Selling into a market with no single buyer

The challenge

GP Triage addresses one of primary care’s longest-standing pressures: managing patient demand and access. Practices have historically faced the 8am rush, high volumes of patient requests, and significant clinical and administrative time spent manually reviewing, prioritising and directing that demand. Autonomous triage removes much of that manual burden and returns the time to the people who should be doing clinical work.

The commercial difficulty was never finding GP practices. It was that primary care has no single buyer. Decision-making can sit at individual practice level, across a Primary Care Network, or with stakeholders operating at Integrated Care Board level, and the reason a stakeholder cares is different at each layer. An outbound team selling into it has to understand both the clinical and operational problem and the organisational structure wrapped around it.

The decision-maker landscape

• GP Partners and practice-level senior decision-makers.
• Practice Managers and senior operational stakeholders where relevant.
• PCN Clinical Directors.
• Digital Transformation Leads and other digital and operational stakeholders across PCNs.
• Senior stakeholders and transformation decision-makers at ICB level.

A major strength of the campaign was the ability to move beyond a single persona. The team could start at practice level and, in the same market, identify opportunities higher up the structure where a broader transformation conversation was the right one.

The approach

1. Learn the market before writing the script

   Caption became closely integrated with GP Triage rather than operating as a detached calling resource. The team learned the primary-care landscape, the pressures practices were experiencing, the terminology and the buying structure, and the different reasons a stakeholder at practice, PCN or ICB level might care about autonomous triage. In a market this specialised, a rep who cannot hold the conversation does not get a second one.

2. Start where the pain is, then work upwards

   Outreach reached genuine practice-level decision-makers first, then expanded into PCN Clinical Directors and Digital Transformation Leads, and opened conversations at ICB level where a broader transformation opportunity existed. The same product has three different arguments depending on which layer you are talking to, and each was built separately.

3. Let live conversations re-aim the campaign

   Market feedback from real calls was used to refine targeting and messaging continuously, and fed back into GP Triage’s wider go-to-market approach rather than staying inside the outbound function. Over the life of the campaign the picture of who mattered at each layer of primary care got sharper, and the targeting moved with it.

4. Build a national footprint, not a regional test

   The campaign covered the UK rather than a small number of regions, which is what turned the work from a series of practice conversations into national commercial reach.

The results

• More than £11.4m of pipeline generated.
• An average of 15 qualified decision-maker meetings a month.
• Meetings spanning individual GP practices, Primary Care Networks and ICB-level stakeholders.
• 4.5m+ patients represented by the organisations and opportunities within that pipeline.
• A national UK footprint rather than a regional pilot.
• Access to GP Partners, Clinical Directors, Digital Transformation Leads and other senior primary-care stakeholders.

Why it worked

This was larger than outsourced appointment setting. Caption effectively became an extension of the commercial team taking a specialist AI healthcare product into a complicated market, and the partnership was the mechanism: Caption learning from the market continuously, and feeding that understanding straight back into the campaign.

It is worth being precise about the claim. GP Triage does not fix the NHS, and nobody involved has ever said it does. What it does is automate a specific, expensive, manual process and give practice teams that time back. Selling it well meant describing that operational problem accurately to people who live inside it every day, which is a different skill from selling software.

Caption have become far more than an outsourced sales development team for us - they’ve become a genuine extension of our sales operation.

From the outset, they took the time to understand a complex market, our product and exactly who we needed to be speaking to. They’ve consistently opened doors with GP Partners, Practice Managers, Digital Transformation Leads and senior decision-makers across PCNs and ICBs, while building and nurturing opportunities over the long term rather than simply chasing quick meetings.

What’s impressed us most is how integrated the relationship has become. The Caption team work directly within our CRM, manage opportunities and follow-ups alongside us, and have helped us build a much more structured sales pipeline. We’ve seen opportunities they originally generated progress all the way through to signed customers.

They’re proactive, persistent and genuinely invested in the outcome. It feels like one team working towards the same goal, and they’ve made a real impact on our growth and reach across UK primary care. We couldn’t recommend Caption highly enough.