VGTM | Adam Turinas Podcast Interview
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[00:00:00] Corey Quinn: Welcome to the Vertical Go To Market Podcast, where you'll discover new opportunities to grow your business from 7 figures to 8 from the world's most successful agency and B2B SaaS executives. I'm your host, Corey Quinn. Let's jump into the show. Today, I'm joined by the CEO and founder of Health Launchpad, Adam Tarinas.
[00:00:24] Corey Quinn: Welcome,
[00:00:24] Adam Turinas: Adam. Hello. Hi, Corey. Thank
[00:00:26] Corey Quinn: you for having me on the show. Hi, I'm super excited for our conversation. Please just tell [00:00:30] us a little bit about yourself and what Health Launchpad does.
[00:00:34] Adam Turinas: So I am, I'd say this is my part three of my career. So first, uh, couple of decades, uh, was in the traditional agency and digital agency business working with big agencies.
[00:00:46] Adam Turinas: And then I took a weird right turn in act two and I started a healthcare technology company, which I built up and then eventually sold in 2019. And I thought, I want to go back to my first love, which is marketing. And so I [00:01:00] thought, Hey, you know, I love marketing. I love B2B marketing. And I seem to know a bit about healthcare, or in fact, I know a lot about healthcare.
[00:01:07] Adam Turinas: And so I thought, you know what I'll do is I'll start an agency focused exclusively on healthcare technology. So sort of business to business of healthcare. So I don't, you know, we don't, we don't help hospitals get new patients. We help software companies and services companies get hospitals and insurance companies and things.
[00:01:25] Adam Turinas: So
[00:01:26] Corey Quinn: just to clarify the specific, specific business for Health [00:01:30] Launchpad is You work with healthcare technology companies who are trying to market their products and services into, uh, hospital systems or what, what, what is the typical.
[00:01:42] Adam Turinas: Exactly right. Yes. So our typical customer, they kind of bifurcate. So we have several large healthcare organizations.
[00:01:51] Adam Turinas: So for example, one's called AMN Healthcare. They're a massive staffing company, a multi billion dollar publicly traded company. And we work with [00:02:00] their language services division. So we're helping them sell to the healthcare system market. So basically hospitals and other ancillary organizations around that.
[00:02:11] Adam Turinas: And then the other, the other end of the spectrum, we also work with venture backed. Companies. And, uh, in those cases, we are often actually acting as their marketing department. So, you know, maybe working with the founder team. So for example, we're working with this [00:02:30] amazing AI company called DeepScribe AI, which has raised, uh, over 50 million.
[00:02:35] Adam Turinas: And, uh, they've got this fantastic AI. solution, and we are helping them market to the hospital market. And as they're sort of in the early stages, we're actually, they're sort of outsourcing a lot of their marketing to us. And eventually they'll scale up their marketing team and they'll take it over. And so that's the kind of way we work.
[00:02:55] Adam Turinas: We, and it's essentially our clients fall into those two camps. Got it.
[00:02:59] Corey Quinn: [00:03:00] And the similarity, a couple of similarities, I imagine, and correct me if I'm wrong, one is That your clients, whether they be, you know, your healthcare tech companies or their venture backed businesses, they're all trying to attract more clients within that sort of that hospital and hospital system ecosystem
[00:03:18] Adam Turinas: ecosystem.
[00:03:19] Adam Turinas: Yeah, you got it. The thing they all have in common is business to business, long, complex life sales cycles with complicated [00:03:30] buyer collectives with, you know, sometimes several dozen people involved in the, in the sales process. The sales cycle can last, you know, over a year in some cases, and so we specialize in that.
[00:03:45] Adam Turinas: And what we do, you know, specifically for them is a range of services. So, at the heart of it is account based marketing, which, you know, if you know anything about B2B marketing, it's sort of where B2B marketing has [00:04:00] been going for the last 15, 20 years. And that's at the foundation of what we do. But we also You know, we'll do digital marketing, so we do SEO, we do SEM, we'll build websites, we'll do branding, messaging, and demand generation.
[00:04:15] Adam Turinas: And we also have, you know, public relations and events specialists as well. What sets us apart from, you know, regular B2B agencies that might be really good at account based marketing is [00:04:30] You know, the majority of our team have, uh, have deep, deep expertise in healthcare. So people like myself who've spent, you know, 10 plus years.
[00:04:38] Adam Turinas: In fact, many of them are much longer than me in healthcare. And so, sort of have been in the shoes of the companies that we're selling to. So we know how hard it is. And which, which is, you know, in healthcare is an important thing. Cause it's, it's the most unusual market. I personally think it's the hardest market.
[00:04:57] Adam Turinas: to sell into. And I know a lot of people that, you know, whether you're in [00:05:00] financial services, because you might say it's the hardest market to sell to. And I've worked in financial services, and I can tell you healthcare is harder. And so you need, you really do need domain expertise. And so we bring, bring that to
[00:05:12] Corey Quinn: bear.
[00:05:12] Corey Quinn: So I would love to dig into that a little bit. Like, besides just understanding sort of background in healthcare, like why, why is specialization in healthcare, specifically hospitals, Why is that important? Why is that, you know, why is that?
[00:05:28] Adam Turinas: Well, I'll tell you, [00:05:30] I'll tell you sort of how I ended up making the decision to do this.
