Adam Cornwell: Turning CRM Strategy Into Sales Rep Satisfaction

Welcome to Go to Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go to Market is sponsored by Fulcast, the go-to-market cloud. My name is Amy Cook, and I'm so excited to introduce Adam Cornwell, SVP of Operations and Strategy at Health Catalyst. How are you doing, Adam?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Amy.

Thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. I know how busy it is in operations. I know how busy it is in health and digital transformation in healthcare right now is, is so exciting. Also, no joke. And there's a lot happening every day, right?

Yep, for sure. It's, there's always a problem to solve.

That's right. That's right. Well, one of the reasons I was so excited to talk with you, Adam, is could you give us a little bit about your background? I'm really curious about your transition from sales to ops, and I'm also really trend, uh, curious about how you have been working with healthcare. So can you just, uh, start us off with a little about your background?

Sure. So I've been in healthcare sales for over 2 decades. You know, when I started out, I graduated with a background in economics and finance and then quickly found myself thrust into the world of sales rep in the healthcare technology sector, actually working for a company called McKesson back in the day. And that kind of started me on a long career in the healthcare field. And for, again, over 2 decades, I held roles such as individual contributors and sales centers, field sales, new business sales. You name the role, I've probably done it throughout my career. And in the latter parts of my career, I've moved in more sales leadership roles where I ran national sales teams for the US, you know, for $300 million-plus companies in annual revenue. Fast forward to where I am today, I recently transitioned into a role that is more focused on sales operations and growth operations. So kind of taking that experience that I've had from the sales world and translating it to you know, the, the world of operations of how do we design comp plans, how do we manage acquisitions, how do we set up teams for success. And, you know, given my background from a sales perspective, it was a, not an easy transition, but it was a, an eye-opening transition as I moved into this new role.

Well, I think it's so exciting and, and I'm sure the sales team absolutely loves working with you for many reasons, but also because you understand them. You know exactly their pain points, you know exactly what they want to accomplish. And how do you feel about going on the operations side when you have been in sales so many years?

Absolutely. Well, the first part I would say as a positive is there's a lot less travel in operations compared to being a sales rep on the road. So I'm putting a— I'm losing my mileage day by day as my mileage status in Delta and United. But other than that, you know, for me, the reason I moved to this role was It allowed me to gain a more holistic view of the entire revenue engine. So, you know, sales is not just a job for the sales team. Sales is a company mission and it takes sales, it takes marketing, it takes customer success and operations. They all have to work together in order to drive sales and to drive growth in an organization. And just being on the sales side of things for so long, I understood there was a need for that operational aspect or experience if you're to become, you know, a more well-rounded leader and a more valuable asset to an organization. You know, what, what benefit can I bring to my company? What experiences can I bring that will be beneficial to, you know, the executive leadership team? And from a sales and marketing standpoint and customer success, I'm looking at coming in this to try and bring that sales-first perspective. So it's me understanding what the sales team needs to be successful. I've been in their shoes, I've gone through deals. I understand that instead of just focusing on, well, here's some dashboards and reports we want to fill out. Here's the things we want to do. I want to try and figure out how we transform sales operations to becoming more of a, a revenue driver for the company, not just a support aspect, but to say, what value can we bring to the sales team? What tools can we present to them that allows them to be more successful in the field? There's a lot of times, you know, I'm guilty of this myself, you know, that when sales operations or something might run out a new tool or new process, you go, well, How does that help me win deals? How does that help me achieve my quota? And more often than not, a lot of the stuff is, well, we're just doing this because we need to check the box. We're just doing this because we need to meet certain reporting requirements as opposed to what are the stuff that we could focus on that will actually help and save, save time for the person in the field. Because it is difficult when you're on the road, you're flying, you know, your evenings are in an airport, your mornings are in a hotel. Your afternoons are talking to a client and then you're back on a plane in the next place. You really don't have that time to sit down and say, yep, I'm going to go document everything in our CRM tool or things of that nature. So totally figuring out how to make their lives easier and give them more time back to, you know, do what we want them to do, which is be selling, be in front of clients, talking, solving issues. You know, that's where my focus has been.

