In this episode
In this episode, Rory Holland and James Furbush discuss the evolving landscape of healthcare payments and the role of AccessOne in facilitating financial well-being for patients and healthcare systems. They explore the challenges patients face in understanding healthcare costs, the importance of empathetic payment solutions, and the innovative approaches AccessOne employs to bridge the affordability gap. The discussion also touches on the marketing strategies and sales cycles involved in engaging hospital networks. In this conversation, James Furbush discusses the challenges and strategies of marketing and sales in the healthcare sector, particularly focusing on AccessOne’s approach to account-based marketing, content creation, and the importance of aligning sales and marketing efforts. He emphasizes the need for a holistic approach to increase sales velocity and improve lead quality, while also highlighting innovative content marketing strategies like their podcast, RCM Ladder, aimed at engaging their target audience. The discussion concludes with insights into the future direction of AccessOne and the continuous improvement mindset of the team.
Key Takeaways
- AccessOne aims to improve healthcare access through better payment solutions.
- Patients often face financial barriers that prevent them from seeking care.
- Healthcare costs are often opaque, leading to confusion and anxiety for patients.
- AccessOne provides tools to help patients manage their healthcare payments more easily.
- The company focuses on empathetic communication and automation in payment processes.
- Integration with existing healthcare systems is crucial for patient engagement.
- Sales cycles in healthcare can be lengthy and complex due to multiple stakeholders.
- Education is key to helping patients understand their payment options.
- AccessOne’s mission is to close the affordability gap in healthcare.
- The patient experience is central to AccessOne’s service offerings.
- Sales teams face significant challenges in complex deals.
- An account-based marketing approach is essential for targeting healthcare systems.
- Providing value through content is key to building relationships.
- Sales velocity can be improved by refining the sales process.
- Marketing must align closely with sales to drive success.
- Quality of leads is a shared responsibility between sales and marketing.
- Effective communication and SLAs enhance collaboration.
- Content marketing can create lasting impressions even when prospects are not ready to buy.
- Innovative content like podcasts can differentiate a brand in a crowded market.
- Continuous improvement is vital for long-term success in business.
Podcast Episode Transcript
Introduction and Background
Rory Holland (00:11)
Hey there, welcome to Mighty Finsights This is Rory Holland and I’m thrilled to be joined by my friend James Furbush the vice president of marketing at AccessOne. James is always lots of fun, so think we’re gonna have a interesting and fun conversation. First and foremost, what part of the country you in, James?
James Furbush (00:34)
What’s up everybody? Rory, how are ya? Don’t put too much pressure on me. I am in the Boston area. I am probably about an hour outside the city. But a New Englander, Northeasterner, for good or bad, I suppose.
Rory Holland (00:56)
Yeah, we were we were talking a little bit about the orange team in your neck of the woods Syracuse. That’s where you went to school, right?
James Furbush (01:01)
Mm-hmm.
I did. Yeah, I did my undergrad at Syracuse and got a master’s at Emerson. So I have a master’s in journalism from Emerson and I did do my undergrad at Syracuse. And Syracuse is probably the one place where it’s colder and more snowy than it is in kind of Boston and New England. So I managed to survive it and get out of there in one piece.
Rory Holland (01:29)
Yeah, we’re experiencing a little bit of, who knows when folks will listen to this podcast? We’ll release it in a couple months. It’ll be springtime by then, but it’s winter here in Texas. So 17 degrees. You notice I’ve got my coat on, so staying warm, even though we’re indoors. My blood has definitely gotten thin from my days in Detroit, Michigan.
James Furbush (01:52)
Yeah, I’ve actually, you know, it’s funny. I’ve gone sort of the other way, which is for the longest time, I was not a winter person because like growing up for me, winter was just shoveling sidewalks and snow. My family, I’m probably one of the few New Englanders who grew up, we did not ski. I really didn’t know anybody who did ski.
The town I grew up in was a lot of middle to lower middle-income people, a lot of kids that I grew up with divorced parents and they kind of basically raised themselves. So winter was like not enjoyable for me growing up, but now I’ve sort of started to get into it a little bit more, just like trying to find that sort of joy in the winter season.
I love it. I went running this morning. It’s about 20 degrees, 15 degrees today. And I got out for a good run outside and, just absolutely love the winter now.
Rory Holland (03:01)
That’s great to hear because you’re stuck with it this time of year.
James Furbush (03:03)
I’m stuck with it. Yeah.
