Start with Who

The Critical Foundation of Successful B2B Healthcare Marketing

You’ve likely heard Simon Sinek’s famous advice to “Start with Why.” While understanding your purpose is essential, there’s an equally important principle when it comes to B2B marketing in healthcare technology: Start with Who.

I’ve been involved in healthcare technology marketing in some way for over 15 years. If I’ve learned one thing, you have to define your target audience, your target market, and your ideal customer profile very precisely. Getting this wrong is probably one of the biggest reasons things don’t go as well as they could with marketing.

The precision of your targeting can make the difference between success and wasting your investment on target accounts that would never buy from you.

In this post, we want to help you define your “who” and provide a systematic approach to identifying and reaching your ideal customers.

Our latest episode of the Healthtech Marketing Show covers this issue in depth. The quotes below come from this episode.

Why Targeting Is More Important Than Ever

The pressure on marketing teams to demonstrate ROI has never been more significant. As my colleague Mark Erwich, Chief Strategy Officer at Health Launchpad, explains:

“Targeting is getting more important because of a few reasons. There’s a clear push towards ROI. You look at metrics like the cost to acquire a new customer and how you’re performing as a marketing organization. That in the end is going to drive your budget.”

Beyond budget justification, precise targeting serves several critical functions:

1. Creating organizational alignment: “Marketing can be the glue between all departments,” says Erwich. “We have a really strategic role to play in the organization by collecting the right information and sharing that across departments.”
2. Adapting to changing buyer behavior: Today’s healthcare decision-makers are overwhelmed. “They’re ignoring emails. They get inundated with over 400 emails per day,” notes Erwich. “Even digital advertising is getting harder and harder. We as marketers need to find a strategy to reach the right accounts.”
3. Enabling high-touch, personalized marketing: When you know exactly who you’re targeting, you can implement more meaningful, personalized tactics that cut through the noise.

A Systematic Approach to Market Definition

Defining your market requires a methodical approach that moves from broad possibilities to specific targets. Here’s how to break it down:

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

Start with the total potential market for your solution. In my own words

“If you’re just going after the provider market, the total available market is about 6,000 hospitals. But that’s actually about 1,800 organizations, really. There are 1,800 buying entities and two-thirds of that is networks.”

TAM isn’t just a number—it’s a dollar amount representing your maximum market opportunity. “The TAM is not a number, but it’s actually an amount,” clarifies Erwich. “It’s the total potential number of organizations times the annual contract value.”

When defining your TAM, consider all potential segments, even those you’re not currently selling to. “It may be hospitals, but how about clinics or payers?” suggests Erwich. “Look at your existing customers and whether your solution is applicable elsewhere. You may not have sold anything to payers, but you may have a solution that works really well for them.”

Serviceable Available Market (SAM)

Next, narrow your focus to the market you can address with your current capabilities.

“Let’s say it’s an interoperability solution, which only works with Epic. Epic has something like 750 customers currently. So your serviceable available market is actually 750.”

Erwich adds, “If you’re marketing to hospitals, and if you have a product that needs to integrate with the EHR, and you’re integrating with most of the EHRs but not with Meditech, for instance, then you have to exclude that part out of your SAM. It will be part of your TAM, but not part of your SAM.”

Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM)

The SOM represents a strategic focusing of your efforts based on your available resources.

“One of our clients is a smaller EHR vendor in a specific market,” Erwich shared. “They only have a limited number of sales resources. So what they did was say, ‘In order to strategically approach the market, we are going to focus first only on five states.’ Their TAM obviously is national, but they established this serviceable obtainable market, which I think is a really smart strategy, particularly if you’re in the growing phase, because it gives focus.”

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Your ICP defines the organizations you can serve best, considering multiple attributes:

1. Firmographic attributes: “What is the size of the organization? What is their business model? Are they for-profit or not-for-profit?” explains Erwich.
2. Technographic attributes: “What is their technology stack? The EHR may be relevant, but there may be other parts. Are they partly in the cloud? Are they aligned with Microsoft or Amazon or another cloud vendor?”
3. Behavioral attributes: “How do they purchase? Are they buying through group purchases? Are they buying direct? Are you dealing with the individual hospital or is it part of an IDN?”

Here is another: Based on your ideal customer profile, maybe you’ve got a solution that works better with legacy customers, for example, customers who are on older versions of Epic. That might mean that your ICP is maybe half of that 750, so 375 accounts.

Erwich emphasizes that defining your ICP isn’t a desk exercise:

“You don’t do that all by just sitting behind your desk in your ivory tower and working in Excel. You need to talk to customers. You need to talk to prospects. You need to get out there.”

Target Accounts

Finally, identify specific organizations within your ICP to pursue. As I say in the podcast

“From the ICP to your target accounts, you might do a sort of best-fit customer assessment. There are Epic customers who are open to new solutions and Epic customers who are not. What I found is that Epic customers who are new tend to be zealous. Every time you make a suggestion, it’s like, ‘Let me just go back and check where this fits on Epic’s roadmap.’ Whereas Epic customers that have been Epic customers for a while actually love Epic for what they do well but know that they don’t want to depend on the roadmap. They’re much more open to new solutions.”