[00:05:33] Adam Turinas: So, you know, it's 2020, early 2020. By that, and I mean early enough in 2020 that People were talking about COVID in the news, but it wasn't a thing yet. And so I started, I was doing a little consulting on my own and I always thought, you know, I want to have a business to business consulting agency and we'll do some stuff in healthcare and then we'll also market to [00:06:00] patients.
[00:06:00] Adam Turinas: And, you know, I was trying to write the proposition. I found it was like way too amorphous. And I was talking to a good friend of mine who happens to be the chief marketing officer of a large healthcare technology company. And he said, and he's always been, he was my first boss when I moved to the US in the late 80s.
[00:06:20] Adam Turinas: And he's always been extremely candid to me. And he said, Hey dummy, the only thing you really know anything about That I would credibly hire you [00:06:30] for is your, your knowledge about healthcare. You know, there are millions of people, you know, thousands of people who know more about B2B marketing than you do.
[00:06:39] Adam Turinas: Whether that's true or not, I sort of took the point and then thought, well actually I thought that, and then I thought, you know, it's too smaller market. Do I really want to just focus on that? And then I thought to myself, wait a second, when I was running my own software company. I would every year pay a visit to the annual, big annual global trade show, which is called [00:07:00] HIMSS, which is the massive health, uh, sort of like, you know, Comdex used to be.
[00:07:05] Adam Turinas: It's, you know, there are 50, 000 attendees at this show. And I thought about the exhibit hall, and the exhibit hall would often take, you know, five or, the size of five or six football fields. Hundreds of exhibitors. And that, and that wasn't every single company that was in healthcare technology or healthcare services.
[00:07:24] Adam Turinas: And I thought to myself, if I could serve, if I was to have a business where I served, [00:07:30] you know, 1%, 2%, you know, wow, amazing, 5 percent of the companies that were in that room, I'd have a very successful business. And so I thought, yeah, I'm just going to focus on, on healthcare technology. And then, you know, again, the reason for doing it is that, you know, if you only have to, you only have to spend five minutes in healthcare to understand how hard it is.
[00:07:53] Adam Turinas: I'll tell another little story if you want. It's that when I first started in healthcare, this is [00:08:00] in 2011. So I, I had, I'd left the sort of big agency business and I was doing a bit of consulting with a friend of mine and uh, it was sort of, it was assessing the strategic relationship between agencies and their clients or through, between other strategic partners.
[00:08:19] Adam Turinas: And a friend, another friend of mine who's a doctor said, you know what, the methodology that you're talking about would be hyper relevant to healthcare because the relationship between the physicians [00:08:30] and their healthcare systems, and they're dependent on each other, is broken. So I thought, okay, well, why not?
[00:08:37] Adam Turinas: We could go pitch that to some hospitals. I, so I, we went off to our first meeting together to meet with the board of, of a healthcare system in New Jersey. And when I walked into the hospital, I realized I, the last time I'd been in a hospital, which is where my son had been born 20 years beforehand. And I thought, uh, I walked into the meeting and I literally hadn't a clue [00:09:00] what anybody was saying.
[00:09:00] Adam Turinas: It was like, I'd walked, I'd gone into a. Meeting full of Martians. It was their language. I don't know what they were talking about. Thankfully, my partner happened to be a physician, so he could translate what they were saying. And between the two of us, we were able to actually kind of figure out what our value was going to be to them.
[00:09:20] Adam Turinas: And so we, that business then morphed actually into a software business. I'll spare you all the gory details about running a technology company, but it took me [00:09:30] about a year. to really feel, to get over the imposter syndrome of, of being in healthcare and to feel like I could have a conversation in the c suite of a healthcare organization and feel like I actually understood, understood the conversation in the room and could add some value.
[00:09:49] Adam Turinas: And that's, and then it took then over the next I've been doing this for the past seven or eight years with a software company, I then learned how hard it is to actually sell into healthcare systems and how complicated [00:10:00] it is. And so, you know, when I, when I set up Health Launchpad, I realized it's like people in this industry get how hard it is.
[00:10:07] Adam Turinas: And so having, working with a company like mine. where we can actually help, you know, we, they don't have to teach us how to take teachers healthcare. In fact, in many cases, we're teaching our clients aspects of healthcare that they didn't realize. Um, so that's, and that's why I've, I've, I've specialized.
[00:10:27] Adam Turinas: Yeah.
[00:10:28] Corey Quinn: And that's a, that's a big [00:10:30] benefit. I mean, you're, you're doing, and I'll use shorthand, but you're doing ABM for your, your health tech clients. You know, for these big, big hospital systems. And so doing it day in, day out, you're going to, you're going to learn things about their business to your point that they don't, they don't even realize yet cause they don't spend all of your day all day in marketing.
[00:10:47] Corey Quinn: Right. And so that's, that's an extreme value, value add that I saw even in my time at Scorpion with, with attorneys and whatnot. That's
[00:10:55] Adam Turinas: right. Yeah. Well, just on that point, and it's, you know, I [00:11:00] think that in my days before healthcare, yeah. Um, I thought actually coming from the agency business, this traditional agency business, when somebody said healthcare marketing, I thought they were talking about pharmaceuticals, life sciences, pharmaceuticals.
[00:11:13] Adam Turinas: It never occurred to me that people would, you know, that people would sell to a hospital or the, you know, alternative health insurance company. And the deeper you get into, the more complex you realize it is. And so the nuances within it. are extraordinary. And, and, [00:11:30] and to, uh, it was quite interesting why we just completed a project with a very large company, it'll remain nameless, it's a confidential project.