That’s the thing, right? It’s like you can keep smashing your face against the fact that like, I hate winter, I hate winter and…
But then you realize, well, I’m never leaving from this place and there’s always going to be winter. So it’s like, how do you actually, what do you do to sort of enjoy and make the most of the three, four months out of the year when it is that way? And I finally, this year had that sort of mental shift. The block finally was released where it’s like, no, like it’s always going to be winter. got to figure out some way to like enjoy and make the most of it. So that’s, took me about 45 years to kind of get around to that, but I finally did have that epiphany.
Rory Holland (03:41)
It’s a good place to be. I always appreciate you change of seasons. So we’ve got, you know, a hundred degrees in the summer. So I actually really appreciate the cold and the wind when we get it. That’s a good excuse to put on a coat, but. All right, well let’s jump in. So AccessOne, and I’m just going to read a bit about, about right off your website. So for those that want to understand a little bit about AccessOne, I’d love to dive in some more into the products you guys offer.
Understanding Access One’s Mission
Rory Holland (04:12)
You guys recently went through a rebrand and acquired a mobile payments company. So I want to get into that a bit too. So improving healthcare access one payment at a time. And AccessOne believes a successful balance of healthcare and payments is possible. No patient should avoid care or risk bankruptcy from healthcare costs. No health system or provider should go uncompensated for the world-class care they deliver.
James Furbush (04:18)
Sure.
Rory Holland (04:38)
AccessOne supports the physical well-being of patients and the financial well-being of healthcare systems. We make collecting payments a breeze by focusing on empathetic patient terms, automation, digitization, and intuitive patient communication channels. So clearly you support a dual-sided market, consumers who are in need of or have had healthcare and then healthcare systems.
And when you and I had met a few years ago and we did some work together on the rebrand for AccessOne, you had recently acquired a mobile payments company. So I would love to hear from your perspective what AccessOne does, your market, and would love to unpack some of the products and services you guys offer, because I know you’ve evolved quite a bit the last couple of years.
James Furbush (05:27)
Yeah, I mean, so I think fundamentally, AccessOne exists to help hospitals and health systems, large provider organizations sort of deal with the growing problem that is collecting payments from patients. And you know, if you think about the trajectory of sort of healthcare payments, you know, for the longest time, health systems didn’t really have to care a whole lot about whether or not they collected payments from patients because they mostly got reimbursed from insurance companies. And if patients didn’t pay their bills, it was a relatively small portion of their overall revenue.
But that has changed in the last 10 years and there’s a lot of macro sort of events and factors that have gone into that. But essentially, patients owe… they pay for healthcare twice, essentially, if you think about it, which is, and not just patients, we all do, which is we pay to have healthcare insurance, if you’re gainfully employed and you have employer-sponsored care, you pay out of your paycheck. But then even when you go to the doctor’s, you’re still paying for care after the fact because your insurance doesn’t cover the whole thing and insurance is very convoluted and it’s hard to understand. Are you in network or you’re out of network? What’s covered? What’s not covered? So then you get the bill and it’s sort of like, oh my gosh, I have a $3,000 bill or whatever. So AccessOne exists to make it easy for patients and frankly to afford their care and to live their best life without sort of that financial barrier. I think there’s a lot of studies out there that patients don’t get care because they’re worried about the cost, they’re worried about the affordability of it.
And all of our tools and services and really kind of everything we do is through the lens of you know, how is this gonna help health systems make it easy and less stressful for patients to pay their bills? And we have a kind of two main lines of business on how we do that. And they sort of serve, you know, different segments of that market, but ultimately, they both really at their core are trying to make it easier and less stressful for patients to pay what they owe when they go to the doctor in the hospital.
Rory Holland (08:18)
Before AccessOne, were patients having to negotiate payment terms with hospitals?
James Furbush (08:30)
I… Well, I think… I suppose that is it depends, which I think is savvy patients. think, I would say by and large that patients don’t and still don’t nowadays, right? If they go in and get a knee surgery and they get that bill from the hospital for that knee surgery, I would say most patients are not negotiating that cost. They’re not bothered to call up the hospital to kind of scrutinize the bill and look at every sort of line item charge and stuff like that. I would say more savvy patients can, and I would encourage patients to do that in some ways, I think, because I do think, you know, there’s a lot of…
Look Rory, how care is paid for in the US, whether it’s through insurance or just patients paying their bills, it’s very opaque. It’s still very, not very transparent in 2025. And that’s problematic because I think we hear this time and time again from even people who work in hospitals and health systems, which is like, healthcare is the only industry where you don’t actually know how much you owe before you go and buy the service. know, like if you go and you want to get your oil change fixed or you’re buying something off of Amazon or buying a car even.
