From the Archive: Rebuilding Your Pipeline Strategy for How Healthcare Buyers Actually Buy

0:00And so that is the new way of thinking. And that's why I say it's account-based. It's not necessarily account-based marketing, but it's account-based thinking becomes much more important.

0:14Welcome to the award-winning Health Tech Marketing Show. I'm Adam Cherenis, and I'm away again this week. So we're going back into the vault for another show. Thank you as always for listening, for following the show and for being part of a library of now over 140 episodes. And if you haven't already followed or subscribed yet, you can find us on any podcast application and also on YouTube. This episode is brought to you as always by our great friends at Healthcare Now Radio, the 24-7 healthcare only radio show and podcast syndication network. Thank you, Roberta and Carol, for everything that you do.

0:59Today's pick is a little bit different. So instead of me hosting, you're going to hear my colleague Mark Erwick and I, Mark's our Chief Strategy Officer at Health Launchpad, as guests on a conversation about B2B pipeline growth in healthcare. And we recorded this with Colin Hung from Sway Health. So this was actually, I think, on the Sway Health podcast about a year or so ago. And it's a wonderful reminder of what a great community Sway Health is. And I always say to people, great things happen at Sway. In this episode, we're going to get into the real mechanics of the healthcare buyer journey, how sales cycles running well past a year, how buying groups keep growing, and the uncomfortable stat that most buyers pick the first company they call once they finally surface because they kind of already made a decision, maybe even from the get-go.

2:06So those dynamics haven't gone away. And if anything, what we're seeing is that AI is reshaping it and making it even harder because it's making it easier for AI buyers to do their research before they ever talk to a vendor. So in many regards, this conversation feels even more relevant now than it did when we recorded it a little over a year ago. So here it is. And you're going to listen to Colin Hung chatting with Mark Erwick and I. Adam, Mark, welcome to the program. Thank you, Colin. It's great to be on your show. I'm very excited because first of all, I don't have guests with accents like yours very often.

2:50So this is going to be very special. And by nature, you're just going to make me sound smarter because of your accents. So this is going to be fun. Yeah, but I should put, although it's a bit deceptive because I think between the two of us, Mark and I have probably about 50 plus years actually living in this country. Yeah. I'm sure when you go back home, you know, the people are like, what kind of accent is that? Right. But to us. It sounds beautiful. Well, I'm excited to dive into today's topic with you around pipelines and managing that, accelerating that and those kinds of things. But before we get there, just for the benefit of our audience members who aren't familiar with you, Adam, can you give us a quick overview of yourself and your organization?

3:33I'm Aventurinus. I'm the CEO and founder of Health Launchpad. And what Health Launchpad is, a pipeline growth firm. So, yeah, we like to consider ourselves to be pipeline growth partners. So we own the right to become partners by our clients by helping them grow their revenue pipeline. And Mark, yourself? Mark Erick, Chief Strategy Officer at Health Launchpad. And it may be worth just spending a second on where Adam and I met each other. We had Sway Health earlier this year, the event, and you invited us to be on a panel and from one thing became another. So thank you so much, Colin, for the introduction.

4:14Absolutely. Great things happen at Sway Health. That is an amazing endorsement. Thank you both for that. And yeah, I mean, it was funny. That wasn't obviously the intent, but a happy outcome that, you know, when people get together at Sway, you know, magic can happen. Absolutely. Well, I'm excited to dive into this topic. Pipelines are obviously always a perennial priority and concern for healthcare marketers, growing pipelines, accelerated pipelines. What do you think the, and what are you hearing in terms of the biggest struggle marketers are having with pipelines at the moment? Adam, we'll start with you.

4:49Yeah, so we talk to health tech marketing leaders all the time. So we have many clients we're working with, but also we have a community of health tech marketing leaders called the Health Tech Marketing Network where we get together and we talk about issues that are important to them. And pipeline growth and all the areas around that always comes up as one, if not the top issue that they're dealing with. And I think the reason why that is, is that there's been a realization over the last couple of years that the traditional B2B playbook focused on starting with lead generation just doesn't work as well as it had done.