This targeted approach might whittle your list down further: “That might take that 375 and move it down to 250. Then it’s like, ‘Okay, our salespeople can really only handle a hundred accounts, which hundred should we pick?'”

Creating an Effective ICP – Key Components

Building an effective ICP requires both data and real-world validation:

Data Sources

Leverage tools like Definitive Healthcare for firmographic and technographic data. “All of that information is available through their website or even better if you have a tool like Definitive,” notes Erwich.

Multiple Criteria

Move beyond simplistic targeting based on size alone. As Turinas cautions, “That’s how you get from 1,800 down to 100. It’s not by saying which are the biggest—that’s a dumb way of doing it.”

ROI-Based Targeting

Consider targeting based on potential return on investment rather than just company size.

Real-World Example – The Radiology Department Success Story

Mark shared a compelling example of precision targeting in action:

“We had a solution for radiology, and we could sell to any radiology department of any hospital. But the question was: where do we start? Rather than taking a look at the biggest hospitals, I did an analysis looking at the number of procedures that happened in each radiology department and each freestanding radiology clinic.”

This analysis created a powerful targeting metric: “I developed a metric which was basically giving us insight into which organizations would have the highest ROI from investing in our solution. I could basically predict or calculate which organizations, in priority order, would have the highest return on investment if they purchased our solution.”

The execution was laser-focused: “We had full focus with sales reps focusing on those accounts and marketing focusing on those accounts. Some of them got two direct mail pieces—three-dimensional mail pieces—per quarter. We had not more than 10 accounts per rep, but we had focus from sales and marketing. That’s how we closed them, literally one by one, checking them off. We were massively successful.”

Common Targeting Mistakes to Avoid

Even experienced marketers make targeting mistakes. Watch out for these common pitfalls:

1. Going after TAM without segmentation: “Go straight after TAM and then pour a lot of money into it without really thinking,” Erwich cautions.
2. Misalignment in timing: “If for next year, we’re launching this new product that will unlock a certain segment—let’s say now we’re able to sell to Meditech customers—that doesn’t mean you need to start on January 1st. You need to start in September or August cultivating that market, creating brand awareness.”
3. Over-optimistic market potential: “The over-optimistic ‘we can sell towards this 3 billion market potential that is out there’ without having the ability to narrow that down or break that down into certain segments.”
4. Not accounting for competitive evolution: “Your competitors are not standing still. They’re also getting out in the market, achieving market share. How does the market develop and what does that mean for your continuation?”

The Broader Impact of Good Targeting

A well-defined targeting strategy delivers benefits beyond marketing campaigns:

Sales Enablement

“Once you start collecting all of that information and documenting it, this becomes a great foundation for your sales enablement program,” says Erwich. “You can actually educate internally, train your sales team, and even certify them, particularly when you have different segments.”

Content Evaluation

“It provides a lens to go back towards your existing content, whether it’s your website or white papers,” Erwich notes. “By having your ICP and personas defined, you have the ability to evaluate if your content is still appropriate as you expand into new segments.”

Organization-Wide Alignment

Precise targeting creates alignment across departments, from trade show staff to executives. “The more you share that knowledge and the why behind it, the more successful your organization will be,” advises Erwich.

Getting Started

If you’re just beginning to formalize your targeting approach, Erwich recommends:

“Start building this dataset. Start building up numbers, even if you just put it into a spreadsheet. It can help you have so much more meaningful discussions inside the organization—not just about the amount of money you need or the segments you can go after, but even your total budget for planning exercises.”

Don’t wait for organizational buy-in: “Even if nobody else in the organization is doing it because there are other priorities, I would suggest to any marketing leader: start collecting this data, start building this. Maybe you’re not sharing it at the beginning, but once you have some solid data, start validating it with clients, with your finance department, with your sales department.”

Final Thoughts

By starting with “who,” you establish a foundation for marketing success that resonates throughout your organization. The systematic approach outlined here—from TAM to target accounts—provides a roadmap for more efficient, effective marketing that drives real results in the complex healthtech landscape.

Getting really precise in who you start with has such a dramatic effect in terms of how you market and sell, in terms of the results, and how you can measure those results.

1. Check out more posts like this in the Healthtech MarketingLearning Center.It is chock-full of articles, use cases, how-to’s, and ideas. Check out our resource center dedicated to the Buyer Journey. 
2. Follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn.I publish videos and articles on ABM and healthtech 
3. See what other healthcare technology marketers are doing. Check out the State of ABM in Healthcare Technology.
4. Buy Total Customer Growth: Our bookon how to win and grow customers for life with ABM and ABX. 
5. Work with me directly.Let’s book a growth session and we can explore ways you can improve your marketing using the latest techniques in account-based marketing.