Well, I really love that. I come up through marketing. I ran an agency where I was like, the owner and the chief salesperson as well. So I understand the pain points of both sales and marketing and the, the junction being so important in helping them, you know, be able to make it, make sales a company-wide initiative. I think that your perspective there is so enlightening and any really successful company I think has to have it that way. Otherwise you get marketing saying, I got all the leads for you and sales going like, these are not good leads, right? It's like kind of that friction. When you make it the entire company goal and you're able to see that entire revenue engine from start to finish, how lucky is Health Catalyst to have you managing that entire process from start to finish? I think that's so exciting. And also, I wanted to just say, I've been in that position many times with operations where I'm like, You're not even trying to help me. You're just trying to like make me compliant. How is this helping me? Right?

Yeah.

And, and that I think is so important. Like, how do you speak to that tooling as a way to enable the sales team?

I think one of the first things that, you know, I really focused on is when coming into this role and, you know, pulling from my experience from the sales side, sales is in one respect, easy to determine, are you doing good or not? It's a very numbers-driven game. You either hit your number or you don't hit your number. You either obtain your quota or you don't obtain your quota. So it's a very black and white, easy to measure and to say, was I successful this year? Yes or no. When I moved into the operations component, it really became apparent that there wasn't quite that black and white world of what dictates success. From a sales operations standpoint, from a growth operations standpoint, how do we measure are we actually helping or not? And so for me, one of the things I took across in the transition is really trying to enable my team that I work with to say, hey, we not just, we don't need to think about the problem and how we address the issue, but how do we measure how effective we are before we make these changes compared to after we make these changes? Recent example we did is, you know, we took an overhaul of our CRM tool it's, you know, like all CRM tools that you, you start off with the best intentions and fast forward a couple, 5, 10 years later and the system's a mess. There's fields everywhere, there's data everywhere, you don't know where to look. It's just kind of grown into something different. And we took a step back and said, well, look, this is just hard to navigate. And so we took about a 6-month process where we looked at all the fields, all the data, and really tried to streamline just the workflows of like, hey, let's move things into certain tabs, let's get certain fields off the main screen and onto some back screens that people don't ever need to look at. Let's put stuff that's important in front of the sales reps. And we could have just done that and said, hey, I think we did a good job, pat ourselves on the back. But what we did is we took survey of the sales team before we actually implement this and said, what's your overall satisfaction of this platform, the ease of use? And we got score back of, but average 4 out of 10, you know, kind of what we thought. But after we put that implementation into place, did the upload, pushed out, pushed all the new changes out into the live environment, came back, surveyed them a couple weeks later and said, all right, now what do you think about it? And you know, we saw about a 40% increase on their overall satisfaction with the system. It's not perfect, but it gives us something to point to say, look, we did, we accomplished this, we made these changes, we had an average score of X, now we have an average score of Y, that's a 40% improvement. It's something we can hang our hat on. And it's also trying to get back to, you know, we want to be data-driven. You know, we always talk about an ops, Hey, we want to make the company data-driven, but as a group, we need to be data-driven as well. I don't want to be doing work and having our team working on stuff that doesn't ultimately come back as a data point. We can say, this is what we did, this is what we accomplished.

Yeah, absolutely. That's really exciting that just a 40% lift in, you know, the morale and the, like, people's experience with— that's really exciting. Tell me a little bit more about what Health Catalyst does and how, from an operational perspective, are you informing the healthcare community and working with the healthcare community?

So Health Catalyst is a healthcare technology company, and we focus on providing data analytics solutions to healthcare organizations. That could be data analytics and intelligence, reporting, operational improvement, clinical improvements, financial improvements, et cetera. What we're doing as a company is we're trying to help healthcare be more data informed. People who've worked in healthcare, or maybe if you're not familiar with the healthcare industry, You know, one of the biggest drivers of the US healthcare market today is around the idea of value-based care. So you go into a doctor today and get a procedure done, it's typically called something called fee-for-service, where they do the work, you pay for the work, your insurance pays for it, and you go on your way. And as a healthcare entity in the US, they're in the process of transforming to more of a value-based care world where it's more important to provide value, provide high-quality care. It's not the number of procedures you do, it should be the quality procedures you do, it should be the outcomes that patients receive, not just the fact that you did this many lab tests in the last quarter, etc. So, you know, trying to transform that, that model, that revenue model in healthcare is a very big task. It's a very big industry. It's a huge mountain to climb, but it's something we're committed to as a company and trying to help our customers achieve at the end of the day. And so what we try to do as a company is take the data, take the analytics from their health information systems, from their ambulatory EMRs, from all their different disparate data silos that they have, bring it together so they can look at their patients and their outcomes holistically in a single place and understand what levers do they need to pull to create better clinical outcomes, to create better operational outcomes.

