love to hear more about what you're doing. Here's a free VIP link you can use to connect with me. https://clarity.fm/francismoran/thumb749

I have been a journalist and PR practitioner for more than 25 years. I can't count how many media lists I have developed or reviewed for clients. I can't give you specific places because you've told me nothing about your venture. However, there are only two questions you need to answer:

1. Does this outlet reach and influence my market? If it doesn't, you're wasting your time. No matter how ego-boosting it might be to get into TechCrunch, if your customers and those who influence your customers aren't reading it, then it's doing you no good!

2. Does this outlet or writer cover what I'm all about? If they don't, then, again, you're wasting your time.

Imagine a Venn diagram with each of two circles containing all the outlets for which you answered yes to one of these two questions. The outlets in the overlap portion are your targets. Period.

Of course, there are many more things you need to cover off before pitching even the right media, not least of which is that the answers to my questions will change depending on the story you're pitching. Happy to go over some of those on a call.