5:31Even if, you know, and frankly, you know, it was never that great. But I think there's a general realization that it just doesn't work anymore. And so what's happening, I think, is that marketers are taking a step back and looking at the buyer journey and really getting to grips with how buyers buy. And the thing that's been changing in terms of the buyer dynamics is a couple of things. First of all, the perennial problem in healthcare, which is sales cycles are long. According to HIMSS, the average sales cycle is 13 plus months. In many cases, it's 24 months. The buying groups, average buying group is five people.

6:17That's getting even bigger. And so that's one issue. The one issue is that it's more people over longer time. The other issue, and this is probably the more important issue, is the buyer is in control of the process. So what happens in a typical buyer journey is that for nine to 10 months of those 13 months, they stay below the surface. so they will not engage with vendors unless they really have to until they get about 13 months so they get about 70 % of the way through the process and during that time as a group they're researching they're talking to their peers they're talking to analysts they're reading you know healthcare scene healthcare it scene they're looking at him's publications they're going to shows.

7:09And their job is to do the research well so that they can figure out the best way to solve their problem. And here's the really scary, scary fact. 85 % of buyers say that they select the first company they call. So when they get through that process of doing the research, they pretty much made up their mind. And they made up their mind on who they want to go with. And they've made up their mind on who their requirements are. And so what that means for marketers is that as a community, we basically have to answer two questions. Who's in market right now and how can we get to the top of their list?

7:53And so what we're seeing and the clients that we're working with are moving away from a focus on generating volumes and quantity of leads to a focus on the quality of the pipeline that they're generating. Wow. A lot to unpack there, but you are absolutely 100 % correct in the sense of I'm hearing the exact same thing from all the vendors that I speak to where they're like, we just have deals come out of nowhere or seemingly out of nowhere, because as you said, they don't pop up until they're already 70 % of the way through that buying journey. So I love all that stuff. Mark, any comments from you on that?

8:33No, I think absolutely right. With that, the old thinking of taking MQLs, pass them over towards sales, sales will turn those MQLs in towards opportunities, towards deals. That no longer works either. And so you have to rethink where you put the emphasis. And I think with that comes making sure that in the invisible part that is happening before your buyers start contacting you, that you have your branding out there, thought leadership. Those are becoming significantly more important than they've ever been. So given this reality that both of you are seeing, what are some of the effective ways then that we can actually build a healthy pipeline here in healthcare?

9:15So one way to do that is become much more sophisticated with the different steps that your accounts are taking. So I would say start with an account-based approach, unless it's already account-based marketing, but just think about your market out there and think about all of the accounts and then start tracking them. Where are the engagements? And they may be invisible at the beginning. They may be anonymous as a next step before they actually become MQLs in towards the traditional way. And I think what that does, how that helps you, when Adam said the buying group is expanding, you get more visibility.

9:53And so in this old thinking, it was like, well, a lead needs to do X number of things before it became an MQL, and then it turns into an opportunity. That no longer applies. You think more about, hey, this account, how many actions are taken? And I would argue that if there's three people doing a little thing, that's much more valuable than one person doing two things. And so that is the new way of thinking. And that's why I say it's account-based. It's not necessarily account-based marketing, but it's account-based thinking becomes much more important. And then obviously, when you build that pipeline, make sure that you have an approach which is consistent.

10:33Set the right steps for each and every, the right requirements for each and every phase in your pipeline. But also make sure that there is clear alignment between sales and marketing of what the role should be. Some more traditional organizations, sales owns pipeline. Well, that's not true, right? their snapper organization, whether that could be true. Like it's owned by the company and both marketing and sales have a role to make progress there. Again, lots to unpack there, Mark, but I love how you basically said that you have to be more sensitive to buying signals, right? You know, what you said there, like it's no longer like, hey, there's one person downloaded my, this content, signed up for this webinar, came to my booth.

