Over the last two years, Kelly McDermott, Chief Marketing Officer of Caregility, has guided this leading virtual care firm through the ABM journey. They have transformed the way they market to a full-scale ABM model.
I interviewed Kelly for the latest episode of the Healthtech Marketing Podcast. It was a highly insightful conversation about what it takes to transition an organization to ABM. This meant moving from traditionally siloed B2B sales and marketing teams into a more joined-up system where sales, marketing, SDRs, and customer success work together to engage the buyer collectives of a small number of target accounts.
Caregility sells a telehealth-based in-patient system, and they target the largest healthcare systems, specifically the 282 organizations with more than 500 hospital beds. Their sales cycles are complex and can last a year or longer. Buyer Collectives are very large.
Why Did Kelly Start The ABM Journey?
In this short excerpt, Kelly explains why ABM made so much sense for them to embrace. The disruption caused by the pandemic delayed starting this until 2021.
Initially, Kelly read a great deal about ABM and researched the platforms. She wanted to find a platform that would be flexible enough for her to use intent data terms that would align with their unique needs.
They selected Demandbase and integrated it with their website so that they could get even deeper insights into buyer behavior.
Critical Lessons from Kelly’s ABM Journey
The key lesson from the last two years is that while technology is essential, the people and process side of the ABM journey is far more important. She summed this up best, referencing a famous blog post from 2006 by Avanish Kaushik – For every ten dollars you spend on technology, you should spend ninety dollars on people to support the change this enables.
In Kelly’s case, one of the keys to the success of their ABM journey was moving one of the team into a full-time ABM demand generation role. This person took the lead in standing up Demandbase, integrating this with the website and other systems, and, most importantly, managing the process.
After a couple of false starts and a very thoughtful and deliberate strategy, Caregility has ABM working at scale.
What Was The Biggest Change?
One of the biggest changes on this ABM Journey was the addition of Sales Development Reps (SDRs). Kelly realized early on that this would be critical to their success and added SDRs to her team. They work alongside the other marketers and the sales account managers to pinpoint opportunities and move them along the pipeline.
This created the additional benefit of building the “Farm Team” of future sales account managers.
The whole process has become more collaborative between sales and marketing using the information in their ABM platform to identify engaged accounts, create opportunities and build a faster-moving pipeline.
What’s next in the ABM Journey?
As acquiring new accounts is becoming more systematic, the next stage is to focus on existing customers to build a “Land and Expand” approach. This involves Customer Success more actively as part of a total customer growth team.
You can listen to the podcast here. Here is a video of the interview.
Originally posted on LinkedIn.