How CIENCE Helped a Health Data Science Company Grow Its Sales Pipeline

Sales Development

Precision Analytics Case Study

Key Takeaways

  • Companies relying solely on inbound marketing have fewer opportunities to attract desirable clients. 
  • The onboarding process is a great opportunity to develop a greater understanding of your company’s products, services, and market.
  • Because the biotech industry is thriving, it's a good time for this sector to invest in the future by implementing orchestrated outbound marketing.

About Precision Analytics

Precision Analytics provides analytics and data-related software solutions for biotech and life science companies. The software solutions enable companies to collect, analyze, and understand their data, which helps move their research forward. 

In a world where biotech companies increasingly need to keep up with technological advancements, such as big data, machine learning, and data-driven decision making, Precision Analytics helps companies stay relevant and competitive by harnessing thoughtful automation and cutting edge analytics.

Precision Analytics was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Montreal, Canada. The start-up has wide-ranging experience across different domains, such as bioinformatics, drug discovery, epidemiology, and public health. Precision Analytics has successfully worked alongside large companies and institutions such as Merck, McGill University, and the World Health Organization.

erika-braithwaite
Erika Braithwaite
Co-Founder & CEO
Industry
Biotechnology Research
Website
www.precision-analytics.ca

The Story of Precision Analytics

Before Precision Analytics partnered with CIENCE, the company’s go-to-market strategies consisted exclusively of inbound marketing. Prospects found Precision Analytics mostly through networking, though there were also some referrals and a small amount of organic traffic from search engines and social media

Precision Analytics realized that, in order to grow its business, it would need to adopt a new, more comprehensive strategy that incorporated outbound marketing. 

As a company that conducted outsourced work itself, Precision Analytics knew that bringing in expert partners would be a great way to increase value by reducing the time to ROI (return on investment). 

Using Google’s search engine, Precision Analytics connected and spoke with ten different outbound marketing companies. Impressed by customer reviews, Precision Analytics decided to work with CIENCE.

Challenges & Scope

The major struggle Precision Analytics faced in trying to build an outbound marketing strategy related to its lack of hands-on experience. By bringing in an experienced partner, Precision Analytics could ensure that its outbound messaging was top-notch, giving a great opportunity to convert many new customers.

 

Challenges

A major challenge confronting Precision Analytics was that its lack of outbound marketing was severely inhibiting its growth. Relying exclusively on an inbound marketing approach can lead to fewer opportunities to attract desirable clients. With inbound, a company must wait for new clients to get referred or to stumble across its LinkedIn page. Precision Analytics wanted to be able to go out and actively target the kind of clients for whom its value proposition was built. 

The problem, however, was that Precision Analytics’ team did not have the requisite experience and knowledge to create a successful outbound strategy. It's hard to set up a sales development team if you don't have a sales background or outreach experience.

Need

Realizing that it would need guidance to best navigate outbound, Precision Analytics looked for a company that could help build and execute its strategy. It also needed a partner who would be ready and willing to explain new concepts in detail.

Importantly, Precision Analytics wanted to take a flexible approach to outbound. Given that it was still a fairly small start-up, building an in-house team would be too great of a commitment. Furthermore, given that Precision Analytics had never conducted outbound, it couldn’t be sure that it would find a satisfactory ROI. Precision Analytics wanted the freedom to easily scale up or down its outbound marketing operations as it saw fit.

Opportunity

Having never conducted an outbound campaign before, Precision Analytics had a great opportunity with CIENCE to rapidly schedule many qualified sales meetings. Moreover, Precision Analytics had the opportunity to learn more about its business. When completing the onboarding process, Precision Analytics would be prompted to answer questions that it hadn’t yet thought about in-depth. This would invariably lead to a comprehensive understanding of its own products and services, without which a company cannot improve or move forward.

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Why CIENCE?

A key part of the unique solution CIENCE offered Precision Analytics was the comprehensive onboarding process. This is especially important for clients such as Precision Analytics who enter the partnership without experience in outbound marketing.