You can generally have a good sense of knowing what you’re going to pay, even if there’s some negotiation on the back end and things like that. Most industries, you know what you’re paying before you’re buying it. And you can make a smart decision about the ROI or is this service worth the cost of it? You make that trade-off.
Healthcare really is still the only one where you’re like, how much is this thing going to cost me? Like, I don’t know. Like I need a gallbladder transplant or whatever. And you’re like, I don’t know how much is this going to cost me. And the price fluctuates. And if you go to the hospital down the street, it might be 30 % less than, you know, and so there’s just all this complication and unknown. and I would say ultimately anxiety when it comes to just the cost of care.
And so that’s a real challenge for both patients and hospitals and health systems because as patients owe more, right, you could kind of do the math in the back end, which is that like hospitals and health systems, the more that that payment gets shifted to patients, the less revenue they end up making at the hospital and health system.
And their margins are already tight. Like I know that we’re talking about in some ways, multi-billion dollar health systems. And so I know it’s hard to have empathy in some ways, but those health systems, their margins are still like 0%, 1%. They are having to be super efficient with a lot of the choices they make. so every bit of revenue that they earn and keep in that health system helps that health system deliver more care, deliver better services to the patients they serve. So the problem of that AccessOne is trying to solve for and help with the problem of just patient payments, self-pay is, I think it’s become a really interesting one and it’s a vital one in some ways.
The Challenges of Healthcare Payments
Rory Holland (12:46)
Well, I think so many of us have, well, at least by the time you reach my age and I think you’re not, you’re, I’m going to give you some grace. You’re a bit away behind me, but you have children and you know, things come up, things happen. And then you learn about, as we get older, we learn about what a deductible means and what premiums mean. And you find out that, you know, that, that bit of care that you may have made of need or you may need ends up costing a lot more out of pocket, even tens of thousands of dollars. I’ve experienced that firsthand with my son and his sport motocross and being injured. And then discovering, despite the fact that we pay several thousand dollars a month into the system, our deductibles were a little higher. And so I’ve learned the hard way that when you need care, that copay is just the start, oftentimes. And it’s unfortunate, but I can see there’s a tremendous amount of value from my exposure to AccessOne and the work that you guys have done and as you’ve moved from, you know, a few years ago is probably recognized in the space a little bit more of a traditional payments company to a FinTech and to having a mobile payment solution providing consumers an option. And that option is readily available in the palm of their hand. To be able to at least think from a cashflow perspective, how am I going to meet my obligation here? Because I can’t write a check for $10,000 today, but I need the care. I got the care and now I’m strapped. So I see a lot of value in that, that alone and leaving some anxiety.
James Furbush (14:24)
Well, yeah, like, patients shouldn’t have to make that trade-off. People shouldn’t have to, I mean, we call it, we say patients, but really people in the United States shouldn’t have to make that trade-off between deciding, like, if you go in and you get care and you have… Like right now we’re recording this in February. That’s like peak deductible season, right? Like deductibles reset for patients in January. And if you’ve got a three, four, $5,000 deductible, you’ve got to pay for, have to spend that much in care before you essentially even get any benefit of health insurance if you’re on a high deductible plan. And so if you go get care, well, if you walk out with a $3,000 bill, most people cannot just write it. They don’t have that money sitting in a emergency fund waiting to be spent. God bless you if you do. You’re better off than most. And so now, your choices are excruciating. If you’re a family, it’s like, I have to put that bill on a credit card, well, the interest rate on that credit card is 28%. And so now, you you’ve paid it off, but now you gotta pay the credit card company back. And it’s like, you know, that’s at 28%. If you can’t pay that, you just get further into debt.
And so what AccessOne says is like, no patient should go into debt or feel that sort of stressful burden of, you know, not getting the care they need in order to pay their bills. Yeah, we, you know, our programs are designed for, you know, to enable families to pay that $3,000, like 0 % interest over 12 months, 24 months, whatever they need. So that, you know, they’re not making those hard choices of, do I want to pay my heat in the winter or pay for my knee replacement? Do I want to put groceries on my table for my kids this month or pay for their diabetes treatment? And so what we’re saying is that patients, people should not have to make those gut-wrenching choices. And at the same time, health systems shouldn’t lose that money that they’re owed to keep their doors open.
And so we’re kind of bridging that gap between, we call it the affordability gap. And it’s really kind of what hospitals and health systems are losing out on and what patients are not able to afford. And we’re trying to kind of close that gap for our partners in the industry. And so we’re a very mission-driven organization. And it’s, I think a hugely important one. I wish that… you know, the cost of care and how care is paid for was talked about more in the US and that’s kind why I love working for AccessOne and I think I feel like a sense of stewardship almost, right? It’s like the work that we’re doing is important, but also trying to make that relevant and seem important because oftentimes it can be
as you know, complicated and complex and it’s like hard to kind of wrap your head around sometimes. yeah, we’re, all of us here feel deeply honored to, you know, sort of how do we take that sort of deeply important work that we’re doing and make it simple and relevant for the different audiences that we serve.
