A Practical Guide to Intent-Driven ABM and AI in Healthtech

We created like an overlapping model, where overlap was good. We wanted not necessarily to double count, but we wanted to have. It was okay if the pipeline that was brought in was represented in multiple different teams, tracking and keeping the eyes. And we actually wanted a 70, 80% overlap because that means our teams were running at the same accounts together. Before we get into today's episode, I want to take a moment to share something that genuinely means a lot to us. The health tech marketing show recently won the Sway Health Podcast of the Year Award Agency category. And I'm honestly blown away by that. This show exists because of this community, the guests who share their thinking, so that, you know, as generously as they do. And you, you the listeners who keep showing up episode after episode. So thank you. It really means everything to me and to us as a firm. So welcome to the award winning health tech marketing show. I'm your host, Adam Terenus, CEO of Health Launchpad. One of the presenting sponsors, Health Launchpad is the pipeline growth company for B2B health care technology. As always, a huge thank you to you for listening. And if this is, you know, one of the first times you listen to the show, please hit follow or subscribe. It'll make a real difference to us because it means that you'll get to listen to as many shows as possible. And a big thank you to our friends at HealthCare now radio, 24/7, HealthCare only online radio network and podcast syndication service, Reburser and Carol, we are so grateful to you for everything that you do. And you had a huge part to play in this award. This is the final of a three episode mini series on ABM and go to market strategy. In the episode with Clint Munim and for the sagility and Tom Tony Mancuso from Onimus, they looked at ABM from a sales perspective. They were asking the hard question on what it takes to actually be ready to start ABM. And what it takes to have the right target account list to get going with the notion of starting with who. In the second episode in this series, Paula Cobb from Avashore and Alex Eskaval from Luma Health, looked at how the GTM model itself is being rebuilt from the ground up with revenue accountability, the death of the MQL as we thought about it. And what a modern sales marketing, customer success team actually looks like when they work as one single unit. And you've got links to both those episodes in the show notes if you haven't already listened to them. Today's episode is a terrific case study on what it takes to execute ABM in practice. And actually where AI fits into that picture in a really pragmatic and useful way. Here's the honest reality. Most of us are still using AI for content and research. But the problem is is that the CEOs are expecting it to move the revenue needle when it comes to the use of AI and marketing. And a gap between those two things is real and it's getting harder to ignore. My guess is Rehan Mirza. Rehan is the chief growth officer at Verifyable. They are a credentialing automation platform that's been through the full ABM journey. Is that started with cold outbound, moving to a more sophisticated, intent-driven orchestration approach. Rehan has lived every single stage of this evolution and has some genuinely hard one lessons to share. No, no hype. Just what works, what doesn't, and where AI earns its place. So with that, let's get into it and meet Rehan. Rehan Mirza here, a chief growth officer here at Verifyable. I was part of some of the founding team here. I initially got to come on as an advisor, think about go to Marta. I was lucky and I got to date the startup before marriage. But then I came on and. What were you doing before? My quick journey here, I call it my slumdog millionaire story, is my first life. I was in healthcare, revenue cycle, management, consulting. A number of large systems did a lot of epic installs and ICT 10 cutovers and lived where the sausage was made with healthcare. And then I got out of it because it can be pretty daunting at times. To think about change. I went into HR tech for a while, so think of it as recruiting, onboarding your people data as a human capital management strategy. I got an identity for a little bit. And then in 2020 when the first surge happened, my wife's a pulmonary ICU doctor. And so if you think about, and she got stuck in the credentialing process when she was looking to moonlight and support when the first surge was happening. So if you put all those experiences together, it's actually what really brought me to or kind of helped get Verifyable off the ground. In the early days we saw the delays that were happening in the credential process and we had to be able to see what was happening, what was making it take so long. And it's a bunch of checks and verifications that need to happen. So we built out the APIs and the pipelines to go run and automate those verifications. And so for folks who aren't familiar with what credentialing is, think of it as the extended background check that needs to happen on a clinician related to their credentials. So their DEA schedule is their boards, their certifications, their licenses. And that happens both at the healthcare provider organization side as well as the health plan side as they let in a clinicians into their network