[00:11:38] Adam Turinas: And they were looking to enter, they're in the healthcare provider, the hospital based market, but they're looking to expand into the insurance, health insurance market. And they knew enough to be dangerous, but they really didn't feel they knew how that, how this, This, you know, this, this segment within healthcare board.
[00:11:57] Adam Turinas: So we had, went out and conducted some first [00:12:00] party research and were able to create a really precise buyer journey for them. And so, you know, that's the kind of thing which, you know, if you're, if you're in it, if you're in that market and you understand it and you can bring that level of specialism to it, it does set
[00:12:16] Corey Quinn: you apart.
[00:12:16] Corey Quinn: Sure. I imagine from a competitive perspective, you're, you're creating a moat. around your business with regard to all of the other generalists or people in healthcare who, you know, like for instance, in, you know, [00:12:30] uh, dentists are, you could, you could say fall within the, the umbrella of industry of healthcare of which there are private practices.
[00:12:39] Corey Quinn: There are DSOs, which are multi location back office type of things. And there's, there's a lot of complexity there. And so for your business, The fact that you've focused in on the art and science of selling of helping businesses to sell to hospital systems of which I have some personal professional experience having worked at [00:13:00] Scorpion and I'm familiar with those long buying cycles with Many stakeholders at the long board table where you're doing the formal suit and tie pitches.
[00:13:08] Corey Quinn: I mean, it's, it is a serious, serious thing. So from a competitive perspective, being able to go in there, speak the language, use the jargon, you know, go toe to toe on that front, that's all awesome. But how do you then, how big, how many of competitors are there in your space who, let's say, have gone that, gone that same distance and could be able to do the same [00:13:30] type of things in that, in that boardroom?
[00:13:32] Corey Quinn: So
[00:13:32] Adam Turinas: I, I could, I could name them on one hand, uh, and still have a few things left actually. I think there are three other firms, actually no, four other firms that I can think of. that only do healthcare technology and services. And, you know, then there are a few firms that have a strong, that sort of a B2B agencies with a strong healthcare practice.
[00:13:58] Adam Turinas: However, I know, [00:14:00] you know, that I don't, we never, funny enough, we never, it's very, very rare. that we lose to a competitor. The biggest competition that we have is, well, there's, there's two. One is inertia, you know, like it's just, I think we're not going to do it. But, but the other, the other big, big thing, and this was a really sort of tough lesson for me coming back into the agency business after being out of it for a decade, is that our biggest [00:14:30] competitor is in house.
[00:14:32] Adam Turinas: And so, you know, we started work with a client the other day, and they're very excited about the work we're going to do with them. And we're going to, we're helping them get up the A, the ABM curve. But they've already told us to us, they, the CEOs, you know, I was in a meeting with the CEO and the head of marketing and the CEO team, so it's great.
[00:14:48] Adam Turinas: So when you, when these guys have taught you how to do it, you're gonna take this inhouse, right? Yeah. Okay, good . And it's like, okay.
[00:14:54] Corey Quinn: Okay. Wow. Right. Well, I think charged you more Well, I, I'll, I'll [00:15:00] say that. And that typically, I've seen that in my own experience happen typically more often when it is a larger enterprise y type of, like a type of business.
[00:15:10] Corey Quinn: Whereas, let's say on the other hand, an attorney, a small law firm, a couple of attorneys, they're not going to go through the effort to build up a whole marketing team. However, at a hospital system, a multi billion dollar, multi location business that has definitely a, you know, a huge investment in marketing.
[00:15:29] Corey Quinn: Yeah, [00:15:30] thinking about this idea of, well, this is just a new skill set that we need to train for, we'll hire this specialty agency, we'll, we'll learn what we need to learn, and then we'll sort of How do you, how do you come back, combat that? Well,
[00:15:42] Adam Turinas: I tell you, this goes back to my, actually goes back to my agency days and also my software days, which is, frankly, I would say on the software side, we were probably even more effective at expanding an existing customer than winning new customers.
[00:15:58] Adam Turinas: In fact, there was a couple of [00:16:00] years where we, you know, we added some logos, but not as, but most of our growth actually came from existing customers. And the same on the agency side, I, you know, and I, I had a relationship with one client where we 10X'ed it over five years, and that's down to two things.
[00:16:17] Adam Turinas: It's down to number one, you know, the, it's down to listening and listening really hard at what, to make sure that you really understand what the challenges are that your client [00:16:30] has. And then looking for opportunities to deliver additional value. So they're always looking for help with something, you know, and say, for example, with one of our clients.
[00:16:40] Adam Turinas: You know, we've been training them, you know, kind of teaching them how to do ABM and to do certain aspects of marketing and actually introducing them to vendors that we work with. And now they've added some teammates and they're going to kind of take a lot of that in house. So that part, you know, so the marketing team is, you know, we've still got a great relationship.
[00:16:59] Adam Turinas: We're still [00:17:00] working with them, but the amount, the sort of the level has gone down, but in the process, we also understood that. They're trying to really change up the way that their customer success people engage with their clients. They were trying to improve customer experience, like transform it. And so we've done some work in that area and we were able to show them some work that we did.