The Patient Experience with Access One
Rory Holland (18:32)
Yeah. And what is the, what is the experience like the introduction of AccessOne? Let’s just, let’s just play an example. Um, you know, we have to go, I have to go to the hospital or get some care. And then you go to check out the bill is due. Here’s, here’s the result of what just happened. Is it, is it, is it a downloading of the app? Like what does that experience look like for the consumer and how does the hospital, the partner hospital work within that relationship too?
James Furbush (19:03)
Yeah, so it’s slightly different depending on the product. So if it’s mobile pay, oftentimes those customers, those patients, they sort of just get a text that’s like, hey, your bill from General Hospital is due. And then they kind of click the link and they can open it up and they can see their bill and sort of just pay right from the interface, credit card on file or whatever. It’s super easy and very frictionless. And that’s kind of this really interesting thing because the product is almost so good that it requires very little education or, but the biggest thing we have to do is the health system. We help the health system educate the patient that like, if they see this text, it’s not a spam, right? It’s sort of like overcoming that. Like this is not a phishing thing. This is like, actually your bill is gonna get it through text message.
On the patient financing side, we have signs and brochures. A lot of it is in the waiting room or that front desk, right? Like educating at the line of like where patient, front line of where patients are, giving them a kind of brochure to take home. Hey, if you’re worried about affording this care, like our partners, AccessOne.
And that it’s sort of like they sign up on our patient portal and they go to the website and things like that. Call our, it’s called a PAC, but it’s the Patient Advocacy Center. It’s basically like our call center.
And so there’s a bunch of different ways that they can interact with us, but essentially it’s helping our health system partners sort of educate, like, hey, if your patients are worried about pain, like you need to like let them know about AccessOne. And we give them a whole bunch of resources and things to help the patient kind of interact with us. We also have like integrations with, I’m sure probably everyone has interacted with like Epic and MyChart. Probably if you’re in the health system, if you ever gone to a hospital. And so a lot of our customers use that and we sort of interact right within that as well. So like if you go in MyChart to pay your bill, oftentimes it’s like, hey, need help? Like we work with AccessOne and they can kind of click over, like activate from Epic and things like that. So we do have like other integration touch points like that.
And what we try to do is sort of like those first principles of like, okay, how is your patient interacting with your billing system? And then like, that’s, want to be sort of everywhere that those touch points are that you have with your patient so that they know where, AccessOne is and how we can help them pay for their care if they can’t pay for it in full.
Rory Holland (21:57)
So is it, is the experience different for hospital networks and how they work versus say, are you working all the way down to individual offices or practitioners as well?
James Furbush (22:09)
We own, well, so the answer is yes, but, and so we only, for our patient financing programs, we only sell to larger hospitals and health systems. So, you know, our addressable market, you know, I could get really, really kind of wonky on this, but it’s like, I think it’s sort of like a billion in patient revenue and multiple hospitals. So it’s like we have a very tight addressable market of health systems, but within those health systems, it’s like they own multiple hospitals, they own physician practices, they own urgent cares.
And because we work at the health system level, our products do trickle down to all of the different practices and entities that they own. So yeah, we are in the individual doctor office, but we’re not like selling to the individual doctor office. We’re selling to that sort of health system level.
Marketing Strategies and Sales Cycles
Rory Holland (23:15)
And I must imagine that the sales cycles are fairly long. I’m curious about as a VP of marketing leading the marketing strategy for the business, like what is the marketing look like to engage those hospital networks? then I could imagine the sales cycle is long and then the actual onboarding and integration takes some time too.
James Furbush (23:38)
Well, yeah, the great, so the great thing is integration and onboarding is actually fairly not as long as you would think. I think our integration team, we have our VP of onboarding. She’s amazing. I think she started with AccessOne maybe about like a year or a year and a half ago, and she’s just done like tremendous work. I think we can get, I think we got our most recent patient financing customer live… it was like three months, four months, you know, like it was a very fast go live from like signed contract to go live. So we’ve got that process kind of like really dialed in.
The sales process, yeah, it’s long. It’s, I think. I typically say it’s probably like a 15 to 18-month process. And that’s on average. I think we’ve had some deals on the shorter side, 10 months to 12 months, probably some longer, two years in change. Yeah, it’s very long, arduous slog for our salespeople. And so.