That's so interesting. I come from the skilled nursing industry, so I've been in healthcare marketing or healthcare rev ops for several decades as well. And I was working with several, several companies as part of an agency during this whole transition from the fee-for-service to value-based care. And it's very interesting to kind of watch that change. And it's still very difficult, like right now, census and the quality mix in skilled nursing is still how they drive their P&Ls and everybody just wants the straight Medicare. Nobody wants to go with the HMO and certainly not Medicaid, right?

Yeah.

Getting those fee-for-service is really the lifeblood. So I remember very distinctly the fear in some of our executives' eyes at these different skilled nursing companies when the value-based care came online, you know, with a 30-day readmission rate and trying to implement that and and understand how all of the money flows down from the hospital to the skilled nursing to the home health and all of the intricacies there. So the fact that you're doing that to help all of these companies become data-driven and successful from a value-based care type of model is just absolutely compelling to me and so interesting. So—

Yeah, it's a great industry to be a part of. And just being at Health Catalyst is a great company to be a part of because it's a very mission-driven company. I know being out of Salt Lake City, the focus is on providing those better outcomes, providing better care. And so whether it's, you know, the peers I work with, I mean, everyone has been impacted by healthcare at some point in their life, whether it's them directly or a family member, and be able to step back and say, we're not just selling technology software solutions, but we're providing tools and analytics that at the end of the day, we can point back to a healthcare organization and say, hey, in the last 90 days, we've saved 80 lives because our analytics identified these patients and improved these processes. And if that didn't occur, you know, these 80 people may have died because of sepsis or they may have impacted in a different way. And to be able to not just say, I saved you dollars, which is always important, you know, common saying is without margin, there is no mission. You need to make money. But at the end of the day, it's about the patients they're serving that our healthcare organizations are serving and being able to say we helped and we were a small part of that is something that you can go to sleep every night going, all right, you know, I did, I actually did something good today.

Isn't that amazing? I remember doing, I feel like kind of the low point of my career was when I was designing a website for a company that did infusion. So after you went on a bender all weekend, you could still show up to work on Monday. Like that was their mission. And I thought, you know, that's not a bad thing. It's helping people, but how much better if I can do something a little bit more to help people save their lives, you know? So I really love, I really love what you said about that. Tell me a little bit more coming from sales and now into operations. How is it working with the executive team, specifically the CEO who oftentimes, I mean, that there are technical CEOs and there are operations CEOs, but a lot of times they're sales-led CEOs. So how has your perspective as a sales leader been influenced the way that you communicate with the CEO and drive value in the executive team?

Absolutely. So I think you're right. You know, many CEOs I've worked with over my career and many organizations I've worked with had been very financially driven. Putting a plug in for my current company, I think Dan Byrne, who's a, who's our current CEO, He is one of the most caring individuals I've ever worked with as a CEO. You know, a lot of times I've been in many past companies where the CEOs say, we care, but being at Healthcast is the first place I've ever worked at where you truly feel that from the CEO down, the company's created a culture that, you know, they care about their employees, they care about their customers, they're trying to put those first in every decision we make. And so that's a really nice place to be compared to, you know, maybe some of the other organizations I've been a part in my past. Yeah. But when it comes to working with the executives here at Health Catalyst, and really, quite frankly, any executive, we're trying to take complex data, complex problems, and boil it down to simple data talking points that are actionable. And that's kind of one of the biggest challenges. You know, it's one thing to say, hey, we have this large challenge and here's 50 different data points. You can read data however you want, but it's taking that experience to say, what of all this data that we have in our CRM tool and our marketing tools, how do I use that and provide information to our executive leadership team that can actually influence changes that will be positive for our company's growth and our company's direction? And one of the examples we recently did, and, you know, it's not to say the data is the only point, but the data was definitely a contributing factor, was to say, When we look at our win rates across our clients, you know, how, how do we win when we go after clients who have never done any business with Health Catalyst before compared to how successful are we when we are working and trying to provide more value to our existing clients who might have one product or two products? Is there a difference there? And from my perspective, we came in and said, let's look at that data. Let's, make that analyst and look at the different win rates from a dollar perspective of, hey, how does it compare? And you know, what we found was a 4x difference between a net new business opportunity versus an opportunity that is being cross-sold into our current client base.