[00:17:25] Adam Turinas: for, um, a healthcare franchise called Restore where we [00:17:30] basically developed a playbook to train their clinicians how to be salespeople. And so we're going to do that work for them. And so we've just moved, we've kind of moved department. And the way that I've done this is I've kind of, you know, I, I, I think of the agency as being a collective.
[00:17:50] Adam Turinas: And so there's, you know, there's a core of about half a dozen people. That are essentially full time, right? But then there's an extended team of [00:18:00] specialists who've got their own businesses. But who I, I know well enough and, and, and trust them and I bring them on to do specialist things like for example, public relations.
[00:18:11] Adam Turinas: And that allows me to sort of add to existing relationships or just transform the relationship so that it, it, it just, it, it more, the relationship morphs according to the client's needs. So what we start off doing. Might not be what we're doing with them a year or two [00:18:30] later, but we continue to have a relationship and to be a, be a, be of service to them.
[00:18:34] Adam Turinas: Makes
[00:18:34] Corey Quinn: sense. Especially, you know, every business are always solving complex, challenging problems. If you have a great relationship and if you're able to help in an area like that, that's a really smart way to grow and to maintain sort of that valuable
[00:18:47] Adam Turinas: relationship. Yeah. I mean, typically our point of entry.
[00:18:52] Adam Turinas: is account based marketing. So that's it. But what happens is over the course of the relationship, they say, hey, could you help us with [00:19:00] this? And that's where, yeah, yeah, funnily enough, we could.
[00:19:03] Corey Quinn: I love that. So previous to recording, we actually had a chat about how you, you grow the agency and how you attract new healthcare clients.
[00:19:11] Corey Quinn: And you had some pretty interesting ideas and things you guys do. Would you mind just kind of talking broadly about how, how do you, how do you grow and how do you find new, new clients?
[00:19:21] Adam Turinas: I'll give you a little story about how I actually kind of backed into it because it wasn't my plan. So, I did a lot of preparation to launch the [00:19:30] company.
[00:19:31] Adam Turinas: And what I was going to do was, you know, launch it, go to HIMSS, the annual show, and I was going to walk the floor, see all, you know, various, reconnect with various friends and sort of network, and that was how I was going to get customers. Then I was going to go to another couple of health tech shows, and I was going to do this globally.
[00:19:48] Adam Turinas: And I, I, uh, launched the company on March 6th at noon, and at March 6th at 12. 01, HIMSS, the big annual trade show, was [00:20:00] cancelled. And then South by Southwest was cancelled, and then HIMSS International was cancelled, and, and, and, and, and. And so I was like, hmm, that's, uh, this is interesting. And so, It forced me to do something I've always wanted to do, which is take a much more content led approach to marketing.
[00:20:18] Adam Turinas: And what we've developed is what I call my four corner marketing strategy. So I'll take you through the four corners. So the cornerstone of it is content. [00:20:30] So we write a blog post every week, an article, and we publish that across multiple channels. We do, we have a podcast, uh, it's called the Health Tech Marketing Show.
[00:20:39] Adam Turinas: We, we do that like this on podcast and on, uh, YouTube as well. And then we, we then turn that into written content as well. And so we're always publishing content. We've produced hundreds of. pieces of content in the last three years. So that's the first Kip Cornerstone. The second is a [00:21:00] very intentional strategy with SEO.
[00:21:03] Adam Turinas: So one of the things that I personally invested in was an SEO consultant who's actually now part of the team to create, to help me figure out what words we were going to try and dominate. And what's happened as a result of that combined with the content is that our traffic has gone up 10x over two years.
[00:21:24] Adam Turinas: And I would say 70 percent of the traffic we get on the [00:21:30] website is through non branded keywords. So that means basically 70 percent of the people who come to the website have never heard of us when they get there. But until they get there. The third aspect to it is social media. So I've used social media as like the, it's the, it's, it's our channel, you know, it's our TV, you know, it's like, uh, it's, I used to call it the Adam channel, but it's the health launchpad channel.
[00:21:52] Adam Turinas: And so every, I, I'd send out connection requests every day. I work really hard on following the right [00:22:00] people and trying to build a relationship so that I get following back. And that builds up the following, I publish, you know, I post on LinkedIn every day. I just, you know, I just use LinkedIn. To the max, and it's, and I do that because it basically amplifies all of, all of the content.
[00:22:18] Adam Turinas: And then the third thing is partnership. So I, for example, I've got a partnership with HIMSS where we've been an educational partner on marketing for three years. And there are other companies that we've partnered with as well, and that helps to sort of [00:22:30] extend out to their audience. And I know it works because I've analyzed the source of business, and so 50 percent of the business comes from referrals.
[00:22:41] Adam Turinas: And the other 50 percent is cold business, which has come in inbound and the people said, so for example, a client the other day, a new client started with us. And I said, so how did you hear about us? And he said, well, I, I, I read, I watched one of your webinars, I think about a year ago. And I've been following, oh no, I [00:23:00] googled, uh, a healthcare a BM, and I came to, and I've been following you ever since, but it was never the right time, and now's the right time.
[00:23:08] Adam Turinas: And, and about half the business has come that way. And then on the referral side, the other, it, it, it strongly influences that. And so it's the four Corners content, SEO, social and Partnership. Um, and partnership.
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[00:24:40] Corey Quinn: I'd love to learn a little bit more about the partnership piece because it's interestingly very overlooked from a, at least in my experience, from an agency perspective, is looking to specialize in a vertical, you know, hymns, as you've mentioned now is.