During onboarding, CIENCE helped Precision Analytics identify its ideal customer profile and gain a greater understanding of the industries and clients it was trying to target. CIENCE inquired into Precision Analytics’ pain points and helped the company understand how to solve these. Finally, CIENCE created the marketing copy that would be sent out to prospective leads. More than anything else, it was this time spent onboarding that set this campaign up for success.

The custom campaign strategy which CIENCE created for Precision Analytics positioned the messaging around the company’s co-founder and CEO, Erika Braithwaite. CIENCE’s team thought that this approach would best serve Precision Analytics because it would facilitate relationship building. From this initial template, each separate message was customized to make every touch more human and thus more likely to be engaged with. 

This messaging was then delivered via CIENCE’s orchestrated omnichannel approach, whereby prospective clients are reached through different channels, such as email, LinkedIn, and telephone calls, in a precise order and at exactly the right time. This method has been proven to cut through background noise, which is what’s needed in today's marketplace to get prospective clients’ attention.

 

Results

Precision Analytics’ partnership with CIENCE began in November 2021 and ran until February 2022. Every week, CIENCE’s team submitted a list of approximately 175 potential leads that Precision Analytics then verified. The two teams met biweekly to discuss how the campaign was performing across the different sales channels and verticals. 

The campaign resulted in a dramatic increase in awareness of the company’s services. More importantly, over twenty high-quality appointments were booked for Precision Analytics’ sales team.

“CIENCE was fantastic,” said Erika Braithwaite, co-founder and CEO of Precision Analytics. “They consistently met and surpassed our expectations, were extremely efficient and organized, and their whole onboarding process was seamless. Everyone on their team was very professional and receptive to feedback.”

The reason this partnership ended in February was that CIENCE had already managed to completely fill the top of Precision Analytics’ sales funnel. CIENCE scheduled more appointments than Precision Analytics’ team could support at the moment.

 

“We’re not walking away from the service completely; it’s just that we didn’t have the resources to take on any more new business,” said Erika Braithwaite.“With CIENCE on our side, we booked more calls than we could’ve ever done on our own. We closed one contract and now have five in negotiation. In that regard, CIENCE definitely helped our small firm populate its sales pipeline.”

Once Precision Analytics has converted and absorbed these contracts, the start-up will be able to further invest in growing its team. Precision Analytics will then be ready to commit to a new round of outbound marketing to further grow its market share.

The impressive results achieved during this partnership provide a good indication of the current state of the biotech industry. CIENCE’s team is seeing a lot of success and activity throughout the industry. Many biotech companies are incredibly busy, and there is a lot of money circulating. Companies are actively investing for the future right now, and this partnership proves that outbound marketing is a great way to ensure long-term growth.

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Partnership Success

The fact that CIENCE brought in more business than Precision Analytics’ team could manage certainly points to this being an extraordinarily successful partnership. This success can partially be attributed to Precision Analytics’ willingness to learn from CIENCE’s experienced team.

“Precision Analytics was a good fit for CIENCE because they were brand new to outbound,” said Michael Storey, sales executive at CIENCE. “We were able to take ownership of the process and tell them the best practices that we’ve utilized with our industry experience in the past. It was just a positive sales journey all the way around because they weren't coming in with any sort of bad practices per se.”

Precision Analytics took the onboarding process seriously, diligently working alongside CIENCE to better understand its products, services, and market. Guided by CIENCE, the company put a lot of thought into its ideal customer profile (ICP) and the tone it wanted to communicate to potential clients with. 

Another factor that contributed to a successful partnership was CIENCE and Precision Analytics’ likemindedness. Both companies have a background in data and analytics. As such, they were able to speak each other’s language. This tendency to think about things in a similar way helped this campaign to run smoother.

Steve Grimsley, account manager at CIENCE, described this partnership as his best account to date: “Everybody was on board. Everything worked like a well-oiled machine. The client was very pleased with our performance and was very astute as to what we needed. Precision Analytics set the bar high in terms of openness to collaboration and was a joy to work with.”