According to Forrester’s 2024 State of Business Buying Report, the average B2B purchase now involves 13 stakeholders and nearly 89% of buying decisions cross multiple departments – and that’s across industries. In healthcare, where compliance sign-offs, procurement holds, and committee reviews are standard operating procedure, those numbers likely skew higher.
The problem isn’t the timeline. It’s that most ABM programs aren’t designed for it.
Most ABM playbooks assume a relatively linear buyer journey – awareness, consideration, decision – with enough momentum to keep things moving in a predictable direction. Healthcare deals don’t work that way. Procurement holds, budget cycles, committee reviews, and compliance sign-offs create long stretches of silence that can feel like stalled deals but are often just the normal rhythm of how these organizations buy.
When marketing and sales don’t have visibility into what’s actually happening inside an account during those quiet stretches, the wheels come off. Marketing doesn’t know whether to keep nurturing or pull back. Sales doesn’t know which accounts are warming up and which have actually gone cold. Everyone’s working from gut feel instead of real signals – and the deal suffers for it.
Staying warm across a long sales cycle is a discipline that requires marketing and sales working from the same playbook. Here’s what that actually looks like.
What “staying warm” actually means
Staying warm isn’t a euphemism for sending more emails. It’s about making sure that when an account is ready to move – after the budget freeze lifts, after the committee reconvenes, after procurement finishes their review – your company is the one they’ve been coming back to. Not because you were loudest, but because you were consistently useful.
The teams that do this well aren’t working harder. They have a clearer picture of what’s happening inside their target accounts – who’s engaging, what they’re reading, and when activity is picking up. That visibility is what lets marketing nurture intelligently and gives sales the context to know when to act.
The rest of this comes down to three things:
- Knowing who you’re keeping warm – mapping your content and outreach to the full buying committee, not just your primary contact
- Having the content to do it – building a library that serves different stakeholders at different stages across a long timeline
- Having the visibility to know when it’s working – so marketing can adjust in real time and sales knows when to act
Know who you’re keeping warm
This is where a lot of healthcare ABM programs break down before they even get started. Teams treat an account as a single entity and nurture accordingly – one contact, one sequence, one narrative. But the buying committee inside a large employer group isn’t one person. It’s five, seven, sometimes ten – and they don’t all show up at the same time.
Take a company selling supplemental benefits to a large employer as an example. The benefits manager might be your champion from day one. But finance doesn’t get involved until there’s a budget conversation. Legal shows up when there’s a contract to review. Procurement has its own timeline entirely. And if the offering touches employee data in any way, compliance isn’t far behind.
Part of what makes this so hard is that most of the buying journey happens without you in the room. According to Gartner’s 2024 research, B2B buyers spend only 17% of their total buying time in direct contact with potential vendors – and that time is split across every vendor they’re considering. The rest is internal: conversations, reviews, deliberations you have no visibility into unless your content is doing the work.
Each of those stakeholders has different concerns, different questions, and different definitions of “ready to move forward.” If your ABM program is only nurturing the benefits manager, you’re warm with one person and cold with everyone else who has a vote.
A practical starting point is mapping the typical stakeholders in your deals and the primary question each one is trying to answer:
- Benefits manager: Is this the right solution for our employees, and can I defend this decision internally?
- Finance: What’s the total cost, and what’s the risk if this doesn’t deliver?
- Legal: What does implementation look like, and where does liability sit?
- Procurement: Has this vendor delivered for organizations like ours before?
- Compliance: Does this meet our regulatory requirements, and how is data handled?
Your deal may not involve all of these – and the titles will vary – but the underlying questions usually don’t.
It also means paying attention to who is actually engaging inside an account. When a new stakeholder starts consuming content – someone you haven’t spoken to yet – that’s a signal worth acting on. It often means the deal is moving internally even when it looks quiet from the outside.
Content is what keeps deals alive
Most content strategies are built around campaigns, not buying journeys. Assets get created to support a launch or a theme, then they sit. In a long-cycle deal, that leaves gaps – moments where you don’t have anything relevant to offer a specific stakeholder at the stage they’re in. Those gaps are where deals quietly cool off.
Content built for long-cycle ABM looks different. It’s organized around the questions each persona is trying to answer:
- Benefits manager: Case studies and peer examples showing how similar organizations solved this problem and what outcomes they saw
- Finance: ROI models, total cost of ownership breakdowns, and risk mitigation evidence
- Legal: Implementation timelines, contract process explainers, and liability documentation
- Procurement: References, delivery track record, and vendor evaluation criteria
- Compliance: Regulatory alignment documentation, data handling practices, and certification evidence
None of those questions get answered by the same asset – and serving a compliance stakeholder the same content as a benefits manager isn’t just unhelpful, it’s a missed opportunity to move them forward. The programs that execute this well aren’t manually routing content to every contact. They’re using tools that automatically surface the right asset based on who’s engaging and what they’ve already consumed.
The other thing content does in a long cycle that often gets overlooked: it tells you who’s paying attention. Engagement with specific content – what someone reads, how long they spend with it, whether they come back – is one of the most reliable signals you have about where a stakeholder is in their thinking. That’s information marketing can use to sharpen nurture efforts, and it’s information sales needs to know when to pick up the phone.
Visibility is what makes warmth scalable
Good content and a solid committee map will only get you so far if you can’t see what’s actually happening inside an account. And in a 12–18 month sales cycle, flying blind is how deals slip away.
The reality is that most marketing and sales teams are working from incomplete information. Marketing knows what they sent. Sales knows what came up in their last call. Nobody has a clear picture of what the account is actually doing in between – which stakeholders are engaging, which content they’re spending time with, and whether activity is picking up or tapering off.
That gap is expensive. Without engagement data, marketing is guessing at who to nurture and when. Sales is reaching out on a schedule rather than on signal. And the moments when an account is genuinely warming up go unnoticed.
According to Forrester’s 2024 State of Business Buying Report, 86% of B2B purchases stall – not because the buyer lost interest, but because the process bogs down, internal alignment breaks, or a vendor simply lost the thread at the wrong moment.
The signals worth paying attention to:
- A new stakeholder engages for the first time – someone you haven’t been in contact with starts consuming content, which often means the deal is progressing internally
- A known stakeholder revisits content they’ve seen before – particularly later in the cycle. This usually signals discussions internally, or a decision point is approaching
- Multiple stakeholders are active in the same window – when several committee members engage in a short period, it often means the account is in an active evaluation phase
- Engagement depth increases – a contact who previously skimmed is now spending significant time with detailed content, suggesting they’re moving from awareness to serious consideration
When these signals are visible to both marketing and sales, staying warm stops being a guessing game. Marketing can adjust nurture in real time based on what’s actually resonating. Sales gets a clear view of which accounts are heating up – so they’re prioritizing the right conversations at the right time.
But visibility only works if marketing and sales agree on what they’re looking at. The teams that execute this well have a shared definition of what “ready to re-engage” actually means – which signals trigger outreach, and which ones mean keep nurturing. Without that alignment, even the best engagement data gets acted on inconsistently.
The long game is winnable
Healthcare deals are long, complex, and committee-driven – that’s not going to change. But the teams closing them aren’t doing it through sheer effort or better strategy. They’re doing it because they’ve built the infrastructure to stay relevant across a timeline that would cause most ABM programs to lose the thread.
Staying warm across 12–18 months comes down to knowing who you’re nurturing, having the content to serve them, and having the visibility to know when to act. When marketing and sales are working from the same signals, the long game stops feeling like a grind and starts feeling like a system.