case study

Just because a company is small doesn’t mean its product and service offerings can’t provide big benefits and value to its customers. SCWorx was a force within the healthcare industry—providing a comprehensive, flexible, and highly developed SaaS offering that includes services to enable health system leaders to maximize the value of all supply chain-related activities.

Yet, they were up against much larger competitors. The company needed to identify the right messaging to promote its offerings and solidify that messaging internally to support the sales organization’s growth.

SCWorx provides Supply Chain Software as a Service through applications and services that improve the quality of a hospital or health system’s foundational item master data. SCWorx provides a sustained and cost-effective path toward building and maintaining a high-quality foundational item master database that maximizes and sustains a range of downstream benefits across the supply chain, purchasing, and clinical operations.

The company addresses the complexity of healthcare logistics, which relies heavily on high-quality data. Recognizing the challenges of industry-wide data standardization—such as the labor-intensive nature of maintaining standardized data, difficulty in performing spend analytics, and identifying sourcing opportunities—SCWorx offers a solution that tackles these issues, primarily aiming to resolve major supply chain challenges in the healthcare sector.

When SCWorx engaged Healthcare Service Consultants, the company faced several brand identity challenges. One significant obstacle was that it did not have a strong marketing voice within the industry.

Even though SCWorx had a great product and many happy customers, it needed to differentiate itself from its larger competitors. The advantage SCWorx had was that those competitors offered a broader scope of products and services—so, while their competition had the breadth of offerings, they didn’t have the depth and specialization of SCWorx. Another challenge was overcoming the market misconception that because SCWorx was a small company, prospects were concerned that SCWorx could do the job.

It became clear that SCWorx needed stronger messaging to better articulate its value proposition and find their voice for conveying that messaging to customers and prospects. This was particularly challenging because they comprised many different buyer personas, from the COO and VP of supply chain to individual department managers (cath lab, operating room, nursing, etc.). This became even more critical as SCWorx was set to bring on a new sales force, and the company needed messaging locked in before sales training.

Our first step in reorienting SCWorx and its marketing was interviewing three customers. This deep dive helped us better understand SCWorx’s value proposition—particularly in the context of their competitors. The three customers we spoke with were also familiar with the competition and thus were able to shed light on the weaknesses of those larger companies and highlight the unique strengths of SCWorx.

We created an internal FAQ document from the interviews that broke down multiple points surrounding feature, function, and competitive analysis. The process of creating this FAQ involved several intense internal conversations that helped the team flush out and gain consensus around key points. Other internal documentation we created was also instrumental in capturing and articulating pain points and value propositions against each buyer persona and competitor.

We also helped SCWorx refine its go—to—market strategy using a version of the “freemium” model. The company was willing to give away a certain level of functionality, but it then had the opportunity to upsell add-on functions and features. To do this effectively, we had to clearly understand the product structure and how to best articulate the value of the add-on product/service offerings.

Externally, we developed a sales sheet and a customer success story based on one of the customers we interviewed.

Internal comfortability with messaging translated to greater external confidence among all company stakeholders. SCWorx now understood how to position itself against its larger competitors, which shone through in its sales efforts. The sales team knew how to speak to each of the buyer personas in a way that clearly articulated the company’s value proposition. SCWorx also took that messaging and revised external-facing marketing materials (website, sales sheet, email, etc.).

This focused but rewarding five-month engagement proved to be an overall success.

Contact us if you feel your company could also benefit from improved positioning and a strategic marketing approach.