My hats off to them because I think they’re kind of the ones fighting that good fight, kind of every day. And it’s hard, know, because there’s buying committees to evaluate buying committees. It’s like in healthcare. I always tell people I’ve used this analogy before, but like if you’re selling, let’s say to an academic medical center that’s associated with like, let’s say a state-run university, you might be selling to that hospital system, like our buyers, called the vice president of revenue cycle management or the CFO. So you might kind of be selling to that person, but then because it’s affiliated with a college institution, there might be a component of the buying committee that’s actually attached to the academic university and not just the hospital. Because it’s also state-run, there also might then be like another entity behind the curtains that’s attached to the state government because it’s a state-funded public university. So there’s like, I think there’s a lot of that when we, like we know who our buyer is, but then sometimes that wider buying committee can be enormously complex and like convoluted. And I think oftentimes then you’re dealing with IT because it’s like HIPAA and healthcare and all that stuff.
Rory Holland (26:20)
Mm-hmm.
James Furbush (26:27)
So it’s tough. mean, our sales teams definitely have it tough for sure with how long and how convoluted some of these deals can be.
Navigating the Complex Sales Landscape
Rory Holland (26:39)
How are you marketing to healthcare systems now? And follow on question of that is, what’s a primary reason why they’re talking to AccessOne?
James Furbush (26:51)
Yeah, so right now, so we definitely sort of take an account-based marketing approach. And so, know, fortunately for us, because we only sell to hospitals and health systems and we only sell in the United States, I think there’s probably at any given time, you know, our addressable market is probably 400 accounts nationally, right? Like it’s a big market and there’s a ton of opportunity, but like there’s a lot of accounts that already have competitors and we have our customer base and things like that. it’s a very defined market. So we definitely have sort of taken a much more account-based approach. And we have tiers kind of within our addressable market where I spend my time or sales spends their time. We have different playbooks for how we, okay, if we know there’s a competitor at that account, you know, we deal with that sort of, we have like the competitor competitive playbook versus if we think there’s an opportunity where we have different stuff.
So very trying to get tight alignment between sales and marketing, how we do stuff. But a lot of the activities that we run, it would not surprise anyone. We’re doing a lot of content-led growth, I’d say. I hate using that term, but my background is in content and as a reporter. And so I lean heavily into that.
So we do a lot of content and that’s everything from podcasts, organic social, a monthly newsletter. think we’re trying to use email marketing. Our strategy is not to give people the hard sell and always kind of hammer them with our products. I think it’s more like, how do we give value? I sort of always approach everything from the lens of how do you give as much value as you possibly can in everything you do in order to build relationships at scale? And so I think if you’re always sort of asking, here’s our product, here’s our product, take a demo, come talk to sales, do this, blah, blah. I think people kind of tend to tune that out. I think people just, they’re like, I got bigger shit to deal with than buying your patient financing product. Like I’m really sorry, but I just, I, you know, you’re a small piece of my overall business. So I try to very much like entertain, educate, not waste people’s time wherever we show up. And, you know, so we have, you know, a small sort of targeted paid, you know, we’re running targeted paid ads to the accounts that we’re going after. have different messages depending on which bucket they fall into. And that’s to soften it up. We’re working with sales on, you know, we do cold outreach, but that’s sort of like marketing-led where I’m making those kind of cold emails from, look like they’re coming from sales, but they’re kind of like automated at scale.
It’s, you know, again, that sort of marketing. We have a podcast. We’ve leaned more heavily into YouTube this year. I think YouTube is kind of an untapped avenue for a lot of B2B marketing teams, especially in our space and revenue cycle. I’ve been really impressed with over the past years. We’ve sort of gotten more into it.
That seems to be very promising. So for us a lot of it is like educate thought leadership you know trying to do content that’s relevant to that buyer to those accounts things like that it’s it’s not anything revolutionary or or that different but I think what we try to do is when we do stuff we do try to show up and do it a little bit differently than say like other people in our industry and I think that’s kind of how we differentiate ourselves.
Strategies for Accelerating Sales Velocity
Rory Holland (31:22)
What would you say that when you think about the length of the sales cycle, are there things that you’re doing that you’ve seen be effective in trying to increase the velocity of the sales process?
James Furbush (31:35)
Well, we’ll have to maybe schedule a follow-up call. So that’s kind of my goals this year in 2025 is to figure out how to create better pipeline velocity. that’s again, probably not surprising, but like everything from re-looking at how sales does discovery sessions, the demos, proposals that they deliver all the stuff that they’re doing. And so for me in 2025, that’s definitely will be kind of on, that’s on my kind of goals and to-do list this year is, is how do I kind of better work with sales at that sort of bottom of the funnel to kind of.