so we serve both of those markets now as well too. When I had my health care startup, which was a clinical communications application, we would populate it with as much physician data as we possibly could. And I didn't really understand why that was so complicated. Luckily, you know, I was educated because my partner, my founding partner was a physician. Mm-hmm. And, you know, he was very experienced physician and he explained the complexity of this. And I think if you're, if you haven't dealt with it and the sort of differences between states. So like if you're a physician in, I don't know, say New Jersey, but you also practice in New York like you might be in Bione and you also practice in Staten Island. So credentialing, right? It's just two different states. Yeah, it's really messy. And so now imagine kind of the jumpstart or the, you know, the kick in the butt here was also when you think about the virtualization of care. So now previously, you know, you were geographically bound by the brick and mortars across the, you know, across the river. But now you could think about it. Some of our early customers were coming in and saying, Hey, we have clinicians that we are practicing across 10 states are all 50 states. They were actually kind of cross state licensing and renashing was a strategy for their network growth and kind of supporting those patients. So that was in, you know, an early toll hold that we spent our time in, but very much of obviously continue to grow in where our businesses take us. Like steady MD and that come and yeah, yeah, all of kind of those virtual care, telehealth, online mental health care platforms, all of those have credentialing as needs as well. So did basically the company come out of solving the problems from COVID or did it start before? So we initially, what we say is we built the pipes initially and we gave those away for free early on when the early surge was happening. Think of it as like any organization that wanted like a single front door to go check, Hey, is this license active? Yeah. You know, are they in any federal, not elicor? There's kind of a easy spot. And that gave us the proof of concept where we first built those pipes. We went through why commentator after that. And then after going through that, we had some of our early customers and it went from organization saying, Hey, we want the pipes to also say, Hey, we also want the kitchen sink. So we started building the workflow layer, the UI layer. And then the third journey was organizations came to us and said, we don't just want that kitchen sink. We want it integrated into our, you know, houses of workflow or record. So again, we became a Salesforce partner pretty early on. That was actually a pretty key element to our early go to market strategy. Because when you think about being enterprise grade or kind of riding underneath that banner, especially as they were verticalizing both into provider and payer organizations, it allowed us to come in and be, you know, a quick to deploy managed package on top of Salesforce as well. So that was some of our journeys and some of we started with APIs. It's really hard to demo APIs. Unless you're a product manager, you kind of like, what am I seeing? So it came in and then said, now how do we orchestrate these workflows to our third chapter? It was really deploying within ecosystems. And I think now, you know, where our world has taken us unsurprisingly is into the world of AI. And I think what gets really exciting about what we do is it allows for a lot of parallel processing for credentialing to kind of happen at scale. And I think that's what we're really excited about. Right. So, yeah, and you're rolling the company's chief growth officer. You know, so pipeline, go to market pretty much. How do we get in front of a customer and how do we convert them? And then we're closely with in enterprise sales team who's, you know, getting the contract signs, but yeah, very much involved throughout the deals. Yeah. And I think you're a, you practice IBM. Yeah. So tell me about, you know, what's the IBM company's IBM story? Yeah. I think the first spot we started was, well, maybe the spot to admit to is we started just kind of with a lot of cold outbound, a lot of paid search. You know, those things were working early on, especially when we were looking for some of our lower market deals. I think the question really came in is, you know, when we brought in a business development team, and we really thought about how to make them successful. I think the first area we started to think with was intent, right? And so it came into first party intent, a little bit on third party intent. We started seeing better and better conversion happening with some of our BDRs, and that allowed our marketing and our BDR teams just to, I think, kind of create a shared language of both signal to actionability. And that helped build the relationship. I think as we continued to grow, we started our business, we started closing larger opportunities. And I think as we started doing that, we said, "Okay, how do we forecast this? How do we replicate this? What can we go into next year and understand what our strategic opportunity pipeline is going to be?" Talk about the ICP. So you talked about small and small deals start with that big of a deal. What's the story that I'm talking about? Yeah. Our