How to Sell When Your Buyers Are Frozen by Market Uncertainty
MA exits, Medicaid cuts, ACA subsidy cliffs, and government shutdowns hit simultaneously. Buyers can't make decisions when they don't know what's next. Here's how the vendors still winning adapted.
Upward Growth provides health tech leaders with the playbooks and proof to transform complex markets into real growth. Each week, we deliver clear, practical strategies on positioning, messaging, and growth, so leaders can close enterprise deals and build repeatable momentum.
🟦 Connect with the author, Ryan Peterson, on LinkedIn.
📩 Join the CEOs, GTM leaders, and investors already reading every Tuesday.
💡 Sponsorship opportunities are available: Inquire here
Your deals aren’t moving. But the reason isn’t what you think.
In the last few months, Medicaid took a $1 trillion cut from the One Big Beautiful Bill. Medicare Advantage plans started exiting entire markets. The ACA subsidy cliff moved from theoretical to imminent. A 43-day government shutdown froze procurement across the board. Commercial health plans are bracing for cost increases that haven’t been this steep in 15 years.
Five simultaneous shocks to a healthcare system that was already under severe pressure. Ouch.
Many vendors have responded by getting more aggressive: more outreach, more urgency tactics, more pressure to close before year-end, but that desperation is exactly what’s pushing buyers away. The companies still closing deals have taken a different approach. They recognized their buyers aren’t operating under normal conditions, and normal sales behavior fails when your buyer is in crisis mode.
Think about what a health plan executive is dealing with right now:
A CFO at a Medicare Advantage plan is modeling scenarios where they exit three more markets by year-end
A VP at a Medicaid plan doesn’t know if their state contract will get renewed at current rates or slashed by another 20 percent
A commercial plan COO is deciding which vendor relationships survive the next round of cuts
These aren’t simply people being cautious about new investments; they are people who can’t think past the next 60 days because they don’t know what their organization will look like in 90 days.
The vendors still winning aren’t ignoring this reality. They adapted and embraced it.
And here’s what most people miss about that adaptation: it’s not temporary crisis management. It’s a fundamental shift in how vendor relationships work in health tech. The behaviors that are closing deals right now will redefine what buyers expect from vendors long after the crisis ends.
Give Buyers One Path Forward, Not Eight Choices to Evaluate
When everything feels uncertain, making decisions becomes exponentially harder. More variables, more risk = more likely the buyer defaults to “not now.”
The typical vendor response is to build more detailed business cases or add more proof points. More information, more assurances, more options to consider, all of which add to the cognitive load of a buyer who’s already overwhelmed.
The vendors successfully closing deals are taking the opposite approach. They stopped asking buyers to evaluate, compare, and decide, and instead are removing every decision point they possibly could.
How this works in real conversations
The shift starts with better discovery, not less. Winners are doing more research upfront to understand the buyer’s situation deeply enough to make an informed recommendation rather than just presenting options.
Let’s use the example of a Quality Improvement/Stars vendor:
Before engaging, they’re analyzing what’s publicly available: the plan’s Stars ratings and which specific measures they’re struggling with; their market footprint and recent contract changes; and news about expansions or exits. They’re building context, so the first conversation isn’t generic discovery.
In that first conversation, they’re asking targeted questions to understand the buyer’s specific constraints: What’s your budget cycle timing? What approval processes slow things down? What have you already tried? Where did previous vendors fall short? They’re not running a standard needs assessment; rather, they’re gathering the specific information they need to make one clear recommendation.
Then, instead of presenting multiple options, they synthesize what they learned and make the call: “Based on your Stars performance in diabetes measures and what you’ve told me about your prior auth volume, here’s what makes sense: Start with inpatient procedures. That’s where your cost leakage sits and where we can show ROI in 60 days. We can expand to outpatient later, but this gets you moving now.”
The buyer doesn’t have to evaluate five scenarios or spend weeks building internal consensus on which approach to take. They just need to decide: does this recommendation make sense, or should we wait?
The same principle applies to every other decision point. Instead of asking “which population should we target,” they do the analysis and present the answer: “Based on your utilization data, start with high-cost diabetics in the ZIP codes where you’re seeing avoidable ED visits. That’s where you’ll see immediate impact.”
The work hasn’t decreased. It’s shifted. Winners are doing more thinking before presenting, so the buyer has to do less thinking to say yes.
Here’s what that sounds like in an actual conversation:
Buyer: “I need to think about how this fits with our other initiatives and figure out which departments need to be involved.”
Vendor: “Let me make this simpler. Based on what you’ve told me, this sits in your quality budget, it touches your care management team but doesn’t require IT resources, and it directly impacts your Stars performance in diabetes measures. The only decision you need to make is: does protecting those Stars points matter enough to start now, or should we wait until Q2? Everything else, we can figure out as we go.”
That’s not being pushy. It’s removing the burden of coordinating five departments and building consensus across competing priorities. You’re making it possible for them to say yes.
What NOT to do: Don’t remove decisions that actually matter to the buyer’s risk tolerance. If they have real concerns about data security, compliance workflows, or member experience, surface those explicitly. Removing friction is not the same as ignoring legitimate objections.
This approach requires confidence. You have to know what works and be willing to recommend it without hedging. You also have to be prepared for them to say “not now,” also realizing that there’s little to lose if the buyer was leaning towards no decision anyway. Simply put, the vendors who work to simplify the path forward are the ones breaking through when everyone else is stuck in endless “evaluation” cycles that never convert.
