Data does not always create business value. It may just create noise. Knowing the difference is critical for companies with data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence offerings.
“Within our customer accounts, there are multiple buyer sets,” says Ray Goforth, SVP of Marketing at Verana Health. “Each of those buyers can have a different objective, problem, or need. Verana’s goal is always to identify how we tailor our analytics to each buyer’s specific business problem.”
Verana Health unlocks the power of patient data for pharmaceutical companies. By leveraging comprehensive datasets, they optimize the development and commercialization of drug therapies, offering insights that are crucial at every stage of the drug lifecycle.
Rather than approach their buyers and customers with a “data, data, data” product pitch, Ray has been co-leading an initiative at Verana to connect “the data” to specific business outcomes.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ray and learn her three key strategies for moving from data to business value for their customers.
Defining Your ICP: Understanding Your Buyer Sets
For Ray, an effective marketing strategy has always been built through an understanding of the individual needs of different customers meeting an ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
At Verana, Ray and the leadership team have identified three buyer sets: clinical development, medical affairs, and commercialization. The goals and pain points that drive each buyer set to use Verana’s data are quite different.
“For clinical development teams, our data helps recruit the right patients and clinical sites to efficiently meet clinical trial deadlines. By contrast, for medical affairs it is about real-world performance of a therapy to shape clinician messaging and marketing claims while for commercial teams, it is about accelerating market expansion,” says Ray.
By clearly defining their buyer sets and the needs, the Verana team has been able to personalize its messaging and engagement strategies.
This personalized approach helps to set the right content strategy.
Personalized Storytelling Across the Funnel
Storytelling is a powerful tool in marketing, and when personalized, it can dramatically enhance engagement and conversion rates.
Ray explains how they identify and craft personalized stories and case studies, showcasing how they’ve helped peer customers achieve similar goals by addressing those specific needs.
“Knowing when to bring in customers’ stories, top of the funnel, mid-funnel, bottom of the funnel, not only to fill the funnel from a marketing perspective, but for marketing to partner closely with the sales team across each of the sales stages” Ray added.
Ray emphasizes the importance of close collaboration between marketing partners and the sales team, a strategy that has significantly contributed to Verana’s success in recent years. Having a shared set of stories has helped with this alignment.
Additionally, the narrative must evolve to reflect the buyer’s progress through the sales funnel.
Meeting Buyers Where They Are
Personalized content is most valuable when it is shared with the right buyer at the right time.
“We want to align our storytelling to their buying cycle, so we can offer trusted information when they’re entering the buying cycle or then deeper down when they are showing some intent.“ Ray added.
Ray shared that a recurring practice at Verana is to look at trending topics. “We want to understand those market trends and to know when buyers are beginning to end with these topics.“
Verana has implemented a lead scoring model to distinguish in-market accounts who are actively seeking a solution from those that are not yet taking action on the trend. Effectively lead scoring has been another key element of marketing to sales alignment.
“Once a contact within our target accounts has achieved a certain lead score, it goes over to our SDR. Then there’s manual research to ensure that this account and this prospect not only fit into our ICP role but that they actually look a good potential buyer for us“
For Ray and the Verana marketing team, the commitment to ICP needs identification, personalized storytelling, and lead scoring has paid off handsomely.
A year ago the vast majority of SQLs were generated by not very well qualified booth traffic at industry events with only a handful coming from the website engagement.
This year close to 60% of SQLs are coming from prospects that are self-qualifying through content consumption on the website and then being validated by an SDR.
The increase in the volume and quality of marketing-generated SQLs is the key reason Verana is on track to grow revenue by more than 75% this year.