Case Study

Leading Medical Device Manufacturer’s Journey to Account Based Marketing

20,000+ hidden contacts unlocked and added to their CRM ensuring the right stakeholders are at the center of every deal

This medical device manufacturer is a global leader in patient-focused medical innovations for structural heart disease and advanced hemodynamic monitoring technologies. Driven by a passion to help patients, the company collaborates with the world’s leading clinicians and researchers to address unmet healthcare needs, working to improve patient outcomes and enhance lives.

To successfully transition to account-based marketing (ABM) and engage the right people at the right time, this leader in medical devices knew having an improved contact database was imperative. Through leveraging People.ai, the company could remedy inefficiencies with manual data entry, gaining the ability to match contacts to an account or opportunity. The company captured over 20,000 contacts within the first year for its Salesforce CRM database by leveraging People.ai’s contact and activity capture solutions.

Challenge Statement

One of the medical device manufacturer’s three pillars is providing innovative solutions, and it has lived up to that promise. This organization is dedicated to shaking up the status quo in the healthcare industry by introducing disruptive, advanced technology, such as an algorithm that predicts conditions in patients several minutes in advance to allow clinicians time to intervene. To ensure its game-changing solutions are visible to its clinical audience, the company’s team decided to develop an ABM strategy.

Leveraging ABM methodology, the company could focus on specific hospitals that would be the ideal candidates for each of its various solutions. But when trying to get its message to the right people at the right time, the team realized that its current CRM contact input practice led to incomplete data in Salesforce.

Adding to this challenge was the lack of alignment between the organization’s sales and marketing databases. The marketing team sourced leads through digital activities and maintained that information in Marketo. However, this database didn’t always sync back to Salesforce, causing both teams to work in silos.

Industry: Life sciences, healthcare, medical devices

Use Cases: Filling in contacts within accounts that reps are actively in communication with, ability to leverage contacts created to use for ABM campaigns

Products Used: Data Foundation

Key Result: The medical device manufacturer added over 20,000 contacts to its SFDC database since
using People.ai’s Data Foundation solution. People.ai gave the medical device manufacturer’s marketing and sales departments more visibility, making collaboration between the two easier.

Key Discoveries:

- People.ai enabled the medical device manufacturer’s sales teams to easily find the data they needed at the moment of need
- People.ai provided the medical device manufacturer with more transparency into why the system works the way it does, building trust among reps
- People.ai illustrated the data issues present within Salesforce that the medical device manufacturer needed to resolve

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Ajay Parikh

Director, Global Digital Strategy & Marketing Operations

"The sooner we could light up the dark funnel with who a contact is, the better our sales teams had the opportunity to engage these people one-on-one. People.ai was a key component in providing visibility for our team with its industry-leading smart match technology."

The Database Problem Impacting the Organization

The company first recognized its database challenges during the height of the pandemic. Its sales reps are the key relationship owners with its clinical customers. But when COVID-19 hit, reps weren’t allowed inside of hospitals, cutting off in-person interactions with clinicians. The organization pivoted to a digital model to continue engaging its target audience but quickly realized a more complete database was needed to leverage for digital marketing and sales efforts.

“The data in Salesforce was incomplete; critical information like a contact’s email address or medical specialty would be missing. As a result, we didn’t always have the data we needed to associate as many contacts as we should into our targeted digital campaigns,” said Parikh.

A significant cause for this inaccuracy was that sales reps had to manually input contacts into Salesforce. Reps at the medical device company have many other responsibilities besides just selling – leaving them with little time to enter data into the CRM. Unfortunately, not consistently entering or updating CRM led to stale contact data and incomplete views of which people had actually been engaged more recently.

The incomplete data affected marketing too. Often, the marketing team would have to “harvest” contact data from Salesforce for a specific campaign and manually upload the records that met the criteria into Marketo to run a targeted campaign. But due to the data challenge, the campaigns couldn’t reach as large of a target audience as intended.

“We wanted to begin our ABM efforts and knew that we needed to enhance our contact database before we could start. Fresh, accurate data is intrinsic to ABM implementation and execution, so having all the contacts that our reps engage with on a regular basis in our database was really important. Having those contacts associated with the correct accounts and opportunities in advance allowed us to execute our efforts with greater speed,” said Parikh.

Turning Database Trouble into Database Triumph with People.ai’s Data Foundation

This medical device manufacturer has developed innovative algorithms to change the practice of medicine. When looking to improve gaps in its contact database, the organization internally asked, “why wouldn’t we leverage a similar innovative solution for our own sales and marketing teams?” That’s why the company turned to People.ai’s Data Foundation, an AI-powered platform that automatically captures all buyer and seller activity and contacts, to help improve the reliability and confidence in its contact database.

With People.ai’s Data Foundation solution, the company now could:

Capture the inbox activity of go-to-market team members
Ensure every type of activity, from calendared meetings to
emails exchanged, is captured and recorded in Salesforce
Grab the contact details that have a large impact on sales and marketing efforts, including title, department, and role
See which activities should be associated with accounts or opportunities

“We’ve added over 20,000 contacts to our Salesforce database in our first year since we started using Data Foundation – the solution enabled data gathering that worked hand-in-hand with reps. Now our reps know their stakeholders are in the CRM for every account,” said Parikh.

The enhanced contact database also resulted in improved alignment between marketing and sales, with marketing campaigns now hitting the right targets.

“Now when campaigns are started, marketing has everything on the contact side already, so as contacts start engaging with ads, our reps know who they are and can reach out to them through other channels,” said Parikh. “Without People.ai, we would’ve had thousands of ‘unknown’ visitors in our campaign reporting, which isn’t helpful to anyone.”

How This Leading Medical Device Manufacturer Will Move Forward

Thanks to People.ai, the organization’s road to ABM is much more certain. With accounts now containing the contacts reps are actively communicating with, sales teams can focus on the people showing signs of engagement based on marketing-driven activity – ones that will help move the needle.

The company is already looking to the future of how it will continue using People.ai. Plans are underway to use People. ai’s Revenue Solutions Account Intelligence to help standardize the account planning process and leverage scorecards for opportunities to better understand deal health. As the company continues to address unmet healthcare needs, it can count on People.ai’s innovation and AI technology to make that process as seamless as possible for the whole organization.