How Cardinal Health & WaveMark Boosted Pipeline by 417% 

Cardinal Health WaveMark™ Solutions provides medical products and services to hospitals, pharmacies, and other health care providers. is a business line within Cardinal Health offering a SaaS-based inventory management solution to help hospitals and acute care facilities better manage high-dollar inventory in places like operating rooms and lower-dollar consumables used throughout facilities.   

While WaveMark’s SaaS solution offers considerable benefits for hospital systems, the nature of hospital administration requires involving many stakeholders over a long sales cycle. WaveMark’s marketing team was running a lead-based process, but leads were often too far along their buying journey for marketing to make a big impact. The team needed to reach prospects earlier and deliver highly targeted content and messaging to sway their decision 

Thanks to DemandScience (then Terminus), WaveMark revamped their GTM strategy by identifying ICP accounts earlier in the journey and tailoring content and messaging to transform marketing into an influence driver. Since implementing DemandScience, WaveMark has increased marketing-influenced pipeline opportunities by 417% while shortening a once-lengthy sales cycle by 39%

How to Educate Buyers on Solving 
a $25 Billion Problem 

Hospitals overspend on their to the tune of $25.7 billion per year. Expenses run especially high in operating rooms and procedural rooms, where high-cost implants and supplies account for. WaveMark addresses this expensive challenge with a solution that monitors inventory and makes intelligent recommendations to help hospitals optimize on-hand supplies. Hospitals can avoid running out of critical supplies without overspending and wasting resources. 

Hospitals systems stand to gain significantly by investing in more effective supply chain management. Yet, decisions on adopting systemwide inventory management software require lengthy internal search, review, and implementation processes. For WaveMark, that meant every potential deal involved collaborating with many stakeholders and managing a long sales cycle. 

This sales environment meant WaveMark was best served by reaching the right accounts at the right time. In fact, they’d already invested many team resources in identifying their ICP, crafting compelling messaging and content, and setting up a lead-based marketing process. However, when leads were ready to engage, they’d already progressed through most of their buying journey and developed preconceived notions about the solutions market, hampering WaveMark’s conversion rate. 

“They’ve already thought about how they need to solve the problem, so they may already have a vendor in mind, and they’re just looking to us for additional research or information,” said Maegan Schnarre, Senior Marketing Manager at Cardinal Health™ WaveMark™ Solutions. “Those leads aren’t always as successfully converted.” 

Maegan and her expert team, Chloe Mars, Marketing Manager, WaveMark, and Stephanie Marsico, Content Marketing Manager, Cardinal Health, wanted to identify leads earlier in the buying journey and deliver highly targeted content and messaging to shape prospects’ impressions of the market and guide them toward WaveMark™ Solutions. 

Right Prospects, Right Messaging, Right Timing

Deploying convincing messaging and content can sway potential buyers; however, it’s equally important to thoughtfully choose when, where, and how to deliver that information. It’s about reaching the right person with the right message at the right time—a reality that a lead-based process doesn’t always reflect.  

With that in mind, Maegan brought in DemandScience as WaveMark’s partner of choice. Specifically, Maegan set out to increase the share of “marketing-influenced opportunities” WaveMark’s efforts generated. 

“We defined marketing influenced as an opportunity that came into the pipeline that was either part of a recent engagement spike or had clicked on our advertising, so not just views or impressions, but actual clicks,” said Chloe Mars, Marketing Manager, WaveMark™ Solutions. “We knew there was somebody looking into our content, so that’s how we knew our campaigns had made an impact.” 

Through DemandScience, Maegan and her team could move away from less-effective lead generation and actively identify ICP accounts earlier in their buying journeys, knowing they’d be much more receptive to WaveMark’s marketing messages. WaveMark then used DemandScience to create targetable segments based on the elements supporting “marketing-influenced opportunities,” including factors like: 

• Account engagement metrics provided by the DemandScience platform 
• Website activity and engagement, such as spikes in website visits or clicks on advertising
• Existing customer status (whether the account was a current customer or net new) 
• Alignment with their defined ideal customer profile (ICP) 

Now, equipped with detailed segmentation and supporting account data, Maegan’s team could serve the right content and messaging to the right accounts. 

DemandScience Fuels WaveMark’s Incredible  Marketing Growth and Relationship with Sales 

Naturally, any activity that influences pipeline and potential deals to close will attract the sales department’s attention. Many organizations struggle to keep information flowing between marketing and sales to ensure alignment.  

Before DemandScience, WaveMark was no exception: Maegan acknowledged that maintaining information transparency and breaking down department silos was important to WaveMark but proved challenging.

WaveMark’s integration of DemandScience into existing systems — including the company’s Salesforce instance — changed that. Both sales and marketing could align on a shared pipeline and set of engagement metrics. The teams now meet regularly, using DemandScience-generated pipeline and campaign insights to further their collaboration and improve outcomes. 

To date, those outcomes have been tremendous. As the company closes FY 2024, Maegan noted that, with DemandScience’ support, her team saw a 417% increase in marketing-influenced opportunities added to their pipeline.  

Even more remarkable? In FY 2023, 10% of opportunities were marketing-influenced. In FY 2024, that grew to 68% of all opportunities. And, WaveMark achieved these improvements while shortening that long sales cycle by 39%. 

With DemandScience, WaveMark boosted marketing-influenced opportunities from 10% toWith DemandScience, WaveMark boosted marketing-influenced opportunities from 10% to 68%, while also cutting the sales cycle by 39%.  68%, while also cutting the sales cycle by 39%. 

Maegan credits her team’s hard work ahead of implementing DemandScience, which helped the platform speed up their success. “A lot of the reason WaveMark has been enabled to use DemandScience to the greatest potential so far is that our marketing team did a ton of work to identify our ideal customer profile, messaging, and value prop,” she said. “We did the hard brand work upfront to really know what our solution was, where we stood in the market, and how we wanted to go to market.” 

WaveMark plans to continue deploying DemandScience to derive even more value from their hard work. Maegan’s team is determining how to refine data processes and consistency, explore other DemandScience offerings to enhance accounts’ digital experiences, and optimize segments and campaigns as they begin the new fiscal year.  

“Based on the success the team has realized, they expect peer business around Cardinal Health will soon follow suit,” said Stephanie Marsico, Sr. Content Marketing Manager, who supports many of those business in their marketing efforts. 

“DemandScience has gotten a lot of interest from the rest of the organization outside of the WaveMark business. Other marketing organizations within Cardinal Health are now asking me, ‘How did you do this? How do we make DemandScience successful? How can we follow the best practices you’ve laid out?'” she said. “We’re really excited about the potential impact we could see.”