Hmm.

And using that information, we packaged it in such a simple way to say, look, this is the difference between these two markets. We should focus more on these markets. It's maybe not about giving the greenfield, you know, everyone loves to talk about, you know, organic growth. I want I love organic growth. I can't count the number of times I've heard that term in my career. Um, and it's great, you know, we would love to have organic growth, but at a certain point in a company's growth and evolution, it's time to step back and go, well, is it really worth it to spend $1 million to try and grow and get 5 more customers, or is it better to spend $1 million and expand your existing large client base threefold more. And so it's about where do you put your limited resources? Where do you place your bets for the following year? And being able to provide that type of insight to our leadership team has helped influence to say, yep, it's not about maybe going to win the new business. It's about how can we bring more value to our 1,000+ clients that we have today? Because there's always something new. There's another challenge you can help them. But ultimately, where does a company want to place their bets going into the following year when it comes to their resource and That makes sense.

I, I love what you're saying. The drum that I've been beating at Fulcast is that revenue operations is the secret sauce to helping companies succeed, and that revenue operations leaders must have a seat at the strategic table because revenue operations people like you are able to see things that other departments just cannot see. When it comes to like the breadth and the depth of the data and what it's telling us in terms of where we should put our limited resources. So I think that what you said exactly articulates why I think revenue operations is so, so important. I love that you guys are acquisitive at Health Catalyst, and I love that you see things in terms of like, is inorganic growth going to get us to our goals faster? Is organic growth going to get us to our goals faster? Is upselling within our current customer base going to get us to our goals faster? So what is your personal opinion on acquisitions and knowing that you are acquisitive, like how have you managed to make that a fairly seamless transition within your company?

It's a good question. So Health Catalyst, you know, we definitely have gone through a number of acquisitions over the last couple of years from a growth perspective. And ultimately those acquisitions, you know, are first dictated by the value that they could bring to our clients. Does this offering or this platform bring additional value and fit in with our strategic direction as an organization? And so once that decision is made to say, yep, you know, this platform would bring value to our clients, we look as a company and say, all right, well now how do we integrate that into our organization? And to get perspective, like we probably, had 7 different companies join our company over the last 3 years. Number actually might be a little bit higher than that. And so that's quite a strain on the sales operations team because at one point it's good to say, great, the cultures fit, the people, that the solutions fit together. 1 and 1 will now equal 3. Everyone gets behind that. And then I think anyone that is in operations can attest to, they drop it on your desk and say, all right, go make all this stuff work together. And you kind of go, okay, this might take a little bit. And they go, well, could you have it done in a couple of weeks as well? And you're like, yeah, that, that might take a little bit longer than a few weeks too. So there's definitely challenges of sometimes you feel like it's an afterthought. Oh, by the way, we got to integrate all this stuff. But when you break it down, we've now done this enough over and over that, you know, we have a very good standardized process to say, hey, every company that comes in has that concern. I'm part of a new company, part of a new culture. What's going to happen. And our first step is to say, hey, let's get them on a call and say, we have a process, it works, we're going to walk you through it. It's going to take 6 to 8 weeks or 12 weeks depending on the size of the company. It could take 6 months. I mean, it really varies depending on the amount of data that we're ingesting and how big the organization is. But ultimately, we have to look at the people, the comp plans, the territories, the systems, the applications. I mean, the list is quite long and it can be quite daunting, but we try and break it down into more bite-sized pieces so we can get the people on board first. I mean, that people are the most important aspect of any acquisition. Are we making sure these people have the right training and understanding of how our systems work? Can we train our staff on the new company and what they're bringing to the table? And why do we acquire them? And how, how's the 1 plus 1 gonna equal 3 going forward? So that's always our first focus is the people. And the messaging and making sure that's really squared away. And then behind the scenes, I have blessed to have a great technical team under me that I can hand off the systems integrations and say, okay, you, we have two separate CRM systems now. How do we get all this data converted over? We have a different set of marketing contacts. How do we get these over? How do we deduplicate them out? How do we make sure we're not just tossing on a mess on top of a mess? Because that was historically what happened to our CRM tool is it became a mess because we just kept tossing more and more junk on it. Well, here's 100 new fields, just add them on. It's like, no, we don't, we don't, do we really need those fields? So we step back, do that analysis, and then ultimately bring over only the data we need and archive the rest for future use if we have to dust that data off in the future. But yeah, integrations or integrations of acquisitions is definitely, quite frankly, could be a full-time department job at Absolutely.

