Selling SaaS into healthcare is not for the faint of heart. The industry moves slowly, procurement is complex, and adoption depends on both executive buy-in and frontline usage.
Yet Zack Fisch-Rothbart, co-founder and CEO of CoHealth, built a patient engagement platform that grew to 200 healthcare organizations and 50,000 patients before being acquired by Toronto-based ACTO. The secret wasn’t just having a strong product — it was using buyer intelligence to navigate the market’s unique adoption barriers.
Lesson 1: Start With the Buyer’s Reality — Even If It’s Not Your World
Fisch-Rothbart didn’t come from healthcare. He entered the space as a patient, after a post-surgery complication nearly led to his leg being amputated. The experience sparked the idea for a platform that helps healthcare organizations share trusted content with patients — essentially giving them a private, branded “WebMD” with built-in tools to improve experiences and outcomes.
Buyer-intelligence insight: Zack began by learning the workflows, pain points, and approval structures of hospitals and health systems — not just what he thought they needed. That deep buyer research became the foundation for both product and go-to-market strategy.
Lesson 2: Sequence Your Outreach — Top-Down and Bottom-Up
Selling to hospitals required two parallel buyer journeys:
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Top-down: Winning over administrators, boards, and CFOs with ROI, compliance, and scalability.
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Bottom-up: Ensuring frontline clinicians saw value, so adoption actually happened.
This dual approach meant marketing and sales enablement materials had to be persona-specific — different messages, proof points, and success metrics for each group.
Agency parallel: This is exactly where SaaS companies often fail. Marketing teams produce generic content that doesn’t match the buying context of each decision-maker. Buyer-intelligent marketing designs separate, converging paths.
Lesson 3: Avoid the IT Bottleneck (Unless You Have To)
Zack quickly learned that hospital IT teams often slowed the process — not out of malice, but because they’re tasked with risk mitigation, integration oversight, and security vetting.
Instead of starting with IT, CoHealth focused on clinical and administrative champions who could prove patient and workflow value first, then bring IT in later to approve rather than define the solution.
Lesson 4: Early Sales = Pitching the Vision Before the Product
Before the platform was fully built, CoHealth sold mockups and prototypes to early hospital clients — collecting commitments and even revenue before writing the final lines of code.
“There’s nothing better than knowing someone will pay for it before you build it,” Zack says.
This approach provided cash flow for development and validated the product’s market fit — an agile strategy many SaaS founders avoid because of “imposter syndrome.”
Lesson 5: Transparency Drives Retention (and Team Alignment)
When acquisition talks began, Zack chose to be transparent with his team once discussions went beyond “kicking tires.” By giving context, involving key team members in diligence meetings, and framing the acquisition as recognition of the product’s value, he kept morale high and retention stable through the transition.
The Buyer-Centric SaaS Playbook from CoHealth
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Embed in your buyer’s workflow reality — learn their processes before you try to change them.
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Build dual-path buyer journeys for executives and frontline users.
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Sell vision early to validate before investing in full build-out.
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Use internal champions to bypass bottlenecks and accelerate adoption.
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Stay transparent with your team to preserve trust during high-change moments.
Why this matters for SaaS founders & tech companies: CoHealth’s growth and acquisition show that success in complex, slow-moving industries comes from more than just a great product. It’s about understanding each buyer type deeply, aligning sales and marketing accordingly, and removing friction in the adoption path — exactly the type of transformation our agency delivers for SaaS brands.