Readers Write: All I Needed to Know to Disrupt Healthcare I Learned from “Seinfeld,” the Epilogue: The Summer of George

All I Needed to Know to Disrupt Healthcare I Learned from “Seinfeld,” the Epilogue: The Summer of George
By Bruce Brandes

Bruce Brandes, MBA is co-founder and board chair of WhaleHawk and CEO of Mindyra Health.

In 2014-15, I authored a seven-part blog series at the encouragement of Mr. HIStalk to reflect on my years of lessons learned in this industry through the satirical but surprisingly parallel lens of the greatest sitcom of all time.

Posts like Do The Opposite, And You Want to Be My Latex Salesman, and Yada Yada Yada were intended to reorient the mindset of how healthcare solution companies approach their go-to-market activities.

Similar to my TV friend Larry David as he wrapped “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” over a decade later, I felt compelled to pen this as a bit of an epilogue to my old HIStalk series, while also illuminating a next-generation path forward as we rethink commercial relationships in healthcare.

Unlike George Costanza, I was not special enough to get hired at PlayNow, nor was I Penske material. Instead, over the past 10 years, I’ve been fortunate to have had firsthand experience in growing transformational healthcare companies, including Livongo, Teladoc, Care.ai, and Stryker.  

Operating a healthcare organization has never been more difficult. Financial pressures, dizzying technological advances, workforce challenges, and daily policy uncertainty are among a litany of existential issues. Consequently, every solution company needs to completely reimagine how it discovers, approaches, engages, and closes new business. More importantly, the focus on value, outcomes, and building enduring relationships is paramount. Who knows more about enduring relationships than Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer?

Through “Seinfeld” wisdom, combined with my career journey, I’ve developed an understanding of how healthcare executives prioritize investments, navigate buying decisions, and set partnership expectations. Moreover, I’ve discovered the secrets, strategies, and tactics of successful solution companies and their most effective sales leaders and account reps.  

Go-to-market in healthcare takes too long and costs too much. Reps commonly prioritize the wrong accounts, engage at the wrong time, and make a pitch that sounds like everyone else’s and is more focused on what they want to sell than the problems their prospect seeks to solve.

Like George Costanza’s invention of the IToilet (only “Curb” loyalists may get that reference), the power of agentic AI and a treasure trove of digitized industry data are creating a better way to make your life easier.

I see many healthcare sales reps using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. to help them conduct market and account research. My question is, does this actually help or hinder a solution company’s go-to-market success?

Are we simply accelerating unwanted outreach? Does rogue, individualized use of generic LLMs exacerbate the inconsistency of a company’s approach and messaging? Is decision-making in healthcare different enough to warrant a more customized approach?

I contend that using generic LLMs for some research is OK, but the findings are superficial and insufficient if you aspire to improve the overall ROI you are getting on your sales and marketing investment.

We must train LLMs to more deeply understand how selling and decision-making in healthcare is different from any other industry. Sales cycles are long because, more often than not, the optimism of a sales rep does not reflect the realism facing buyers. LLMs must be customized to create sales acceleration agents that are deeply trained in our industry dynamics, on each specific account, and on each individual decision maker, contextualized to the unique solution and best practices.

Three key agentic deliverables will ensure the focused, efficient path to growth every company seeks while enabling a more collaborative relationship with clients.

Know WHERE to Go

Is your go-to-market plan rooted in legacy marketing investments, dated market data subscriptions, and antiquated sales enablement tools? Smarter market segmentation must refine your ideal customer profile at a much deeper level than “academic medical centers” or “community hospitals with 250+ beds.” Real data intelligence is informed by patterns across an array of less obvious variables, such as operating metrics, financial trends, workforce dynamics, governance, leadership histories, community influences, etc. so you don’t waste time chasing accounts that will likely never make a buying decision.

Know WHEN to Engage

How well do you understand the priorities of your prospects and honestly assess your solution’s relevancy, respectfully not persisting when your offering is not a fit or the timing isn’t right? A custom healthcare LLM can continuously monitor tens of thousands of digital healthcare-specific data sources — across government reporting, podcasts, industry news, policy trends, videos, clinical journals, financial filings, and social media — and correlate those insights with the context of your value proposition. That allows you to be the first to make timely connections when a potential buyer would be most receptive to your outreach.

Know HOW to Win

Are all of your reps consistently engaging in a way that is hyper-personalized, but rooted in your proven best practices? Too often, companies lead with spam emails, unwanted LinkedIn messages, trade show chocolates, texts, and unsolicited calls that waste time and money while detrimentally littering our industry and damaging your brand. Proper use of modern agents will create customized playbooks that guide informed, personalized conversations and organizational insights that demonstrate your diligence and expertise that will save time for your best reps to manage more accounts and ensure that every rep performs more like your best reps.

George Costanza once warned that “A George divided against itself cannot stand.” Take heed, and rethink how engaging healthcare-specific, custom LLM-trained agents can reduce ineffective sales and marketing efforts to catalyze a new approach for growth, leading to a less-cluttered industry and better outcomes for all.