In closing, giving buyers one clear path forward helps them say yes faster. But even when they’re ready to engage, you can’t assume the relationship will build through a normal sales process. When buyers are operating in crisis mode, the assumptions that underpin traditional sales cycles don’t hold. That’s where the second shift becomes critical.
Assume Every Conversation Is the Last One for Months
Normal sales processes assume continuity: your buyer’s priorities this week still matter next week, the organization’s budget stays stable, and champions keep their authority.
None of those assumptions holds in crisis mode.
I’ve seen this pattern repeat across every significant health plan disruption over the last decade. Buyers go silent when their CFO announces a spending freeze. Champions get reassigned (or laid off) during restructures. Deals evaporate when plans exit markets. The vendors who were closing deals during these challenging times recognized that every conversation might be the last for a while, and they restructured how they engaged.
Two tactics matter most when time with your buyer is scarce:
Front-load value immediately. If you get 30 minutes with a buyer, give them something useful in the first 10 minutes that justifies their time, regardless of whether the relationship goes anywhere.
For instance: “Before we talk about our solution, here’s something I’m seeing across your peer plans. Three MCOs in states with similar Medicaid cuts restructured their community health worker programs—here’s what they protected and what they cut. Thought that context might be useful as you’re figuring out your own approach.”
That’s value delivered in five minutes. (Obviously, you’re sharing market trends and publicly observable patterns, not competitor intelligence or proprietary data.) If the buyer has to cut the call short or disappears for two months, they still got something. And when they resurface, they remember who gave them useful intel when everyone else was just pitching.
Compress timelines when you can. When a buyer says, “Let’s reconnect in a month,” that’s often code for “I can’t think about this right now.” Push back gently: “I get that you’re slammed. What if we do 15 minutes next week instead of an hour next month? I can show you the one thing that matters most, and we decide from there.”
You’re creating momentum even when the buyer’s instinct is to defer. A month from now, the buyer’s world looks completely different. The window you have today might not exist then.
Sure, the standard sales process is easier, and monthly check-ins feel productive. But relationships in crisis markets don’t build through scheduled touchpoints; they build through showing up with value when buyers need it, not when it’s convenient for your forecast.
These first two shifts help you stay relevant when deals stall. But there’s a third shift that matters even more: how you position yourself when buyers can’t think about deals at all.
The Vendors Giving Away the Most Value Are Closing the Most Deals
The companies still closing deals made a counterintuitive shift: they stopped selling and started helping.
When you position yourself as a solution provider, the message is “We solve this specific problem. If that’s a priority, let’s talk. If not, we’ll check back later.” When you position yourself as crisis support, the message is “Here’s how we can help in the next 30 days, regardless of whether you ever become a customer.”
The first is transactional. The second builds a different kind of relationship.
Many vendors can’t make that shift because it requires giving away value without knowing if you’ll see a return. But here’s what’s actually happening: the vendors treating this like a normal sales slowdown get ghosted, while those genuinely helping are building relationships that will compound for years.
What this looks like in practice
The shift from selling to helping isn’t abstract. It shows up in specific behaviors that cost time but not money, and that solve immediate problems without requiring commitment.
Here are two approaches I’ve recently seen working:
A home-delivery food company offered free nutritional gap analyses for health plans. They examine high-risk diabetic populations, identify where food insecurity overlaps with poor outcomes, and identify which ZIP codes would benefit most from intervention. It’s not the full analysis that the plan would receive if they were to become a customer, but it provides the plan with actionable intelligence they can use, whether or not they ever become customers. More importantly, it demonstrates the vendor understands the plan’s population and can deliver insights quickly.
Another approach focuses on sharing market intelligence rather than doing custom analysis, as the data analytics vendor that recently sent weekly market briefs during the government shutdown. They compiled and sent the latest observations on how different plans are responding to potential policy changes and emerging chatter across markets. It’s a great example because it wasn’t even offering value immediately aligned to their products, but rather in helping buyers understand what their peers are doing when they needed that context most.
Both approaches prove expertise and understanding without asking for anything in return. Both position the vendor as someone who helps rather than someone who sells. And both create relationships that outlast the immediate crisis.
How to make this sustainable
The obvious question: if your team has quotas to hit, how do you operationalize giving away value without it becoming a time sink?
First, set boundaries on what you’ll offer. Free value should be deliverable in 30 days or less, solve an immediate problem the buyer has right now, and not require them to change workflows or get internal approvals. Don’t offer “free trials” that are disguised demos. Don’t provide “free value” that requires the buyer to do work. Don’t give away paid deliverables. Buyers can tell when you’re using “helpful” as a sales tactic.
Second, make it part of how your team operates. When markets are chaotic, internal metrics may need to shift from “deals moved forward” to “valuable relationships built.” It’s quite possible that those relationships become deals when buying conditions return.
To be clear, this only works if you’re actually helpful and informed. That means understanding what’s happening inside health plans now: what health plan CFOs worry about, which decisions are getting made and which are getting deferred, and how plans restructure priorities in response to different pressures. The vendors who are willing to do this work realize that being genuinely helpful in a crisis creates relationships that outlast the crisis.
The three shifts above show what’s working. The gap between understanding the strategy and actually executing it is where most vendors get stuck.
Below, you’ll get the exact language for making recommendations instead of presenting options, and three email templates that work when deals go quiet (with real subject lines and copy you can use).
Upgrade to a paid subscription to keep reading.