first ICP, I would say, was fast growing digital health telehealth organizations. We then moved forward, I would say, into ambulatory and outpatient provider organizations, just by naturally, I think we were encountering some of those. We do and have a handful of hospitals and health systems, but believe it or not, they take a long time to close. So, you know, if you're really thoughtful, and there's a lot of site-specific or facility-specific complexity. So again, I would say even more than hospitals, when you think about the power of automating this credentialing process, we started going into payers quite a bit and health plans and payers. Salesforce had a really strong footprint there. You can think it's much more of a CRM relationship than a HR relationship and how they engage their providers. And so we found a really strong jet stream and being able to automate at scale and truly do that. And you can imagine with a health plan, or stay with a hospital or hospital, might have 5,000 docs, a regional health plan, has 50,000 providers. And our largest health plans that we support are 500,000 plus clinicians in there. So you can imagine the impact of being able to automate those verifications and streamline those workflows at scale, the impact just accretes as you kind of scale up that number. So that's a really interesting ICP development. So I mean, it's not unusual to hear about, an organization. So we did some works with an ambient AI company a couple of years ago. And this evolution from an ICP standpoint was from physician practices to healthcare systems. You've gone from digital health companies and we have essentially kind of probably SaaS venture back. Tech buyers. Yeah, tech buyers, right. And they've got this, everything has to move fast, fast, fast, fast, fast. And so sort of fairly short close cycles, 90 days maybe. Yeah, I mean, even faster or something. So you'd have organizations that come in and we're like, hey, we promised the board. We'd be in these three states. How do we get our clinical works to that one? So you know, it's up through 20, into 2022. Every organization was either thinking through growth or PEMNA was also another big lens for us where you'd get organizations and practices that were getting rolled up together. And then systems of record or consolidating operations that were satellite it out became really important. And so being able to drop in system. Then 23 happened. Yeah. And I was working with a, as a client, I was actually working as a fractional CMO for a virtual care company called Blue Stream Health, wonderful little company. And they sold in the end, they sold it to Evisit, which is I think good for them. What was kind of interesting was that I joined them. So I'd work with them. I think it was 2023. And they coming out of COVID, you see, I had no healthcare experience at all, nor did the head of sales. Chief product officer did. And so there are any experience of healthcare was selling virtual care during COVID. So it was all like, well, this is like SaaS, right? This is like SaaS in banking or SaaS in, you know, manufacture or whatever. It's something that moved really, really fast or SaaS selling to small businesses. And suddenly, after COVID, the pressure was off because virtual care suddenly it was a return to physical care. And the demand evaporated. And I had to explain to them, look, it's not you, it's the market. It's certainly not me doing marketing. This is reality. The reality is, it's not going to get better. It's not going to go back to the world was two years ago. What is it? It's reversing to the norm. And then I was like, oh, boy, was that a rude awakening? Okay. So you probably experienced a little bit of that. And so, but it's interesting that you shifted from tech companies to big commercial payers, health plans. That's a big pivot. So talk a little bit about that. Yeah. I mean, I think pretty early on, we knew that our business would need to diversify and expand a kind of, maybe a sad visual, but we kind of felt like the polar bear where we didn't want to get stuck on the ice. And so I was like, how do we think about moving over into the other segments? I think fortunately for us, going to have been at many organizations that have kind of been trapped in the middle and they're like, do we go down or up market? And they have to decide. I think what was really premeditated for us was the product actually worked really well up market. It really scaled up market again using some of that underlying Salesforce infrastructure. Now we didn't have to go and build every data relationship or object or APIs for every piece. We could kind of like leverage some of the underlying infrastructure. And that brought a lot of trust as well selling alongside and through a partner. And so some of this, I think naturally took us up market just because you have a product that fits up market. Does it mean those folks come and talk to you that? Yeah. So you know, funny. That looks exactly. So very much, even though we had product market fit, we had to go and get the market to see that fit. And you know, I think where we found success, and this goes back to your earlier question around ABM, was really trying to hyper focus in the accounts that we were going after. So intent became one of the early pieces moving towards tiered and named account lists with our AEs and