It sounds dumb, but it’s like, well, can we get deals from 18 to 15, from 15 to 12? If you do get it down a little bit, then sales can pick up their velocity because now they’re turning deals over a little bit quicker. They can probably put a little bit more on their plate. So yeah, we’re looking at this year. And I’ve just started to dig into that.
Rory Holland (32:49)
Yeah, when we, we hear that often is particularly thinking about long sales cycles. It’s how can you increase the velocity of the pipeline? And there’s a number of different techniques that, that we use as marketers that you know of too. And, but ultimately it’s a, requires from my experience, a more holistic approach and there is no silver bullet and there’s certain circumstances that, you know, might have different circumstances and might require longer sales cycles. It’s just the way that it works. But because you have such a targeted audience that you’re going after a select set of competitors, you have certain value propositions and value that that AccessOne offers. I could see where as you go through this process, I’d to have you back on and talk about how you do it. So a follow on
James Furbush (33:37)
I’d love to pick your brain on that. I think what’s so hard too, it’s like, have to look at, it’s like, is your offer right? Is your pricing, there’s a lot of those sort of fundamental things where it’s like, how do you get someone to, cause part of it is like that human psychology, like how do you get someone to actually just do something? And that can be really hard to like get someone to just take action.
Rory Holland (34:05)
Well, and often my experience has been, and I think it’s consistent with the work that we did together for the years that we were able to rebrand AccessOne and do the work together is marketing is held responsible often for the quality of the leads, which I think generally makes sense. But quality is measured in so many different ways. And in that whole prospect journey and experience, there’s a lot of nuances to that. And, you know, understanding your market is one thing and their particular circumstance and how you can help them be heroes in solving their problems. There’s a lot of different ways you can unpack that from a marketing perspective, but a lot of it is an execution of sales, getting that defined well. And what is that experience from intro call to discovery to demo, demo to proposal, proposal to contract. Like, yeah, cause I get asked that all the time.
And the other question I was going to ask you that just came to mind is how do sales and marketing, how are you seeing you guys effectively working together? Because often they’re viewed as two different sides of the business, where in my opinion, the most successful companies blend them together. They have to work well together to be most effective.
James Furbush (35:25)
Yeah, I think we have a pretty small team here at AccessOne. We have to work together. think for us, it’s, look, I think at the end of the day, like marketing, if you’re a sales-led organization, you’re, know, bookings and revenue depends on sales closing deals, right? Like we’re not product-led growth. We’re not a subscription service. We’re not like Canva or like one of these things where just anybody can go put in their credit card and just sign up and get going.
Like my job fundamentally is to make sales easier. And I do that through, you know, if I generate awareness for the company and brand awareness and differentiation, like, yes, that’s one way to make things easier because people know who AccessOne is and they maybe might want to take our call, especially if they know us and love us as a brand.
But then there’s a million other things like throughout the sort of buying journey that makes sales easier. And that could just be a more streamlined proposal. It could be a better, you know, pitch deck. Could be a better discovery call. It could be, you know, doing things where, they have more account intelligence and competitive intel and things like that. So there’s a billion things that marketing is responsible for and should be responsible for in order to make sales easier. So for me personally, in here at AccessOne, I think that’s just like right now for us, it’s like, okay, like I’ve told my sales counterparts, like if you’ve got your sort of bucket of 40 accounts that you’re responsible for, like those are your tier one accounts that you are working, actively selling, trying to close. Like I will spend 60 % of my time like helping you work those accounts and I will do, right? It’s like whatever you need, sales proposals, emails, anything that you need to be better.
Like I will do, if you need me to do set up a local dinner event for you to get face-time, like we will do that. Like you just let us know and you know, we have sort of our operating cadence where we’re meeting every two weeks to kind of like review what’s working and not working and what we know about the accounts and things like that. And so there’s that. And then there’s, you know, and then beyond that, there’s like, I spend my rest of my time like, okay, here are the other accounts that I’m gonna soften up for you and try to get them to want to take a discovery and assessment meeting with you. And so we’re trying to figure out what that operating rhythm is, but I think they know that I’m working to try to make their life easier however I can. And so I think we’re just trying to figure out that operating rhythm of how we work together, make sure we’re not stepping on each other’s toes and making things harder for one another. I mean, sometimes it’s just really fundamentally comes down to like having the right communication rhythm, having the right, you know, set up in Salesforce and things like that where the lists are being pulled correctly and the data is there to kind of look and review.