[00:24:56] Corey Quinn: My understanding is it's a technology related healthcare [00:25:00] association. They have a huge conference where everyone comes out. And you, through your tech company, you had already had a presence at their shows. Maybe, did you have a relationship with that at that time? Or was this, was this a new, yeah?
[00:25:13] Adam Turinas: Yeah, I'd been, well exactly, I'd been a customer.
[00:25:16] Adam Turinas: But, um, well, you know, this was actually sort of, you know, uh, uh, uh, when, uh, w When COVID happened, you probably experienced this too, you know, I got, I joined a bunch of [00:25:30] networking groups and it was an old friend of mine, a guy who used to work with at Ogilby, you know, a thousand years ago, and he had this networking group of people who got together on Fridays and we just got Talk about, you know, zoom, a big zoom call and there was somebody on it who happened to be on the HMSA's advisory board.
[00:25:47] Adam Turinas: And she said, look, I think I'd like to introduce you to, to, to, to them. And so I got connected in with them and it was at the time when they were looking to create new programs for their clients, where they could actually [00:26:00] educate them about things like account based marketing. And that's how it got started.
[00:26:04] Adam Turinas: And so they sponsor a lot of what we do together and, but there are others as well. Like, for example, I did some work with this, uh, ABM company called Bombora and. You know, I've done some, had some other partnerships as well. They're hard to make sustainable. You know, there's a lot of partnerships you drift in and out of.
[00:26:21] Adam Turinas: And, uh, it's something I, I think of, of the four, I think of the four corners. It's the one where I don't think we've quite, you know, fully cracked it, but we're probably further along than [00:26:30]
[00:26:30] Corey Quinn: many companies. Well, I'll share, I'll share an anecdote from my time at Scorpion, which was a agency that focused on seven or eight verticals, if you, depending on how you define them.
[00:26:41] Corey Quinn: And within. Legal, let's call that an industry. There are personal injury attorneys and criminal defense attorneys and family law attorneys. Each of those have their own associations and many associations and groups and conferences. And what we made the mistake, the fatal, not fatal, but I would say it was, it was definitely a waste, a [00:27:00] wasteful decision was we, we just joined a lot of associations by, you know, filling out the online membership form and paying the fee.
[00:27:07] Corey Quinn: We were, you know, a vendor on their list and what we realized pretty soon was we weren't getting any value, any of, out of any of the associations that we had paid to be a part of, that we were also not investing in, right? So the idea that. It sounds like for him, you're providing them with educational material and you're helping them to further their own cause.
[00:27:28] Corey Quinn: And I kind of, I [00:27:30] likened it to, it's like, you know, it's like joining a gym and not actually going to get good to go work out. You're not going to get any results that way. Yeah. The advice
[00:27:40] Adam Turinas: I give is, yeah, you really do. And I'll tell you, this is something which is, you know, for my software days, I, I was burned by a lot of partnership, partnerships.
[00:27:49] Adam Turinas: So I'll, I can remember. You know, we, we, Verizon was courting us to become a partner. And I thought, this is really good. This can make us. And I go, I mean, it went through the process, trying to fill out all these [00:28:00] forms and all this process. And, and then it was like, we actually got to the point of consummating it.
[00:28:05] Adam Turinas: And I realized at that point, well, the partnership was basically, we bought their data from them, and then we could sell that data. And they wouldn't really guarantee anything in return. So I said, well, why is this a partnership? Well, you get to buy our data at a discount. I don't want you to, I just want you to promote me.
[00:28:23] Adam Turinas: Right, exactly. Or we might do. Yeah. Or we'll do that. You can be, you know, in our booth at, you know, a [00:28:30] trade show or whatever. I was like, yeah, fine. So
[00:28:32] Corey Quinn: I'm, I'm curious, do you do ABM for your own
[00:28:35] Adam Turinas: business? Yes, we do. Uh, yeah, yeah. The funny thing is, is a little bit of Shoemaker's Children. Of course. Because, uh, Because we focused on, we have heavily focused on inbound and the inbounds work, so, you know, we haven't had an urgency to do it, but we have been doing it for the last year.
[00:28:57] Adam Turinas: And one of the things actually, so another partner is an [00:29:00] ABM platform called Propensity. And so when we work with clients, they don't actually need to go out and buy an ABM platform, like a demand base or anything like that, because we can basically, they can have it as a service with us. And we use that for ourselves.
[00:29:12] Adam Turinas: And so, for example, you know, I know we've, we've got a, you know, a target account list. So we've gone through the hundreds of companies out there that are healthcare tech, you know, healthcare technology. And we've come up with a list, you know, a defined target account list that we think is sort of our [00:29:30] ideal customer profile.
[00:29:31] Adam Turinas: And we, uh, we use, uh, the intent data that's so third party intent data to identify who appears to be in market for the types of things that we do. And then we run advertising to them. And then in addition to that, you know, we know when they've been on the website. And, and then in addition to that, you know, they are sort of the, the, I've got a list within sales navigator of the marketing people within those.
[00:29:58] Adam Turinas: And I'm, I'm, [00:30:00] you know, nurturing those relationships. And, you know, so for example, yeah, there's all sorts of things that we do. To, to try and get, you know, to try and get close. Do you, um, I wouldn't, I, I would say, you know, that we've not, I didn't say we haven't cracked it. I mean, inbound, I think we've got a good engine going on the ABN side of things.