11:18That is good, but the signals is much less because it's spread out over more people. So I love that. And I love how you basically said that no one owns the pipeline. It's the entire company owns it because to your point, I may first engage with your support team. I may first engage with somebody I bumped into at a conference who wasn't your salesperson. So you can no longer just rely on one team anymore. So I love that. Adam, what about you? Are there any effective ways that you've gone to build a healthy pipeline these days? Well, I want to build a bit on what Mark was saying, you know, we survey this community and there's about 200 people in the community.

11:57And so we run a poll, we might get 40, 50 responses, something like this. And we asked them, you know, where they are on their journey with ABM. And I will tell you that when we started down the ABM journey, and as we know, as you know, that ABM is one of our superpowers. And I would say three or four years, the vast majority of people were in the education phase around ABM, trying to learn about it. Less than 10%, I think we're actually implementing it in any way. That's completely changed. So now, the last time we did it, we ran a survey on where people are on their ABM journey about six months ago.

12:35About a third have either started or been doing it for two or three years. Two thirds were considering it or about to start a pilot. So there are very few companies in our industry that are moving towards taking the first step, at least with ABM. Now, not everybody, very few companies actually have perfected it. I really like one of the things that Mark said about they aren't necessarily executing ABM, but they're doing ABM thinking. And that starts with several things. First of all, you start with the account, right? So you're not focused on leads. You're focused on how many accounts that you've got engaged.

13:22So MQAs, marketing qualified accounts, becomes a new important measure. Second thing is about the buying groups. So it's understanding the buying groups and understanding how you engage a group of buyers and how you're doing on that rather than how many leads you've got in the pipeline right now. And then, you know, the third aspect of it, you said signals, right? So I think signals is one of the kind of key areas that the modern marketer is mastering. So it's being able to understand the pros and cons of things like third party intent data, where you're seeing signals that you're buying from organizations like Bombora.

14:05And then the most important buying signals are the ones on your own channels, like on your website, in your social media. things like that, and email. And so when we're working with clients on this, what we try to do is paint them a dynamic picture of like, okay, you've got a target account list of 200 accounts. You spent the time to really define your ICP. And out of the 1 ,500 or so healthcare organizations, there's 1 ,500 or so organizations that are out there that could buy from you, you've selected 200 that you think are the ideal customer profile. So what we do with the clients is then spend the time to figure out who are the ones who might be in market.

14:55So what does Bombora data tell us? What is the way they respond to LinkedIn advertising tell us? Who's coming to your website? Who's opening your emails? And so by doing that, What we're able to help them figure out is say, out of these 200, these 50 appear to be in market right now based on the signals that we're getting. So then how do you then double down to move them through your pipeline? It's a very, very different way of marketing because it's rather than casting a wide net, what you're doing is using the signals to figure out which are the small number of accounts right now I really need to focus on.

15:36and invest our time and resources on. And that's a sort of, it is a fundamental change. And we're seeing the market moving in that direction. I like how both of you put it. It's not, I think, because I think ABM scares people. Like it's this sort of big, hairy, scary term. But the way you both broke it down is it's actually more about the philosophy. It's around account-based thinking, right? And being much more targeted in who you're going after. One of the things I've said for a long time is, healthcare is what I call a finite market. There's only so many hospitals and health systems that you can name them.

16:12In fact, there's directories of them and they're not measures in hundreds of thousands. They're not these unknown buyers. You know them all. And so because you know them all, you can be much more focused. And so it always was a little baffling to me to understand why are we doing these sort of mass market techniques when we actually know who all the buyers potentially could be. And to your point, Adam, you can use signals now because there's so many out there. to determine who of those thousands of potential buyers are actually in market. Because not everybody is in market at the right moment.

16:43If they've just bought a solution similar to yours, they're not going to be in market. It doesn't matter how much you spend on an advertising to that group or emails to that group or inviting them to, they're not going to buy from you for at least two, three, four years. But you have to pick up on that. So I love that stuff. So can I just make it just another point, which is now one thing when we're not advocating is it's not all or nothing on ABM. And the companies, when you look at other in other markets, what you actually see is that companies like the sort of big SaaS tech companies that have been like the first adopters of ABM and platforms like Demandbase.