thinking about those territories became really important. I think one of the other pieces that we have in our businesses, we really had to change our measurement of our attribution models because to go and get an enterprise to come in, it's not one thing that causes it. And I think we'd previously, you know, real a little bit immature and either like last touch or kind of the originating source of how we measured it. But really when you get the BDR teams running, it layer in an event strategy, you have digital ads running from, you know, orchestrations and sequences from a intent platforms, all the way even to, you know, our alliance system was going out there and having conversations once we knew and how it was interested to go understand, hey, what system integrator partners do they have? What's their deployment footprint of Salesforce or other ones right now? And so we get all of that information and starting to put that together, I think started helping us drive more conversion. But I think for us, we had to move away from, okay, what was the thing that brought it in? And be okay with, hey, we know this is a collective sport. And yes, there's activities we want to measure that had an impact on it, but no one team gets credit over the other if those activities existed. So we created like an overlapping model where overlap was good. We wanted not necessarily a double count, but we wanted to have, it was okay if the pipeline that was brought in was represented in multiple different teams tracking and capabilities. And we actually wanted a 70, 80% overlap because that means our teams were running at the same account together. Yeah, and it shows strong signal, right? Yeah, that's really good. Hey, it's Adam, just a quick word before we continue. If what Rehan is describing resonates that gap between having the intent days of the tools, the team, and actually making it all work together as a system, well, that's exactly what we help health tech companies think through a health launch pad. And one of the things we do is coach teams on their GTM strategy and especially their approach to a ABM. We work with marketing leaders to develop and refine their ABM strategy. Coach, the leaders and their team through implementation and help them accelerate their time to results. And this includes where AI can genuinely speed things up, rather than just add noise. If you're interested in exploring what this could look like, there's a link in the show notes to book a call with me. It's isn't the pitch. It's just an opportunity to talk through the challenges that you're facing and compare notes. Okay, with that, let's get back to Rehan. And how do you, do you have a dashboard that helps you with that? How do you build that? Yeah, some of this was we had to create our language and our definitions. What is a marketing engage? What is BDR engaged? What is alliances engaged? And so what are the things that matter? We had to like bold look each other in face to be like, is this really a valuable signal that's happening? Yeah. And we figured out time to case. We figured out what we wanted to track. It said, okay, if these things happen in here, we'll give overlap and credit for each of the teams to be able to see and do that. And I think once we did that, it actually moved us to not just like how does my team or how does a BDR hit the number of meetings booked? How does marketing think about the, you know, the pipeline that they bring in versus like, we have one pipeline number and we're going to go and get that together. Yes, we want to understand things underneath there that are working. But a lot of that was we actually had to get, we worked on the culture shift or the team mindset shift even before our dashboards kind of came into play. But that allowed us to I think build the dashboards with like a level of earnestness in trying to get it right versus protecting budgets or fiefdoms by the dashboards kind of representing that prejudice. Yeah. That's very interesting. I mean, you really operate the sort of notion of a GTM team, a team of one, right? So, so because you know, I was having this conversation with somebody earlier on about how, you know, the traditional model, so when I had my startup, I was kind of in this is not that long ago. It's seven or eight years ago now, right? It was so the traditional model was sales, marketing, sometimes they all reported up to the same person, sometimes they don't. If marketing reported up to sales, typically they were, their job was generate leads. And when sales, when marketing didn't report up to sales, they might be able to spend more time on brand and things like that. But you know, definitely not, you know, sales and marketing alignment was certainly a big challenge. And just we all know, right? ABM fails if there's not sales marketing alignment. It sounds like it's not it's a non-issue with you guys because you started on the basis of like, we've got a single GTM team. You're too kind. Of course there's issues. I think of this as a, you know, it's a practice. And so it's not, you're not on any one side of ever done or ever completed. Yeah. You know, it's We were successful in that first motion. Let's use last year, last year and a half where we put this in place. We were all just starting bringing those opportunities in. We just start to convert those opportunities. But then, I