[00:30:18] Adam Turinas: Like many of our clients, we're still, you know, perfecting it for ourselves. Yeah. But you know, we're very excited about, about doing it and it's, you know, we're getting some traction with it. Do you
[00:30:29] Corey Quinn: have a, [00:30:30] uh, salesperson on staff or is it mostly yourself who's managing the, uh, the new relationship, like closing new deals?
[00:30:36] Adam Turinas: So there's, uh, another principal in the firm, a guy called Bob Blount, but, and Bob is, the way I think about Bob is like, I call myself as like a marketing guy who knows a lot about selling, cause I've done a lot of selling. And Bob is like, as a sales guy who knows a hell of a lot about marketing. So, uh, Bob, uh, was a very senior sales guy at Dell for many years, but he also worked in healthcare technology.
[00:30:56] Adam Turinas: He started some health tech companies. Awesome. worked in, [00:31:00] in various aspects of health tech. And some of them actually were, it were agencies where he was essentially in a kind of a strategy and sales role. And so he's helping to expand the business. And. What's been great about having him as part of the team is in addition to having somebody else to go out and sell, he brings a different skill set.
[00:31:18] Adam Turinas: And so, you know, I sort of, we've got a new offering around Polaric Enablement, which basically means. Helping sales and marketing teams improve their [00:31:30] performance and their processes. And that's where things like a customer, customer experience playbook comes into it, comes into it. So, you know, the, you know, so between the two of us, you know, we're out there doing all the selling and then I've got some fantastic people who are on the team who join me in sales teams, sales meetings.
[00:31:51] Adam Turinas: You
[00:31:51] Corey Quinn: know, it's, it's interesting. I talked to a lot of agency owners and some of them are very happy owning the sales motion. In fact, they demand it [00:32:00] because relationships are so key and critical and setting up the right expectations and all of that is part of what you get by working with this agency.
[00:32:07] Corey Quinn: And there are others that, that prefer to work with the sales team. And I, I ask because it's always interesting to hear. You know, the, the experience of hiring sales as a founder or CEO, who's not done that before. There's always so much learning there, you know, that I imagine through your tech company, you've already went through that.
[00:32:27] Corey Quinn: But I got
[00:32:28] Adam Turinas: a couple of anecdotes for you. [00:32:30] So quick one was. In my software company, we hired multiple salespeople and they all failed. The only people who could sell was myself and the partner. And unfortunately, it meant that the business wasn't scalable. So it got to a sort of medium size and then we sold it.
[00:32:44] Adam Turinas: And so, you know, I don't, I look at that as a failure, actually. Not as, not, not as, as a sort of anything that reflected well on me. Interestingly, so early on in the life of Health Launchpad, when it was really just me and a couple of other people doing a bit of freelance work, I was a fractional [00:33:00] CMO. And I was hired as a fractional CMO for this telehealth company.
[00:33:05] Adam Turinas: And as I joined them, they said, well, we're in the process of hiring an agency. And, um, we've got this agency who were named nameless. They are one of the hottest digital agencies. They're one of the top inbound agencies. And the sales experience was fantastic. I mean, just like they would, it's like this, this is a SaaS company with my client.
[00:33:28] Adam Turinas: They were saying, they were taking notes and [00:33:30] saying that this is stuff we've got to be doing. Like they were using Vidyard and they were using their technique with their closing. It was fabulous. The, after we got, after we hired them, and they told us, oh, they've got tons of healthcare experience. The healthcare experience was there was somebody who had maybe two or three years working experience.
[00:33:51] Adam Turinas: Smart young guy, but very green, who had worked sort of like in an ancillary role on one, one client which [00:34:00] had nothing to do with what we did, and nobody else on the team had a clue about healthcare. Okay, so, all right, we'll teach you healthcare. The experience of working with them was so bad. that we fired, we had a six, they wanted a year long retainer.
[00:34:13] Adam Turinas: We gave 'em a six month retainer. We actually fired them after 60 days. Wow. And we negotiated, uh, out, and it was, we made, we got to the point, we made their life so unpleasant. They just wanted out anyway. And I, I then turned to the CEO of that, of the company I was doing [00:34:30] as a fractional cmo. Said, look, I'm so incensed by this experience.
[00:34:33] Adam Turinas: I just, I've got a group of freelancers. I'm actually going to make this real and turn this into an agency. And we'll, we'll basically be your agency on a marketing as a service basis. And he said, all right, fine. Go ahead and do it. And so he said, and it'll be cost you less too, by the way. And he said, well, I've got nothing to lose.
[00:34:48] Adam Turinas: Um, otherwise you've got something to lose cause you screw up. I'm going to fire you. It's like, all right, don't worry. And that's how we got started. Uh, so I called it my, my spite agency. I don't know if you're familiar with, you know, Larry David's [00:35:00] Curb Your Enthusiasm. You know, he had a, his Spike coffee shop called Marti Lounge.
[00:35:07] Adam Turinas: This is my, this is my, Joe's a Marti Lounge. This is my Spike agent. He was so expensive. And it was expensive too. And it was so bad. And I, you know, this agent, this, this agent is very successful. So they probably. Just, I think we were very small for them. So they gave us sort of the, you know, very junior team and said, here's the playbook, [00:35:30] go, you know, go do what you're going to do.
[00:35:31] Adam Turinas: But yeah, it was, it was awful.
