Clinical trial design hasn't materially changed in 25 years. Faro Health is fixing that — automating the manual labor behind protocol design for enterprise pharma and compressing ROI proof to a single quarter. Scott Chetham built what the industry refused to, and is now navigating the harder problem: scaling trust in a field where a single misstep touches billion-dollar pipelines.

Topics Discussed:

Why clinical trial design is still done in Microsoft Word — and what that costs the industry
How Faro compressed pilot-to-ROI proof from nearly a year to one quarter
Embedding change management as a core product function, not a services add-on
Surviving a two-year market mistiming and the inflection that followed
What it actually takes to scale enterprise trust when quality is non-negotiable
Navigating a suddenly crowded market after years as the only player
Building leadership deliberately around your own gaps as a founder
Balancing enterprise customer demand against focused product execution

Key GTM Insights:

Make ROI measurable before you can measure what you actually want. When Faro couldn't yet directly quantify what customers cared most about, they identified credible surrogates and sold to customers willing to treat those proxies as sufficient signal. This unlocked early enterprise revenue while the measurement infrastructure matured. As Scott put it: "The earlier sales were people who were more believers that if you could measure this surrogate for what we really want to do, that's a strong enough case to keep going." The lesson: don't wait for perfect measurement. Find a defensible proxy, be transparent about it, and find the buyers sophisticated enough to accept it.
Compress time-to-ROI as a primary product investment. Faro spent years iterating specifically on the speed of value proof — getting it from nearly twelve months down to a single quarter. That compression is not a sales tactic. It's a structural product and process investment that compounds: shorter pilots close faster, expansions follow sooner, and the fundraising narrative tightens. Scott is explicit that this took years of disciplined iteration, not a single insight.
Change management is not a services line — it's a retention mechanism. Faro's professional services team includes specialists — described as former consultants — whose job is not implementation but process redesign. They help customers map current workflows, define new ones, and report measurable value back to leadership. Without that function, even a product with clear ROI sits unused in entrenched organizations. Scott frames this as one of the most critical investments to their success.
Mistiming the market is survivable if the thesis is structurally sound. Faro was approximately two years early for enterprise pharma readiness. Rather than pivoting toward an easier segment, they used that time to mature the platform to enterprise deployment standards. When the market inflected — Scott dates it to roughly 14 months before the recording — they were positioned to capture pull demand without advertising. The lesson is not "be early." It's that a structurally inevitable market shift can absorb a timing error if you survive long enough with discipline.
Signing a contract is the start of the sale, not the end. Scott's chairman — described as one of the first CEOs of Upwork — tells the team the same thing after every closed deal: "Congratulations. Now the real sales work begins." In high-trust, high-stakes industries, retention is built on daily delivery. This isn't a platitude — it's an operational orientation that shapes how Faro allocates attention post-close.

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The ROI system Faro Health uses to convert enterprise pilots | Scott Chetham