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Is It a Sales Problem or a Demand Problem? The Diagnostic Every Healthcare Commercial Leader Needs
- Michael Colling-Tuck
- 19 hours ago
- 3 min read
When your sales numbers are down, the instinct is to fix sales. More reps. More training. A new CRM. Better scripts. Another round of coaching.
But what if the problem is not sales at all?
After 47 product launches across medical devices, diagnostics, and digital health, I have seen this mistake made more times than I can count. A commercial team is underperforming. Leadership concludes the team needs fixing. They invest in sales training, hire a new head of sales, or restructure the territory model. Six months later, nothing has changed.
The reason? They were solving the wrong problem.
The Question That Changes Everything
There are two fundamentally different reasons a healthcare commercial team can struggle:
A sales problem: the team has opportunities but is not converting them. The issue is execution, skills, or process.
A demand problem: there are not enough opportunities in the first place. The issue is visibility, awareness, and positioning.
The interventions for each are completely different. If you apply a sales fix to a demand problem, you will spend money, exhaust your team, and see no improvement. Worse, you will probably conclude the market is not ready, the product is wrong, or the team is the problem.
None of those conclusions may be true.
Why This Matters More Than Ever in Healthcare
In 2008, 80% of healthcare professionals would accept a rep visit. By 2023, that number had fallen to 24%. That is not a sales problem. That is a structural collapse in access.
When access collapses, the pipeline dries up at the top. Reps are not failing to convert. They are failing to get in front of anyone in the first place. And no amount of sales training fixes that.
The answer is demand generation: building the conditions under which healthcare professionals seek you out, rather than waiting to be granted access.
The Three Signs You Have a Demand Problem
You do not need a full audit to get a directional answer. These three signs are reliable early indicators:
Reps struggle to book meetings. Not because they are not trying. Because the answer is usually no, or no response at all. If meetings are the bottleneck, that points to demand.
The pipeline is thin at the top. You have some opportunities, but not enough new ones entering. The funnel narrows before it should.
New hires do not change the numbers. You bring in a strong rep from a competitor. Six months later, their numbers look the same as everyone else. If the territory does not respond to new talent, the problem is not the people.
If two or more of these apply to your situation, you are almost certainly dealing with a demand problem.
The Funnel Diagnostic: Where Is the Breakdown?
Once you have identified a potential demand problem, the next step is to locate it in the funnel. Not all demand problems are the same. Some teams struggle with awareness. Others have awareness but no inbound. Others have inbound but poor conversion from interest to meeting.
The diagnostic walks you through six funnel stages, asking you to rate each one from 1 to 5. The pattern of your scores tells you exactly where the demand problem lives and what to do about it.
Download the Free Diagnostic
The Demand Diagnostic is an 8-page self-assessment for healthcare commercial leaders. It takes around five minutes to complete and gives you a clear, structured answer to the question: is this a sales problem or a demand problem?
The core question and how to answer it definitively
The three signs diagnostic with scoring
A six-stage funnel rating worksheet
A cost-per-meeting calculation to quantify the gap
A structured action plan template to take away
Download it below. No email required.
What Comes Next
This diagnostic is extracted from my book, It's Not a Sales Problem, which publishes on 16th March 2026 and will be available on Amazon. The book covers the complete framework for diagnosing and fixing demand problems in healthcare commercial teams, drawing on 47 launches across medical devices, diagnostics, and digital health.
If this diagnostic surfaces something you want to explore further, book a triage call. Thirty minutes, no pitch, no fee. We tell you what we see.
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