I think it's really interesting with one of our clients that's a very large healthcare organization. We went through that process of cleaning all of their data, redoing all of their sales stages, merging 4 or 5 acquisitions together into one seamless territory model that where they're not on top of each other. You don't have 2 couriers going to the same lab because you didn't have your mapping done correctly, insurance contracts, like all sorts of things that need to be done and considered in a healthcare acquisition that may not be in other types of acquisitions. So the complexity of what you're doing, I think, is just so interesting. One thing that I get hit with a lot, and I wanted to get your opinion on, is do you ever feel like sometimes executive leaders or other people have this idea that that you can just AI it and do it so quickly? Have you ever encountered that?

It's a great question, and yes, more and more often they say, how can we incorporate AI into things? And this may not be the popular opinion out there, but I would say that AI is a great tool and it can be a great asset for moving processes along that maybe have already been standardized. So I mean, one way we use AI at our company is around, documentation. We were having to create PowerPoint slides and screenshots and say, hey, we need to document all of our operational processes in our CRM and our, our marketing tools and things like that. That took a lot of time. It's like, okay, well, there's now an AI tool that you can just plug in and it will record what you're doing and translate it to the words. And it's like, saved us a ton of time. So that perspective, sometimes AI tools are, are very helpful. Other times AI tools, it's like, Well, AI can work, but if you don't have the data foundation that's set up properly for AI, you can't just lay AI on top of crappy data because that can be crappy. And so—

Garbage in and garbage out.

Yeah, it's getting your infrastructure in a spot where it's usable is quite frankly the lion's share of the work. And it's work that we're still actively going through. I mean, I would like to say our data's spotless, but of course it isn't. And every time we add an acquisition on, the data becomes even more messy. So it's like we're— the boat has a leak and we're always bailing water out at all times. So it's never going to be perfect, but that's right, we will keep on top of it to make sure we don't sink. But sometimes the idea of this layering AI on top of something to say that'll automate everything, the reality is, is that it won't work because you need that infrastructure, you need that data to be clean in the first place, right? But you're in a spot where Can you use it in bits and parts of your company to improve some processes? I think absolutely. Very excited in the future to kind of see where it goes. But for many companies that I've been a part of in the past and even my current organization, we're probably not in the right spot to say, hey, let's try and put AI on top of everything. Sometimes it's just, it's the meat and potatoes. We got to do X, Y, and Z to get the job done because, hey, reps want to know how they're doing from an attainment standpoint. How are we doing towards quotas and towards budget? How are we doing with our win rates? Things of that nature. Don't need AI for that. It's really more of just let's make sure we have dashboards and reporting and things of that nature that are available for leadership team members to make their informed decisions.

I love that. It could not be better said. Well, clearly, Adam, you are at the top of your game. It is so awesome to have people like you in healthcare that can help make everyone's digital transformation a lot more successful. What do you do? This is my last question for you is, what do you do to stay at the top of your game? It could be anything from a meditation practice to talking with other teammates. What, what do you do to stay there?

Well, I can definitely say it's not meditation. So, uh, though, then maybe, then maybe I need to try that sometimes. Uh, uh, I, I think for me it's really trying new things and learning new things. I am always a big continual learner and that doesn't always have to be in business. I mean, for me it's, hey, on a personal note, I tried to pick up guitar a year ago and try and teach myself guitar much to the chagrin of my family. You know, my kids and my wife, God bless them. They're like, please go in the basement. I don't want to hear this because it's definitely not pretty, but it's like, I want to try something new. I want to learn something new, add skillset. So whether it's on the personal side of things or, you know, the professional side of things of saying, Hey, we want to come up with better forecasting accuracy in our company. And you know what? There's a lot of different ways you can do forecasting accuracy. And so I was like, all right, well, let me go read some data analytics books and try and teach myself a little bit more from a data analytics standpoint to say, what are different ways that you can measure accuracy and coming up with a way that might work for our company? And so whether it's professional or personal, I would just say learning new things and challenging yourself is a way to keep things fresh and stay on top of your game.

I love that. Thank you so much, Adam. Thank you for all of, all of what you're doing for this industry, and thank you so much for joining the podcast. It was such a pleasure.

All right, appreciate having me on.