17:22ABM is an important driver, but it's still only maybe like 25 or 30 percent of their marketing budget. you still need to build brand awareness and brand favorability because what you need is that you know maybe five percent of the market is in market of your icp is in market this year but you still need to need the other 95 percent to know who you are so that when they start thinking about it you're immediately in the shortlist and so it's not an all or nothing thing you do have to balance both love that statement we tend to talk in absolutes right when we talk about these techniques but the reality of a market you have to have a really good marketing mix is what i'm hearing you say adam so that's fantastic related to this i always like asking this question because it's a nice flip is there anything that we should that you're recommending companies stop doing when it comes to building their pipeline is there just something you go man just don't do that it's just a waste of time it's a waste of effort it's no longer valid anything like that that you have one concept is like there is when you build a pipeline there remains this philosophy that you have this research happening from your buyers.

18:28And so what's happening is you have additional, as you said, signals. And sometimes people are filling out forms or trying to get contact. And like this whole philosophy that BDR should only engage on new accounts and, oh, this is already an existing opportunity, we're going to pass that off. That is really wrong in this new philosophy, right? Because you want to build, you want to make sure that you continue for those accounts where you know that they're actually in the research phase you want to do more and sometimes deals are dead yeah we've been trying to contact them we don't hear for them for two months that doesn't mean anything that did like we have such a like interesting interpretation of what's happening on the other side without having a lot of knowledge they may be busy with other work that doesn't mean that the project is a site or they may actively be researching and if If you stop making progress on that account, if you stop sending them emails, then actually you're doing the wrong thing.

19:25Like when we look at research and these buyers that are considering different vendors, they make their shortlist. If you're not on the shortlist, you never get the deal. So make sure that you get on the shortlist and do that by being out there, by doing branding, by making sure that there is enough leadership out there and there's enough opportunities to intersect with a buyer, right? and whether that's through trade shows or many of the digital opportunities that we have nowadays. Colin, you said something earlier, just before about sort of, you know, talking in absolutes. And it's just, you know, it's hard to say stop.

20:00It's like you shouldn't do something. I mean, there's a lot of stupid stuff out there like Outbound is dead. SDRs are a thing of the past. Content syndication is dead. Completely wrong. I mean, it's just completely wrong. It's just using it differently. You know, for example, with SDRs, the average day of an SDR is changing from, you know, you've got your 100 accounts you're going to try and get on the phone. You've got your 200 emails you're going to send out. It's changing from that to say, OK, here are the 20 accounts that we think are in market. What are we going to do? Let's go and actually say for today, I want you to spend some time doing research on these so that we can figure out how we're going to get them on the phone.

20:44Content syndication, it's like, well, they're kind of using blanket content syndication just to generate a whole ton of leads doesn't work particularly well. But we use content syndication late in the journey. So again, when you've got that list of sort of like, these are the accounts that we really matter, that really matter, what we'll do with our content syndication partners say is, how do we double down on these guys? How do we get leads out of these ones? Because they're the ones that matter. And how do you help us buy it, fill out the buying group so that we get more people from the same accounts rather than one lead per account for 200 accounts?

21:19So I really think that it's less about stopping doing something than just reevaluating everything that you're doing to doing it differently. Like where do events fit in what you do? Events are still thriving and well, they should. But how do you use the marketing before the event, for the months before the event, so that people will show up to come see you and to help them in their research journey? You reminded me of something that, again, I think all three of us have probably mentioned to people before. When you go out there and read and watch videos, read books on B2B marketing, healthcare is such a small number of B2B marketing, right?

22:02Most of the B2B marketing pundits and experts are building their knowledge based on other B2B markets, not healthcare, right? And in those markets, I would say, you know, the buying groups are much smaller. The timelines are much shorter. Everything's compressed. And so you can see results of your marketing much, much easier. And they're not as evidence-based as they are in healthcare. So healthcare, I know we love to think we're unique. but truly in the B2B perspective and the buying journey, we are fairly unique. And so Adam, what you just said, like you just can't go and take an absolute that someone has said based on their research in those other B2B markets and go, well, SDRs are, you don't need them anymore, right?

