Case Study

The Head Scratcher

CipherHealth is in the business of helping healthcare providers and their patients. They provide a platform that automates and orchestrates the many interactions that occur across the entire care journey. They do this for more than 500 of the country’s leading healthcare systems and each system can have dozens of facilities.

When COVID hit, they were in the right place at the right time, as tech solutions were exploding to help overloaded and rapidly changing healthcare organizations. Jim Somers, CMO at CipherHealth, joined the company at that pivotal moment and, working with the heads of their growth (sales) and customer success teams, quickly realized that to grow big, they needed to tailor their outreach to a widening array of influencers and buyers. They also needed to aim higher and engage IT and finance sooner.

As Jim described it, “Because of COVID-19 and the impact it had on the bottom line for many organizations, tech buying decisions were happening across multiple departments — the clinical side, administration, operations, and IT. They were happening faster and at a higher level than pre-COVID. We needed to develop relationships across all those different personas and do so among fewer systems. ABM was an obvious strategy for us.”

What’d They Do?

The first thing Jim did was to lock arms with Tom Arena, CipherHealth’s chief revenue officer. Tom was one of the few people in the company who had experience with account-based marketing. Jim also realized he needed executive buy-in to ensure success. With that in mind, he gained support from their CEO and CFO, as well.

Next, he brought in an outside consultant, Jon Russo, CEO and Founder of B2B Fusion. As Jim put it, “ABM was definitely a new muscle for almost everyone in the company, including myself, and I heard it can be a multi-year journey.” He wanted to compress that as quickly as possible and knew that they needed expert help to “move twice as fast and double our chances of success.” Jim had worked previously with Jon and knew that he was on the leading edge of ABM.

Before going too far into the technology selection process, CipherHealth made sure their foundation was solid. They “poured the concrete” by integrating their existing tech stack and data sets, marrying them into a unified funnel.

They narrowed their focus to the top 300 healthcare systems in the U.S. and aimed “above the powerline” to have more strategic discussions about the value of a platform that would service the entire organization — rather than talking point solutions.

At this point they brought in Demandbase to put their ABM program into action. The team used the Demandbase ABX Cloud to create “swim lanes” (what we call “audiences” at Demandbase). They grouped their 300 organizations into “the core 64” — a handful of sub-segments based on whether an account was a customer or prospect, what EMR (electronic medical record) system they use, and other similar factors. They conducted a whitespace analysis on each of their accounts to uncover cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Next up, they leaned into Demandbase to track intent, engagement, and conversion to pipeline, to see how they were progressing against their overall business targets for each of the core 64. Armed with that knowledge, they were able to load balance and throttle up and down where needed to apply more advertising and marketing fuel across each of the groups. When they see intent and engagement pop up, they quickly engage with their growth team to see if they’re already working with the account or if there’s something that needs attention. “Demandbase has been instrumental in that account journey process,” beamed Jim.

Why Demandbase?

How’d They Do?

With Demandbase One ABX Cloud and Advertising Cloud, CipherHealth:

• Is seeing larger deal sizes and improved cross-selling and up-selling with existing customers
  Targeting higher in the organization and across larger buying groups has paid off with larger deals and improved share-of-wallet among existing customers. With so many systems and providers tightening their belts because of fewer elective procedures during COVID, Demandbase’s Account Intelligence gave CipherHealth the insights they needed to market into their embedded customer base and do a lot of expansion and cross-selling.
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• Engages at that right moment based on solid intel
  People working in healthcare are overwhelmed more than ever, according to Jim, with all the stress on capacity, increased workload, and piles of information to consume. CipherHealth didn’t want to contribute to that stress. They wanted to be graceful about how and when they reached out to potential buyers. They used Demandbase’s journey tracking, engagement metrics, and intent data to discover that perfect time to reach out when the buyer was starting to search on their own. In Jim’s words, “Demandbase has been a big value driver for us…understanding our customer needs and where there’s engagement. Too many people think just because someone clicked on an ad, they’re asking us to email them and follow up. But that’s not true. We need to look at all the signals, whether it’s email, events, LinkedIn, social ads, what have you, and look at the collection of all this engagement. That’s when we can really say, ‘all right, there’s something unfolding here,’ and this is how we craft our story to that account.”
• Continues to grow and gain returns on their Demandbase investment
  CipherHealth’s ABM journey has been a continuum. Coming out of COVID, they’re now gaining traction with new prospects, especially around their new Pre-Care offering, CipherConnect, which they launched in early 2021. They’re expanding participation in the program across more of the growth team and other parts of their organization. Customer Success is another “no brainer” for them, because Demandbase’s intent data can be used to spot and head off potential churn risk. It’s all part of this collaborative team across their accounts, whether they’re on the customer side, the growth side, the marketing side, or even on the product side. Jim is letting their early successes “sell” these other groups on joining in.
• Freed up one team member from manual reporting
  The cherry on top of the benefits sundae has to be the reporting side of things, remarked Jon Russo. “We spent a fair amount of time thinking about the reporting side up front, starting with the end in mind. As a byproduct, we freed up one of Jim’s team members who was doing manual reporting with Google sheets. I think Demandbase plays a really critical role in that reporting and the account journey that others are not able to provide.”