From Spreadsheets to Salesforce in 8 Weeks
Bringing order to complex NHS AI deployments for a fast-growing healthtech startup whose institutional knowledge had just walked out the door.
The situation
A fast-growing AI healthtech startup was doing something genuinely hard: deploying clinical AI technology into NHS Primary Care Networks across the UK. The technology worked and the commercial momentum was building. But the operational infrastructure holding it all together was a patchwork of spreadsheets, private drives, and email threads — and the person who knew where everything lived had just left the company.
The result was inefficiency and institutional knowledge walking out the door, with no system to catch it.
The challenge
NHS deployments aren't like typical B2B sales. Every Primary Care Network operates as its own entity — with its own leadership structure, risk appetite, and its own interpretation of information governance requirements. What worked at one site looked completely different at the next.
On top of that, the entire sector is navigating AI adoption in real time. There is no established playbook for deploying clinical AI into primary care, and the stakes are real. When you're working with patient data at scale, the cost of getting governance wrong isn't just a compliance issue. Blockers appear that no one has faced before. Approvals stall and stakeholders change constantly. Governance requirements evolve mid-process. A timeline that would take two weeks in a standard B2B environment can stretch to nine months in a regulated NHS setting.
This meant a standard plug-and-play CRM setup wasn't going to cut it. Forcing a rigid pipeline structure onto a landscape that actively resists standardisation would have created a system nobody used. The challenge was building something flexible enough to reflect the reality of each individual site and process, while still giving the business a single, coherent view of where everything stood.
What I did
In eight weeks, the company moved from scattered spreadsheets to a fully-configured Salesforce environment — designed specifically around how complex NHS deployments actually work.
The process started with mapping. Before a single field was built in Salesforce, the entire deployment journey was documented end to end: every stage, every stakeholder (both client-facing and internal), every touchpoint, every email sent, and every resource that needed to be tracked. Nothing was assumed, nothing was bolted on as an afterthought.
Mapped the entire deployment journey end to end
Every stage documented with the owner, timing, and customer touchpoint type (email, call, or both), from the first pre-onboarding checklist through to handover to training.
Built a parallel-track structure
The clinical items demo process, legal documentation (Service Agreement, DPA, DTIA), and system integrations all had to move simultaneously, without blocking each other. The CRM tracked all three without conflicting them.
Embedded NHS-specific governance checkpoints
DTAC assessments, DSPTK compliance, and hazard logs were built into the workflow at the right stage, not bolted on as an afterthought.
Accounted for the NHS systems reality
EMIS and SystmOne are notoriously inflexible. Steps like confirming EMIS version, QOS codes, submitting NACI+ forms, and verifying the integration via EMIS Manager were mapped explicitly, because there is no shortcut to getting through them.
Tested against live and past deployments
The mapped process was pressure-tested against existing and completed sites: where did it hold? Where were the friction points, the stalls, the non-standard edge cases?
Built buy-in with the team
Worked closely with the head of sales and product to ensure the system worked for everyone, including those resistant to change or worried a CRM would slow them down rather than help.
The result
The most immediate win was visibility. Before, every stakeholder conversation carried the risk of looking unprepared: no one could quickly pull up the history of a site, what had been discussed, what was promised, or where things had stalled. Now anyone on the team could open Salesforce before a call and get up to speed in seconds. It didn't matter who had last spoken to the client — the context was there.
All communications were tracked in one place, from the first outreach email through to deployment — including shared team inboxes, not just individual accounts. Nothing lived in someone's personal inbox anymore.
For the commercial director, the change was significant. A patchwork of trackers had made it hard to know where deals stood, where things were stalling, and what was being done about it. That changed. Deal values, deployment stage reports, pipeline health — all of it became visible and reportable. Board reporting became simpler. The tech team, who had previously been working without visibility into where the commercial side was at, could now see the pipeline and understand what was coming their way.
The operational transparency removed a meaningful amount of friction.
The governance and document processes, complex as they were, were now tracked within the same system rather than scattered across drives and inboxes — so nothing fell through the cracks at the handoff points where it most often had before.
Recognise something in this?
Complex deployments, messy processes, systems that don't quite fit — feel free to reach out.