[00:35:34] Corey Quinn: And you've been, if you're around long enough, you go through at least one of those experiences with an agency, a really slick sales team experience. And then on the back end, it's a different, different world. So, but yeah, she just reminded me just how truly important. Sales investing in a great sales process, you know, preceded by a wonderful marketing team and a marketing messaging differentiation and all that stuff.
[00:35:58] Corey Quinn: But leading into a [00:36:00] wonderful world class sales experience is just truly priceless for any business. I come from a sales background. And so, yeah,
[00:36:08] Adam Turinas: sorry. And actually I, we, uh, I have a sales process that I have used for 15 years. So different stages and I use it to forecast the pipeline and it gets us focused on where we are in the sales process and it works and I, and, you know, I can forecast with a, you know, a relatively high [00:36:30] degree of confidence.
[00:36:31] Adam Turinas: It's certainly not a hundred percent, but it's, it's, it's better than, you know, if a
[00:36:35] Corey Quinn: salesperson said that when someone was a hundred percent, they would lose credibility with me. So,
[00:36:43] Corey Quinn: so taking like a, like a kind of step back. a little bit with regard to, you know, just taking a vertical market approach. You were, you were in the agency space at Organic, I believe, and then Health.
[00:36:54] Adam Turinas: Ogilvy. I worked at Ogilvy. I worked at Organic. I [00:37:00] worked at Gray. Definitely deep in the
[00:37:01] Corey Quinn: agency space. Yeah.
[00:37:02] Corey Quinn: Deep in the big agencies. Yep. And you made your way into health tech, software, and then now you're in, you're an agency. If you were advising, let's say a junior founder in the agency space, who's thinking about specializing in a vertical, it could be healthcare, it could be, you know, hospital systems or probably not, you know, it could be anything.
[00:37:26] Corey Quinn: What advice would you have for them as they're thinking about taking more of a [00:37:30] vertical approach? Pick a
[00:37:31] Adam Turinas: niche, and then find a niche within the niche, and then, and make yourself really good at that. Because, it's very easy to, I think, you know, I, I, I almost made this mistake of saying, Yeah, health tech's too small.
[00:37:48] Adam Turinas: No, it's not. It's hundreds of billions of dollars. And there's, there's, there's a big need and I don't have an aspiration to create the next, you know, WPP, you know, I'm [00:38:00] quite happy if this is, you know, we're, we are, uh, we're doing really well with seven figure agency and, you know, maybe get to eight figures, but I'm not, I'm no, I don't want to be this to be a hundred, 200 million.
[00:38:10] Adam Turinas: I have no, no aspiration to do that. Um, it's just not, no interest. So, but, so finding niche. And then figure out what your niche is within the niche. So our niche within the niche is ABM. And so that's, you know, we are the healthcare ABM experts. And that, the reason why you want to do that is that [00:38:30] as long as you've, you know, you've identified the need.
[00:38:32] Adam Turinas: So there was a need for ABM. I knew there was a need based on the work that I was doing with, with HIMSS. And once you Figure that out and you're experts at it. Businesses then start coming to you. That's why, you know, we do well on inbound. It's because, you know, people are interested in that. And so, you know, be the number one.
[00:38:54] Adam Turinas: If you're good at SEO, go be the number one SEO agency in healthcare. [00:39:00] You know, there's probably a handful of agencies already doing it. But you're, but again, you know, you're competing. You know, like I said, there's, there's less than 10, maybe less than five companies in health tech, agencies in health tech that are competing for the business of well over a thousand potential customers out there.
[00:39:22] Adam Turinas: Most of my clients I'd never heard of before they became clients. And so, you know, your, your, again, the car, your [00:39:30] competition is most likely not going to be other agencies. It's going to be in house capabilities. I, and I'll tell you, I, in the last year, I started to drift. I just say, Hey, you know, I wrote this book called Total Customer Growth, which is a general ABM book.
[00:39:44] Adam Turinas: And I wrote it for a number of reasons. But one of which was give, give us an ability to get out of healthcare and to serve non healthcare businesses. And I'll tell you what, sort of this blinding glimpse of the obvious, which is we're really good at ABM and we're really good at healthcare. [00:40:00] Yeah. Well, once you get out, get rid of out, and it's like, well, then I'm really good at ABM.
[00:40:04] Adam Turinas: And there are hundreds of agencies out there that are really good at ABM. And there are tens of thousands of companies. It's like, it's, it becomes really, it suddenly becomes. Hard to figure out who you're going after and why they should, why they should do business with you. Yeah, I
[00:40:18] Corey Quinn: think about it in terms of if you're going to specialize, you can specialize in two ways.
[00:40:22] Corey Quinn: You can specialize in what you do, ABM in your case, and who you do it for, uh, hospital systems. When you combine, when you're, when [00:40:30] you're an expert in both. You specialize against both. You see the evidence in your business where you're, you're a, you know, in a small pond, small competitive pond. There's a thousand big businesses or funded businesses that are willing, that have the need that you solve and you're competing against, as you said, a small, small group of competitors and you're able to, in two years, you know, maybe in change.
[00:40:52] Corey Quinn: You're able to, from an SEO perspective, be able to rank competitively, get, you know, quality leads coming in on [00:41:00] keywords that, that otherwise I'm sure would be very hard to be able to rank for, especially in two years. So I think that what you've done is a great example of specializing in both, you know, what you do and how you, uh, and who you serve in a way that's really working for
[00:41:13] Adam Turinas: you.