think as we looked at it, you can imagine with OBBA happening, other types of interest rates kind of cycles, those types of things. A lot of organizations pulled back their capillaries, expenditures, right? And so we had generated this pipeline. But then what we were finding was our cycle links were getting longer. Our deal drop-offs were happening, either after disco or demo. And so that really kind of made us put our investigative hat back on and say, hey, how do we think about this as a team? No A/E should be out there going it alone. And especially as you could think about different stages that we were seeing drop-off, we have this entire go-to-market apparatus. Now, in our deal cycles, especially for one thing we really started to do was also understand inbound versus outbound, the difference between-- and actually from sourcing, hey, if it came in from a partner, it would move differently. If it came in inbound, it would move differently. How do we almost treat those opportunities a little bit differently in discovery and demoing became really important for us to think about? But I think the other piece here was our go-to-market teams marketing, BDR, and our alliances team. Prior to, we weren't really thinking about the role of those teams could play moving opportunities through the pipeline. No, no, it's critical. We know having a closing dinner. We know getting a mid-cycle or an organization that's late in the pipeline, attending a webinar, or hearing from customers, or engaging with community is important. But a lot of our initial measurement was about how do we generate that pipeline versus accelerate and convert that pipeline. I think that's our next stage of go-to-market is the surround sound. How do we do that? In these 350-day deals, understanding prospect journey or opportunity journeys here, and first seeing drop-off after discovery phase was at our messaging. Did we not create enough urgency? Did we need to move from ROI messaging to cost of an action messaging? If it's after demo, what might be some of these other pieces we need to create a business case? And so now we're much, much more involved through each of those stages. And you can imagine marketing, product marketing, demand marketing, and alliances has a really big role in the partnering on the deal committees. There's a real sophistication in how you're doing this. How do you operate and scale this? Your technology, processes, people-- What is it about? Yeah, it's a little bit of each. I would say we've went through a intent vendor recycle. We were like, share names, why not? Yeah, I mean, we were on six cents. I think that gave us our initial build. There was a lot that got black boxed in six cents. So we would go over to warmly that moves us to both account based intelligence as well as contact based. There's a lot more orchestrations. We can kind of run to bring those contacts with those folks in. It allows us to go to second and third party intent to that we're now kind of-- So what are you integrating warmly with? With your marketing automation platform? CRM, mostly. And then we're pushing back out from CRM into our marketing automation and some of our-- and then we're adding stack-adapt. Oh, you sure. We're able to create audiences and really sort of create that surround sound. So again, there's some elements of tooling. We are looking at AI, SDR, outbound, SDR capabilities. And we're thinking about it less even though it's called an SDR. I think we're thinking about it more as a channel. How can we touch accounts that we're not currently touching? Hey, as we think about events and post events, maybe you're limited by your human follow-up of what you can do. How do we kind of think about audiences that we can move through different types of enrichment, identification, and sequences? So technology is one part. This year, when I think of what makes us successful, the acronym that I've been using is core. And that's what we're thinking for my team. And so that's a conversion. How are we thinking about conversion, both pre-opportunity creation, but through each of the stages? O is an orchestration. And so that comes into how is our cross-team orchestration happening? Some of that's some new tooling. Some of that's the measurement. Hey, how are we creating that shared language we did previously to share credit now in varying stages of what do we want to try to create and capture that's happening in deal cycles? So what are the signals? Hey, is their buying committees is an account that has six contexts engaged, actively engaged, better or more likely to close than two contexts? Our GONG data says it's 4x more likely to close. But again, that exists in Asylos. How do we start understanding what we want to create? And then adding the measurement on that are teams to be able to do. R is for residents in reach. We got a bunch of AI and we're doing some cool stuff. I think the AAR BDR falls in that spot. And then ecosystems is really the E for us, again, with Salesforce. And so how we pull off ABM, it's a different formula for everyone. But I think that's a little bit of what we're betting on in this next year. Right. It's rare that you get the opportunity to listen to the evolution of ABM within a single organization in such a short period of time. It's a really fascinating story. I want to close with one question, which is looking