And you know, I think they’ll hold me accountable if things aren’t working well. I mean, I would expect them to just like if they fumble a deal because they didn’t, they sent a shitty email and they didn’t run it by me, you know, I’d be kind of upset about that too. Cause it’s like, dude, I can help with that, you know, like I can help make you sound smart. So like, let me help you, you know, earn that commission.
So that’s, still a little bit of a work in progress, but I think, you know, for me, it’s like just being tightly aligned with our sales team to, you know, for all of us to sort of be working together and on the same page.
Aligning Sales and Marketing for Success
Rory Holland (39:43)
You’re a good s…
Yeah, couldn’t agree. I couldn’t agree more. There’s conversations. I’m privileged to have many conversations with leaders of fintech and financial companies and every week. And it’s not uncommon to have a sales-driven leading leadership group that thinks of marketing in a different camp. And we’re honestly all under the same umbrella. We’re all trying to do good work, provide value to the market we serve, serve our clients really, really well, and build our brand, be authentic in the work that we do. And I think you said it really well that what comes to mind for me is when there isn’t an integrated strategy and not a holistic approach where everybody’s on the same team, rowing in the same direction, some organizations like the sales organization and AccessOne, an individual could go off the reservation and start writing their own emails and their own content and their own social posts and It’s not in line with the brand. It’s not in tuned with the strategy. So it comes across as disingenuous, inauthentic at worst. But at best it’s inconsistent. So that inconsistency and lack of cohesion creates a sense of distrust a little bit. And so that can affect the overall pipeline and the performance of sales in general and the whole organization if you’re not careful. So keeping everybody together is really a big part of it.
James Furbush (41:08)
Well, and I think having really good SLAs and really good, like I’m very, we get, our inbound volume isn’t a huge volume, but I’m also sort of not sending over to sales. I send over maybe one out of every 10 that comes in because it’s like, is not a good fit. This is not worth your time. So I’m like very protective about what I send to them to be like, hey, you should follow up with this. This seems promising. Even like little things like that, where it’s like, no, if I send you something, know that I have like put the work in to make sure that this might be worth following up on. Like I’m not just gonna send you all the shit that comes in because I wanna hit an arbitrary MQL number to myself look good. It’s like, I’m not gonna do that. It’s like, you guys gotta know that if I send you something, it’s like, I’ve weeded out the worst fit stuff to be protective of you and your time. So even things like that make a difference and having agreements and different things, right? Like what counts as an opportunity? What counts as… a lot of it is like operational challenges. It’s like having like clearly defined stages, having SLAs in place, things like that. A lot of that just goes a long way to getting sort of that alignment and buy-in.
Innovative Content Marketing Approaches
Rory Holland (42:41)
Yeah.
Yeah. You had mentioned talking about content marketing and you and I know the 95/5 role, 95 % of the market we’re going after isn’t in market for what we’re selling. So content and thought leadership, um, are, can be great ways to plan a positive memory with your market, even when they’re not ready. So when they are ready, they know who you are. I’m curious how, um, tell us a little bit about RCM ladder. Like that’s a super interesting niche podcast. Uh, for those that might not know what RCM means, maybe tell us a little bit about the podcast itself.
James Furbush (43:14)
Yeah, sure. our buyer is, like we sell to, in healthcare, it’s kind of abbreviated, the acronym is RCM, and that stands for revenue cycle management. if you think about, you know, revenue cycle in healthcare kind of grew out of medical billing and right, so typically you have medical billers, but
it sort of evolved into this thing called revenue cycle management. And they sort of oversee, I think almost in some ways, everything that is like non-clinical in a hospital or health system. Like they are responsible for front desk scheduling, insurance verification, know, kind of that full life cycle of like how a patient interacts from scheduling appointment to paying their bill within the healthcare system.
And so we sell to the VP of RCM. and, and so I was kind of like, okay, we had a podcast previously that was on the patient experience and that was very much just geared towards like general awareness. Like let’s just get whoever we can get on the podcast. Well, you know, tap it and we’ll talk about the patient experience as a topic, but that’s broad enough that it fits into anything.
