Start Here: Read This First
You sell health tech into health plans (or you invest in the companies that do). Either way, this market is harder than anyone on the outside understands.
Most health tech companies know how to build a great product. Far fewer know how to sell it to a health plan. That gap is where growth stalls, deals die quietly, and good companies lose years.
Upward Growth closes that gap. Every Tuesday, one article breaking down how health plans actually evaluate vendors, what moves deals forward, and where the best companies build their edge. Written for CEOs, CROs, and investors operating in the payor market.
Below are curated articles organized into six categories. Each starts with a recommended first read. Start wherever your biggest friction lives.
🏥 1. How Health Plans Actually Buy
No one talks about what happens inside health plans after your pitch ends. These articles decode buyer psychology, internal politics, and the structural forces that kill deals before you ever hear “no.”
⭐ Start here: You’re Not Losing Health Plan Deals to Other Vendors. You’re Losing Them to Forces Inside the Plans. The deal-killers aren’t your competitors. They’re budget cycles, reorgs, and internal misalignment you never see.
Health Plans Don’t Buy Disruption - They Buy Certainty Reframe your message around how plans actually evaluate risk.
Health Plans Don’t Fund Good Ideas. They Fund What They Can’t Ignore. The gap between “interesting” and “funded” is wider than most vendors think.
The CFO Filter: Why Your Health Plan Champion Can’t Close the Deal Anymore Clinical champions used to move contracts. Now CFOs control the gate. Here’s how to arm your buyer.
How to Win Health Plan Decisions by Getting Your Message to the Top Intact Your story gets retold three times before anyone with budget authority hears it. Most don’t survive.
📈 2. CMS, Regulation & Market Shifts
These are the articles that translate CMS regulatory drops and market-level shifts into what they mean for your next sales call. Consistently the highest-performing content on Upward Growth.
⭐ Start here: CMS Is Ending the Risk Adjustment Arbitrage Era. Here’s What That Means for Your Health Plan Deals. The coding arbitrage that drove MA margins is being unwound. This changes which vendors win and which need to reposition.
Medicare Advantage’s Reset: What Vendors Need to Get Right The MA landscape is shifting. Here’s what plans are actually prioritizing and where vendor budgets are moving.
How the Prior Auth Deadline Is Affecting Vendors Who Don’t Sell Prior Auth Regulatory changes ripple further than you think. If your buyers are distracted by compliance pressure, this explains why.
Health Plan Buyers Have Split Into Three Camps. Here’s How to Sell to Each One. Not all plans are buying the same way right now. This breaks down the three buyer archetypes.
Five Health Tech Trends That Will Shape Sales Cycles in 2026 Where the market is headed - and what smart teams are building for now.
📣 3. Positioning & Messaging That Moves Deals
This isn’t marketing advice. These articles explain why deals stall when the message is wrong - and how to fix it.
⭐ Start here: Message Fatigue Is Costing You Deals Health plan buyers hear the same pitch from every vendor. Here’s why sameness is your biggest competitive threat.
Why “AI-Powered” Is Costing You Health Plan Deals (And What to Say Instead) The phrase that was supposed to differentiate you is now doing the opposite.
Most Sales Struggles Are Positioning Problems. Here’s How to Fix Yours. Before you fix your pipeline, fix your positioning. The symptoms look like sales problems, but the root is upstream.
Why Your Value Prop Isn’t Landing with Health Plans Most value props fail because they’re vague. This breaks down how to sharpen yours.
Positioning Comes Before Growth Your message isn’t marketing. It’s a strategic choice that shapes every downstream decision.
How to Sound Like a Growth Company (Before the Numbers Catch Up) Perception drives pipeline. How to project momentum before your revenue fully reflects it.
🧩 4. The Sales Motion: From Pipeline to Close
Tactical, specific articles on building and converting pipeline in a market where deals move slowly and die quietly.