22:44That may be true in other industries, in other B2B industries, but in healthcare, they can still be valuable. You just need to adapt a little bit. So I like that you basically challenged me and said, there isn't actually anything you would say stop doing, but maybe just rethink it, adapt it better to our market here in healthcare. Well, so on that note, is there anybody that you look at, Adam or Mark, out there right now in healthcare that's doing some things well? Can you give us some positive examples of where something is working and if they are engaging early and properly with their pipeline?

23:15I don't know if I want to mention names, you know, because I haven't asked them their permission to, but there are some companies, some that we're working with, some who we learn from, who are quite a long way down the path in terms of their ABM journey. And so they've made the shift. They've made the shift from focus on quantity of leads to a focus on quality of pipeline. And ABM is a key part of that. The interesting thing, and there are several firms that we see doing that really well. The thing which is so interesting is once you get confidence in that and the movement, so you develop a momentum, there's a whole bunch of knock-on effect things that happen.

24:03So lots of the questions are about how should we change our operations? Maybe we need fewer SDRs, but we need SDRs of a different type. Maybe we need to actually hire a marketing operations person who works very tightly with the RevOps people. You start to really change about the way that your marketing team is structured. And so, you know, in terms of sort of companies that we see, the companies that are going through that are going through that kind of a change are the ones that are the more interesting ones, ones to watch. And, you know, I think it's, again, as I say, I think it's about, you know, something like 20 % of the third of the market is quite a long way down the path.

24:45And probably about half of them have really got, you know, the legs underneath them and they're up and running with it. two things to add that if I may one is we have some customers where there's a really strong focus towards sales and marketing alignment and where the groups are working together what's the role there some have a field marketing organization what is the role how can you make sure that those you make progress in those accounts and then by account pretty much looking towards what are the all of the different marketing strategies that we can use to make progress the other one group and we haven't talked much about that which is really a surprise because it's also uniqueness in the healthcare world I think is the realization the largest asset that companies have which is their customers and leveraging the customers leveraging the network of the customers like in healthcare there's such a group of like the CIOs they all know each other they talk to each other every Friday they have their virtual coffee and they have different topics it's not all about technology, of course, but there's such a strength in that community.

25:51So you will not be considered if you have a bad impression somewhere else. You will be considered if you have a great impression. So leveraging that, making sure that it's part of your marketing mix and using one customer that's really happy to intersect with other new prospects that you have is really important. And I see that as one of the things that some of our clients do really well and they realize the asset that they Yeah. Again, Mark, I really like what you said there. And I think, like what we've been talking about before, I think sometimes marketers can get hung up on, well, the only way I can leverage my current customer base is to get a case study, which we know is very, very difficult, right?

26:31It's one of the hardest things to get. Now, there are tricks and things. We could spend a whole podcast talking about that. But to your point, it doesn't have to be that. You can just simply ask someone to, hey, say the next time you're meeting with your mates for coffee, can you just sort of mention that we did a good job or that can you help us? Is there somebody that you've met with that maybe has the same problem that you had? That maybe it's a good time for us to do a gentle outreach to them, right? And so it's one-on-one because then they're like, oh yeah, well, I'm happy to do that. Like, cause it's not, you're not broadcast, you know, they're not gonna get in trouble with the legal team broadcasting to the world that they somehow endorsed you.

27:06But in these coffee chats that they're having, and I don't see enough of that to your point. Like there's other ways you can leverage that asset, that hidden asset that you have in terms of your own customer set. So I love that. And let me ask this final question of you both. Is there something that for anybody who's listening and watching this, what's one thing that you would recommend they start to do to really do better in terms of their pipeline building and their pipeline management? There's just sort of one thing you go, hey, if you just start doing this, that's a great first step to get you moving here.