[00:41:14] Adam Turinas: Yeah, and I'm really the other thing is I'm really enjoying it, but I'm enjoying it because I'm continuing to learn Yeah, the fact I've been doing you know, you know be in health tech Yeah, I've been in health tech for 15 years, which actually for many companies not that long But I'm still learning a lot about the [00:41:30] market because the markets evolving And the problems that we're solving are interesting enough.
[00:41:34] Adam Turinas: So, you know, that, it fuels the passion of our, of the team, right? There's, we're solving interesting problems. We're not getting bored, just like, okay, we're going to build another, you know, HubSpot website for another client. Well, let me ask
[00:41:46] Corey Quinn: you, I mean, you wrote, you went, you went through the trouble of writing a book.
[00:41:49] Corey Quinn: I'm finishing writing a book and it is. Like very painful, at least it is for me in a good way, but, uh, yeah. And with an idea that, Hey, this is going to [00:42:00] help us to expand outside of, uh, healthcare and through that process, you realize truly how special the thing you've built is, uh, those are my words, but effectively that's what I'm getting.
[00:42:11] Corey Quinn: That's right. Yeah, that's right. What are the downsides or the negatives or potential negatives of taking a niche or a verticalized approach in your mind?
[00:42:18] Adam Turinas: Will never be a hundred million dollar agency. And that's, that's something I care about. It's not a problem. I can't think of any other downsides. Yeah, I guess the other downside is, you know, the budgets are not huge, right?
[00:42:29] Adam Turinas: [00:42:30] So there are no IBMs and Procter and Gambles. You know, that spend, you know, perhaps P& G probably spends, well, I think 10 years ago, they were spending over a billion dollars a year in advertising. So, you know, now it's probably 2 or 3 billion, right? You know, there's no, I, I, I haven't found yet the sort of the golden goose health tech clients that will support a 200 person team.
[00:42:56] Adam Turinas: So when I was at Organic. I ran the Bank of America account, [00:43:00] and at one point we had 200 people working on the business. I don't think that's, that exists in health tech. So to me, personally, that's like, I don't have a, last thing I want to do is run a 200 person team, me dependent on one piece of business.
[00:43:14] Adam Turinas: But it does mean that you've got to stay nimble, right? And so maintaining long term relationships is, is much harder than it was in my big agency days. And although, you know, from what I hear of people in the big agencies, it's [00:43:30] even hard for them to keep clients for a long time. So we, you know, we, I find that we don't get fired with clients.
[00:43:35] Adam Turinas: They just take it in house. They just kind of drift away because they just say, Oh, this is great. Thank you very much for teaching us how to do that and introducing us to your, all the various sort of second party resources that you use. We'll just do it ourselves. Which
[00:43:49] Corey Quinn: makes sense why, yeah, your approach of, of, of identifying adjacent problems that you could solve, which is brilliant.
[00:43:56] Corey Quinn: I have one last question for you. What's your [00:44:00] motivation?
[00:44:00] Adam Turinas: I just love what I do. I mean, you know, I, I, I'm at a stage in life where I could, if I wanted to retire. He wasn't that great in Exit, but you know, I don't necessarily have to work. I just love it. I mean, it's just, it's still fun working with clients, working on problems.
[00:44:18] Adam Turinas: And, uh, it's still, you know, I'm proud of the work that we're doing. We're making it feel like we're making a difference. Two, there's someone else, there is one other thing, which is, cause I don't really, you [00:44:30] know, is that there's sort of three parts to the business. You know, it's how we make money, which is consulting.
[00:44:37] Adam Turinas: Then there's two sort of passion things that we do. One is education. So we do coaching and we do, and all the content we create is all educational. The third aspect to it is, is I sort of by sort of a happenstance ended up creating a little network of healthcare CMOs. We did a, I did a webinar with, with him actually, it was a panel of health tech marketing [00:45:00] people and they really got on together well.
[00:45:02] Adam Turinas: And I, so I was the moderator of it. I said, Hey, do you want to kind of keep this going? She said, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do it. So I said, well, I'll organize it. And so we've grown this. And now it's actually a legit network of, and we get together once a month and we'll, you know, talk about an issue that they want to talk about.
[00:45:16] Adam Turinas: And now we've actually got a group of them have actually, are now working with me to run it. And I've no idea what, where that, where that will go. I, you know, I don't, I don't particularly want to necessarily want to commercialize it. But I actually, you know, I'm helping these, [00:45:30] it's sort of by creating this, that it's helping them network with each other.
[00:45:34] Adam Turinas: And so. You know, and they're helping each other try to find jobs and look out for leads and that kind of thing. And that's pretty satisfying. You know, it feels, it feels pretty good.
[00:45:43] Corey Quinn: You use the term, make a difference. And I think that you've, you've certainly made a difference here. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom and your experience with the listeners, with myself.
[00:45:55] Corey Quinn: I learned a lot, Adam. So. Thank you very much for coming on the show. [00:46:00]
[00:46:00] Adam Turinas: Corey, my pleasure. Really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for having me. All
[00:46:04] Corey Quinn: right, folks, that's it for today. I'm Corey Quinn, and I hope you join me again next time for the Vertical Go To Market Podcast. If you receive value from the show, I would love a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.
[00:46:17] Corey Quinn: Thanks, and we'll see you soon.