back maybe on the last few years, the time with Vera Fable. What was one thing that went wrong or something which was a big screw up or whatever, something that was not what you expected, but was one of the best lessons that you had. I'll have to pause and look at all my scars and see which one has the best story. I don't know if this was a big mess up, but I think the way we ran outbounding early on, I think there was a level of hubris that activity and touches and we could just go and blast our way through lists. And it would make a ton of sense for organizations. And I would say me being a beauty-- I said my first job at Vera Fable was a BDR, which was like I was just responsible for spamming probably a little bit if I had to own up to it. With the recognition that my face was linked in, would come along with it. But I think the feeling of that shift, and I think what it allowed me to feel real and, to my mind, was the terminal velocity of like, hey, just kind of like, yes, there's a little bit to gain, but pretty quickly you could start to feel like the goodwill or the connectivity not being there, and almost like you're eroding the trust that's there. And so I think luckily we did it when we were young and early, and I think now coming back in, it's let us have a completely different perspective and how we build the relationship with that prospect or customer across many different points. And I think for us, it comes from now, how are we starting with a perspective of delivering value and then working backwards to the ask? And so again, very, very different than just, hey, this is a volume-based play, and I think in healthcare especially, and particularly if you're not in PLG or consumer or some member patient, volume isn't the answer. And so I think for us, it pretty quickly said, hey, for us to go and get the conversations and the organizations we want to engage with, we have to think about kind of like a holistic message that comes in with both value and intentionality. And so I love that lesson. I think that's a great lesson. And I think you're actually fortunate that you learned it. And I think because there are a lot of companies that come for a long time, for they learn it. So with that, I want to thank you for sharing the story. It's been a really enjoyable episode. And I'm looking forward to other folks hearing this. Likewise, thanks for everything you and the healthcare team do for us marketers as well. Do appreciate it. All right, let me bring this one home. And since this is the final episode in our three part mini series, I want to do two things. Give you the takeaways from today's conversation and then zoom out to what I think you should take from all three episodes together. So here are four takeaways from my conversation with the Rehan Mirza. One, start with intent, not activity. Rehan's early lesson was that volume-based outbound, erodes, trust, fast, and especially in healthcare. The shift to intent-driven value first outreach wasn't just a tactic change. You were the culture change. Take away two. Attribution overlap is a feature, not a bug. The goal isn't to figure out which team gets credit. It's to get marketing, BDR, and alliances all running at the same accounts. As 70 to 80% overlap means you're actually doing it right. Take away three. Pipeline generation and pipeline acceleration are two different jobs. Most GTM teams are wired for the first and neglect the second. Think hard about what role marketing plays at every stage of a 300-day deal cycle, not just at the top of the process. Take away four. AI earns its place by extending reach, not replacing judgment. For example, AISDRs can be used as a channel for touching accounts you're not reaching. And that's an area where AI can really pay off, not as a magic short cut. Now, stepping back across all three episodes, here's what I think the bigger picture is. ABM is not a campaign. It's a commitment to a fundamentally different way of going to market. One that requires that you earn the right to run it as Clint Mooneyum so articulately described in the first episode in the series. And to rebuild your GTM model to support it as Paul and Alex described in the last episode and then execute it with the rigor, patience, and cross-functional alignment. Rayhan describes in today's episode, most organizations try to bolt ABM onto an existing structure that wasn't designed for it. And that's often why it fails. The common thread across all these three conversations is this, the company's making ABM work. Aren't the one with the best tools or the biggest budgets. They're the ones who got aligned first on accounts, or metrics on what success actually looks like and then build patiently from there. Links to the other episodes are down below in the show notes. And if you haven't listened to those, go back and listen in order. These three episodes really do build on each other. And if you wanna talk through where you're at on your ABM or GTM strategy, there's a link in the show notes to book a call with me. I'm always happy to compare notes and to listen to the challenges that you're going through. Please hit follow if you haven't already. And if this mini series has been useful, share it with colleagues. It genuinely helps the show reach more people. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you on the next episode. (upbeat music)