27:35Because again, like ABM, this can seem pretty daunting, like they're trying to revamp your pipeline and rethink and do all these things. But what's a nice first step that you would recommend? Adam, let's start with you. I was going to say, what do you want to take that first? So I've chosen to think about my answer. So I do think that this is as much about change management as it's about, it is, it's about change management, right? And so you don't make big changes by ripping a Band-Aid off unless you really have to. And so I think the first step is to, as you're planning your marketing for next year, carve out a campaign or two where you can do things in a different way that might be more sort of ABM-ish.

28:21yeah i'm not saying go out and get demand base and you know obsess about intent data and all that sort of thing but it's sort of like take as mark calls it the abm thinking the philosophy and apply that to a couple of campaigns so that you can carve it out and see if it will work for you so what that would mean is having a very narrow set of accounts really sweating the way that you figure out the signals and then doubling down on the ones where you was getting the most signals for and then figure out, well, what did we learn from this? Did this work? You know, does it look like it converted the deal?

28:59What did we learn from that? Yeah, to add towards that, I think, work on this part that's happening before a lead becomes a lead, right? And it is really important. In that phase where they're doing their research, create your thought leadership, do proprietary research that you come out there with and are able to connect that research towards your brand educational content all of that get all of that information out there connect that towards your brand and nowadays i can't imagine we didn't mention ai but nowadays it's easy to create a blog post using ai and just produce more and more and more this is not about quantity this is really about quality and that will be recognized and when they're creating when your buyers are creating their shortlist.

29:45You'll be on there because you have created respect and these guys know what they're doing. And I think that's what you really want to achieve. So Mark, I understand that you guys are doing a webinar that's coming up. Can you tell me more about that? Yeah, absolutely. December 13, really excited about it. We talked about a lot of different strategies, but we actually take a look towards the market out there. We collected some research. I will be sharing that towards our peers. And I think with that, there's a lot of learning that people can do around, hey, how do you, based on all of those market dynamics, the new thing that's out there, what should we actually do?

30:20So looking forward to share that with the audience and talk about strategies, but also talk about measurement and how do you make sure that while you do all these things, you still are able to measure that and publish the right information out there. I'm assuming people can go and sign up for that webinar on your website and find the information? Absolutely. The link will be on our website, health launchpad football i love it i love your recommendations i love everything you guys have said today my final absolute final question adam where can people go to learn more about health launchpad and connect with both of you so two things for me healthlaunchpad.com that's the obvious place and you can learn about you know what we do how we do it who we do it for and tons of content.

31:04So we've got blog posts every week, etc. And organized into resource centers, like there's a resource center on the buyer journey. So that's number one, the website. And then the second thing is, you can follow or connect to me on LinkedIn. My name's Adam, last name's Cherenus. There's only one of me, I think, out there. And so that would be the other way. If people want to connect with me, I'm on LinkedIn, Mark Urich at Health Launchpad. Awesome. Well, thank you both for being on the program today and thank you for all the knowledge you've shared. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you so much for having us on.

31:37So that was Mark Erwick and I talking with Colin Hung about pipeline growth in healthcare. A few takeaways that still hold up and maybe are even more relevant today. Number one, the buyer journey in healthcare is long and mostly invisible. Buying groups average around five people over a 13 plus month sales cycle and buyers stay below the radar for most of that time doing their own research before they ever raise a hand. Number two, the stat worth remembering is that most buyers say they end up choosing the first company they call, which means by the time they contact you, they've largely already made up their mind.

32:20And so your job is obvious. It's to be the first company they call. Number two, that means shifting away from chasing lead volume towards account-based visibility. Knowing who's actually in market matters more than how many names are on that list. Number three, thought leadership and brand presence do the heavy lifting during the invisible research phase. If you're not showing up there, you're not going to make that shortlist. And the last takeaway is this conversation is a good reminder of why community events like Sway Health really matter. This entire episode exists because of a conversation that started at Sway.

33:04If these pipeline dynamics sound familiar, and they probably do, share this one with somebody on your revenue team and follow the Health Tech Marketing Show for more conversations like this. And we'll see you back here soon with a new episode of the Health Tech Marketing Show.