Healthcare Deals Are Won A Year Before The RFP Ever Reaches A Vendor's Inbox

A health system approves the budget for a big project about a year before it picks a vendor, often before it has started looking at options. By the time the RFP goes out, the money is committed and the shortlist is taking shape.

Kevin Torf has spent four decades watching that timeline play out. He is co-founder and Managing Partner of T2 Group, a healthcare technology consultancy that guides hospital systems through large IT programs such as EMR transitions, cloud migrations, and data center moves. He helped establish the firm in 2006, and much of his career has gone to selling into some of the country's biggest health systems and advising their executives on multimillion-dollar deployments.

"For big projects next year, you've got to be working on them now," Torf says. Approval is just the first step. From there the deal moves through research, procurement, vendor selection, and the legal work a project of that size demands, and each one adds weeks. The RFP that signals an opening arrives near the end of it.

Be known early

A relationship can't be built in the weeks after an RFP drops. Because the deal takes shape a year earlier, a vendor has to be known before the process starts, so Torf keeps his network warm long before any of it points to a sale. Those connections also outlast any single job, thanks to the industry's revolving door.

"This industry is built on relationships. The people you work with at one health system today are more than likely at another one a few years from now," Torf notes. When a contact moves, they bring your track record with them, so one good relationship can lead to work at several systems over the years.

But staying known has gotten harder. The trade shows and on-site visits that once kept people in regular contact have thinned out, and more of it now happens over video. "You lose a little bit of that connection. It's a little harder to maintain now, but you still have to build that network," Torf says. Staying in touch when there is nothing to sell keeps a vendor familiar for the moment the system is ready to buy.

Spot the budget forming

Being early depends on knowing which accounts are entering their planning window, and that is what AI and data analytics are for. Torf's team uses them to read a prospect from the outside. When a health system visits the company's site after a post or a blog, the tools can track the domain, flag what the visitor read, and sometimes surface the name of the person running the search. What they are searching for hints at the problem they are trying to solve, and where a need may be emerging.

Public announcements do the same work. Some of it is out in the open, and a vendor can buy access to the rest. "AI tools let us do that discovery. A healthcare system made a big announcement three months ago that they're moving to the cloud, and now the question is whether that's an opportunity for us," Torf adds. A system moving to the cloud often doesn't have the staff or the expertise to do it alone, and that gap is where an outside vendor comes in. Spotting the signal early gets a vendor into the conversation while the budget is still forming and the field is still open.

Who signs, who steers

A head start only helps if those conversations reach the right people, and in a health system that is rarely one person. A seven-figure purchase is signed off by the CFO, sometimes through a board or a committee. "When someone is going to sign for a million or two million dollars, the CFO is part of that final decision. They don't necessarily choose the product, because they might not know the operational needs," Torf notes. That choice belongs to the CIO, often with a CTO or a data center lead handling the details and setting the requirements. Clinical purchases run through different people again. A rep needs to know which person controls the money and which one chooses the vendor, and reach both during the planning window.

Winning a health system's biggest projects is a matter of timing. The strongest position belongs to a vendor already inside the account before a formal search begins. AI can point to the accounts worth pursuing and speed up the research behind them, but the relationship that closes the deal is still built by people. "You've got to find someone that has a need, a healthcare system that's going to buy, and a way to get there at the right time. If they're not phoning you, you've got to find a way to phone them," Torf says.