Blog Post #2: Internal Organizational Analysis and Developing Strategic Options

One of the main takeaways that I got out of the reading was the concept of “pseudo adjacencies”- The internship that I worked at over the summer had two products, Treatspace and PracticeBeat. Treatspace’s main business line was referral management, which had been 7 years old and then they developed PracticeBeat as a patient acquisition website platform, which was a way for them to sell a new product line to existing customers. Luckily this company didn’t fall into one of the four patterns that Carroll and Mui kept discovering in pseudo adjacencies that failed. Referral management was the core business, which has to deal with patient access and acquisition for medical practices, and the new product that we began selling was a website platform that attracted patients to the practice organically. Also, Treatspace had a lot of expertise in working with independent specialty medical practices and the reason they wanted to develop the website platform was because they saw the need for it. Unfortunately, however, Treatspace did fall victim to the last tendency of overestimating their hold on their current customers. When the product launched they did not hire a sufficient amount of sales representatives because they thought that the product would sell itself to its current customers and spread within their already established patient referral networks. They thought most of their business would be inbound traffic, but it turned out to be the exact opposite, and growth was slow and unpredictable because the process was not into place. 

Another key takeaway I saw was “Stubbornly staying the course” and this was prevalent at the physical therapy clinic that I worked for. They believed in “word of mouth'' referrals and not investing in their online presence due to changing technological advancements. While all of the surrounding practices were updating their web presence and attracting patients online, our practice started to lose business. Then we ended up getting bought out by a local physician lead practice that had been one with a strong web presence. If our leaders would have adjusted the course to a more modern way to promote medicine then maybe we would not have failed. 

The main takeaway that I got from “The Coherence Premium” paper by Leinwand and Mainardi was “specifically about defining capabilities” about who they are going to sell through. This is an area that Treatspace is actually still trying to define. We keep changing our core customer and what specialty we will “hitch our wagon” to. Right now we go after any specialty or subspecialty we can, doesn’t matter if it's a single physician practice or an integrated physician practice with over 100 providers, while also aiming for different medical societies searching for partnerships. This has been leading to an unpredictable sales cycle and is proving not the best process.