Jessica Arnold is the Senior Vice President of Business Development at Health Catalyst, a company offering a fully integrated suite of healthcare data warehousing and process improvement solutions based on their proprietary Adaptive Data Architecture. Jessica and Patrick Nelli, Health Catalyst’s President, came to us to help them diversify the products they were selling through outbound and establish more consistent revenue.

Before Predictable Revenue

“The catalyst for deciding [to work with Predictable Revenue],” Jessica explains, “was an increased investment in Health Catalyst’s go-to-market strategy and sales teams.” They needed a well thought-out strategy for taking 3 new categories of offerings to market, and wanted to focus on creating the “operational rigor” required to have consistent revenue in each of those 3 categories. And outbound was certainly a motion that had worked before. Health Catalyst had seen historical success in sourcing its $5-10 million enterprise deals through outbound sales, so it made sense to invest in building the outbound function in a more structured way.

The Problem

In the past, the only deals Health Catalyst had sourced through outbound were “large, wall-to-wall, and highly customizable.” These enterprise deals are high value, but difficult to source consistently. The team wanted a way to diversify the stream of deals by combining more “out-of-the-box and application-specific solutions that could be easy to implement and more lightweight.” These smaller deals would represent an opportunity to “seed and grow,” or, as other companies refer to the strategy, to land and expand. Additionally, the smaller, higher velocity deals would act as a safety net in case any of the “lumpy, large enterprise deals” fell through.

Jessica knew that outbound would be the best way to get more of these deals in the pipeline, but the team didn’t necessarily have a great deal of experience with a strong sales development system. As a result, the team struggled to come up with concise and focused messaging and didn’t have a good way to gauge how well outbound (or inbound, for that matter) was working.

Our Solution

With 15 years of sales development experience, Jessica was no stranger to outbound before taking on her role at Health Catalyst in March of 2021. She had also read the Predictable Revenue book when she worked at Salesforce from 2011-2015, so she was very familiar with our methodology as well. It was always Patrick’s goal to have the team operate within the Predictable Revenue framework, so the two of them joining forces with us to make that happen made perfect sense.

Jessica met with our team on a continuous basis as they implemented our framework at Health Catalyst. Her team was, at the beginning of the engagement, “not in a mature place. They were not in the framework. They were focusing on different things than what Predictable Revenue would have them focus on.” We helped Jessica prioritize what the team was focused on, decide what should be done first, and organize all that needed to be done into a manageable roadmap.
“Starting to see customers respond in a positive way and knowing these campaigns are working, or this campaign isn’t working, and being able to constantly evaluate that feedback” is a vital piece of the puzzle that Predictable Revenue helped Health Catalyst find.

The Result

The most impactful result of working with Predictable Revenue, for Jessica, was establishing an outbound sales development framework. After they finished working through the final steps of putting the framework in motion, it will be “what is described in Predictable Revenue. That’s what [they’re] continuing to work on. That’s what [they] consider world class.” 

Jessica breaks the results of implementing the framework into 3 categories. First, there’s the education and participation of Health Catalyst’s internal teams. Through the engagement we “educated them on what that sales development function does, the value of it, and the rigor that is important to sustain it and watch it grow.” Next comes the impact on Health Catalyst’s prospecting. The team now understands the formula and activities necessary to generate opportunities. The final impact is on their customers. “Starting to see customers respond in a positive way and knowing these campaigns are working, or this campaign isn’t working, and being able to constantly evaluate that feedback” is a vital piece of the puzzle that Predictable Revenue helped Jessica find. In teaching her team the framework, we were able to “affirm a lot of the things Jessica knew to be true.”

Most importantly, the goal of diversifying the products they were selling through outbound was also met. Health Catalyst is “starting to see a constant stream of different product sales, which is a positive directional movement”.

Their growth from Q2 to Q3 2021 are:

• 20 created opportunities (+53%*)
• 10 stage 2s (+150%)
• $12.1M in created pipeline (+40%)
• $9M strategy stage 2 pipeline (+36%)

*percentages are growth from Q2 to Q3 results

Conclusion

Jessica Arnold, Senior Vice President of Business Development, and Patrick Nelli, President were always firm believers in the Predictable Revenue methodology. While Health Catalyst had a great track record with outbound, it lacked some of the organization and structure that a tried and true outbound methodology like ours could bring. Without it, their team was stuck relying on the same type of deals they always had through outbound, weren’t clear on exactly what they should be doing, and didn’t know how they should be measuring success.

Consequently, “It was [also] really nice to have that alliance – somebody to bounce ideas off of, who’s done it multiple times and could provide a different idea or a different perspective while building out the team.” Thanks to the Predictable Revenue coaches, Health Catalyst saw a better understanding of sales development on their team, improved prospecting tactics, and received better responses from customers.

Jessica, Patrick, and the Health Catalyst team now know how to measure success and have a plan for how to continue optimizing and iterating. They saw an immediate diversification of the types of deals they were sourcing through outbound, and, most tangibly, a 40% growth in their pipeline within one quarter.