So we recently sort of took a step back and was like, all right, well, what can we do for our actual buyer? And, you know, there are some podcasts for like trade shows and things like that. You know, trade publications that have podcasts like the Becker’s of the world. But they’re all kind of boring and not that interesting. And then, you know,
I was kind of like, well, what can we do that’s a little bit different? And, you know, I was kind of doing some research and I was like, all right, there’s a lot out there. If you work in revenue cycle, it’s like, can find out, okay, like what metrics matter? Like there’s a lot out there, you know, information for them. But I was like, you know, it’s kind of interesting. Like one thing that’s like not here is just, I don’t know, like career development. Like it’s pretty big. Like, how do you go from being an entry-level front desk person, maybe, to becoming a VP of RevCycle, what do you gotta do to sort of advance your career? There wasn’t a whole lot specific to them, to that sort of person. So I sort of just pitched it as like, look, I think this is kind of different enough, right? It’s an interview podcast. So within the structure of it being like an interview podcast, those all exist. But the topic is kind of different and…
And maybe we can kind of hang our hat on it and be different enough when we could kind of recruit and do that. So to me, it was a way to sort of differentiate what we were doing from other vendors or other people. I think a lot of the podcasts are like, come talk to me about your health system.
Talk to me about whatever and what I was like, you my show, it’s very much like, come talk to me about how you run one-on-ones with your direct reports and do these kind of really kind of HBR type things. And so…
Yeah, a little bit different. We’ve done it. We’ve had about 12 episodes. We did like one season. I think it’s very been very well received. You know, we put it on YouTube, Spotify, cut it up for social media. You know, we’ve got I think we’ve we sort of proved the concept of the concept is people like it. And I think I’m very excited for season two. We’re in the process right now of recruiting for that. And I think
What’s nice is we’ve sort of created this like engine and now we’re gonna kind of layer on that sort of account-based approach. So now the guests for season two are just gonna be recruited from sort of our account-based approach. So now we’re kind of gonna dial in and use it as a way to engage accounts and kind of help sales a little bit more.
But I think it really kind of just gives a vehicle for our buyer to come on and talk about them and sort of their career journey and these great stories. And yeah, it’s been awesome. I think I love kind of talking to people about that sort of stuff. And you just get these great stories and yeah, it’s been pretty wonderful so far.
Rory Holland (47:54)
Yeah. And there’s so many stories behind the people that, we work with every day that I think what you’re doing is great. Allowing those folks to tell their stories. And part of what I love with Mighty Finsights is the same. You get to meet the people behind some of the brands that we’ve heard of, or maybe haven’t heard of, but know the heart for the good work that they’re doing. I, I put you in that category. Like you guys are doing some, some good things and in the healthcare payment space and making changes and improving experiences for hospital networks, obviously collecting more payments.
So they can stay in a good financial position, but two, for patients. Most of us have experienced something like that, so I think it’s really meaningful.
Future Directions for Access One
Rory Holland (48:33)
One last question is, what does the future look like for AccessOne? Like, what’s next for you guys?
James Furbush (48:39)
So I think for us, it sounds kind of boring, but it’s sort of like, keep on, keep it on, right? We’re, I think, continuing to grow as a company, offering, making improvements on the product. I think our product team has, and our product leader, Marina Bigsby, has just done amazing work over the last year and a half to kind of build out that team and make it more SaaS like where we’re adding new features all the time and capabilities and refining the product. So I think it’s sort of supporting a lot of those launches. And then again, for marketing, it’s like just driving new business, right? It’s like continuing to educate the market, continuing to build relationships, continuing to try to get people to sort of see the value of what we do and how we do it differently than our competitors. And sort of just like win business to help health systems and patients. So it’s unfortunately, it’s not that sexy. But for us, sort of like, I think, you know, our CEO, Mark, you know, he’s very, I think he was a former football player, maybe a collegiate football player. So he uses a lot of sports analogies, but I think for him, he said it’s just that journey of like continuously getting better, right? It’s like, how do you show up and get 1 % better every day in everything you do? And so I think for me, like that’s kind of my mentality as well is like, how do I show up and be a 1 % better marketer, a 1 % better teammate and coworker for my go-to-market coworkers. And I think as a company, that’s just kind of what we’re doing. We’re trying to get 1 % better every day to help patients in hospitals and health systems.
Rory Holland (50:34)
Now that’s great. For those who might want to learn more about AccessOne or get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that?
James Furbush (50:41)
So for AccessOne, you could just go to our website, accessonepay.com. And then for me, probably LinkedIn. But if you Google me, I run a bunch of podcasts. You can probably find our stuff on YouTube, a lot of our videos, Spotify, things like that. But I would say LinkedIn for sure. James Furbush just kind of looked me up. And I always connect. Yeah.
Rory Holland (51:03)
Great.
Yeah, and we’ll put that on the show notes too, just so folks can find it. Well, James, this has been great. So good to connect with you again. And thank you so much for the information and sharing so much about AccessOne. And please keep us posted.
James Furbush (51:11)
Yeah.
Oh my god, Rory thanks for having me its a pleasure. Hope this was useful for your listeners. So, my pleasure.
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