⭐ Start here: One Question Is Costing You More Deals Than Pricing The deal-killing question that most sales teams don’t even realize they’re asking.
The Second Meeting Test: How to Actually Build Momentum with Health Plan Buyers First meetings are easy. Here’s how serious teams create movement after them.
Build a Smarter, Leaner Pipeline That Actually Closes Deals A bloated pipeline isn’t a healthy one. How to build one that converts.
Solving the Credibility Gap in Health Tech Sales Plans have been burned by vendors before. Here’s what it takes to earn trust when your track record is thin.
How to Close Stalled Health Plan Deals in Q4 Deals that went quiet aren’t dead. They’re stuck. Here’s how to unstick them before year-end.
How to Build a Health Tech Case Study That Moves Deals Forward Most case studies sit on a website and do nothing. Here’s how to build one a buyer can actually use to sell internally.
15 Moves to Convert Conference Leads Into Revenue Tactical follow-up plays that actually earn a second call.
🚀 5. Scaling & Strategic Growth
For companies past initial traction - expanding into new markets, new products, and new buyer segments without losing what made them buyable in the first place.
⭐ Start here: What It Really Takes to Win National Health Plans Mid-market success doesn’t translate to nationals. The buying dynamics are fundamentally different.
Breaking Into Medicaid: A CEO’s Guide to Winning Beyond Medicare Advantage Different contracting structures, different buyer psychology, different economics. What you need to know before you go.
How to Scale Into New Products and Channels Without Losing Buyer Trust Expansion is necessary. Identity erosion is not. How to grow without confusing the market.
You Landed the Account. Here’s How You Grow It. Winning the deal is step one. Expanding within a health plan is where real growth happens.
The Total Addressable Market (TAM) Trap Inflated TAM slides don’t impress informed investors. They expose a team that hasn’t done the work.
Why Fast-Growing Companies Start Breaking Down Growth creates stress fractures. Here’s where they show up first and how to catch them before they become structural.
🏁 6. Leadership & Execution
The CEO and CRO-level articles on making the right bets, building the right team, and running the right playbook.
⭐ Start here: The 3 Bets That Make or Break Health Tech Growth Every exec makes these bets. Most don’t realize they’re making them - or that the wrong one will cost them years.
Why Your Sales Hires Keep Failing It’s not a talent problem. It’s a system problem.
The Revenue Cost of Bad Roadmap Decisions When Product builds the wrong thing, Sales pays for it. Here’s how that cycle breaks.
Execution Isn’t a Commodity: Rethinking Services in Health Tech The companies that win don’t just sell software. They deliver outcomes. That requires a different operating model.
Why Health Tech Growth Stalls - and How the Best Companies Break Through The plateau is predictable. So is the path through it.
How to Sell When Your Buyers Are Paralyzed by Market Uncertainty When plans freeze, most vendors wait. The best ones change the conversation.
👋 About Upward Growth
Upward Growth helps health tech vendors win more deals with payors.
Upward Growth helps vendor teams fix what’s actually slowing down payor growth: messaging that doesn’t land, sales motions that don’t convert, and strategies that don’t align with how plans buy.
If you want to sharpen your team's growth with payors, you’re in the right place.
About The Author
I’m Ryan Peterson. Nearly 15 years selling health tech into health plans. I’ve carried a bag, led teams, and built the growth playbooks inside companies that went from early traction to category leaders.
I lead Upward Growth, a strategic consulting firm advising health tech vendors, national consulting firms, and PE/VC investors on growth strategy in the payor market. I write this newsletter every Tuesday because the knowledge gap in this market is too wide and too expensive. I learned this stuff the hard way. There’s no reason everyone else needs to.
Working through a growth challenge with health plans? Evaluating a health tech investment? I’d welcome the conversation:
🤝 Work with Upward Growth on payor growth strategy: Contact us
🟦 Connect with the author, Ryan Peterson, on LinkedIn.
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