How Blackford Turned Healthcare Market Intelligence into HubSpot RevOps

Current Landscape

As Blackford’s healthcare AI proposition continued to grow, its sales and marketing teams needed more than a conventional CRM database. They needed a connected revenue operations layer that reflected how healthcare organisations are structured, how decision-making is distributed, and how commercial opportunities should be prioritised across parent and child accounts.

In healthcare, that structure is rarely simple. Hospitals may sit within Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs). IDNs may be part of larger parent systems. Imaging centres may belong to wider imaging groups. Public-sector healthcare structures, including Veterans Affairs divisions and Veterans Integrated Service Networks in the United States, introduce additional account relationships and territory considerations. The U.S. Veterans Health Administration describes VISNs as regional systems of care, with the U.S. divided into 18 Veterans Integrated Service Networks.

For Blackford, these relationships mattered commercially. Accurate account hierarchy data could help sales teams understand ownership, influence, territory, product responsibility, and account priority. It could also help marketing teams segment more effectively, launch ABM programmes, and create more relevant outreach for healthcare AI buyers.

The Challenge

Blackford had access to valuable healthcare market intelligence, including data from Definitive Healthcare. However, the team needed to make that data operational inside HubSpot.

Definitive Healthcare is a healthcare data and analytics company focused on the business side of healthcare. Its data is designed to bring clarity to a complex healthcare market and support more strategic commercial decision-making. Definitive Healthcare also highlights healthcare use cases such as building smarter sales territories, growing market share, segmenting markets, identifying ideal clients, and reaching key decision-makers.

This type of data is highly relevant for healthcare solution providers because it helps teams navigate complex buying environments. In the United States, commercial teams often need to understand relationships between health systems, IDNs, hospitals, imaging centres, VA networks, affiliations, service lines, locations, and decision-makers. Definitive Healthcare states that its data includes hospital and IDN profiles across the U.S., with insights into hospitals, health systems, affiliations, leadership, and performance.

For organisations selling into the NHS and wider European healthcare systems, the same principle applies, even though the structures differ. Sales and marketing teams need to understand how trusts, hospital groups, imaging networks, regional structures, procurement routes, and clinical influence affect account prioritisation.

Blackford’s challenge was therefore not just to import more data into HubSpot. The challenge was to transform healthcare market intelligence into a reliable CRM operating model that sales and marketing teams could use every day.

The project needed to support:

• Matching Definitive Healthcare data with existing HubSpot company and contact records
• Deduplicating and standardising large volumes of data
• Creating a unique identifier to support long-term data continuity
• Building parent-child association logic in HubSpot
• Representing IDN parent, IDN, hospital, imaging group, and imaging centre relationships
• Mapping VA divisions and VISN distribution
• Assigning sales territory and industry ownership
• Creating account tiers and landgrab criteria
• Identifying target accounts for ABM
• Supporting educational campaigns, sponsored content, prospecting, and warm outreach
• Enabling continuous enrichment and market signals through ZoomInfo

The Solution

Cat Media designed and implemented a healthcare data solution that connected Definitive Healthcare intelligence with Blackford’s HubSpot environment.

At the centre of the project was furball, Cat Media’s proprietary data-matching and data quality solution. furball is designed to identify patterns in data, match records by extracting context from data points, and support large datasets that need matching and linking without clean unique identifiers, consistent formatting, or standard naming conventions. Cat Media also uses furball for matching, deduplication, correction, and formatting as part of data quality and CRM preparation work.

For Blackford, furball acted as the data preparation and quality layer between Definitive Healthcare, HubSpot, VA/VISN data, and enrichment sources. It was used to compare records, identify likely matches, standardise inconsistent fields, format values, and support deduplication before the data was activated in HubSpot.

This was essential because healthcare data often includes naming variations, incomplete identifiers, differing facility classifications, inconsistent address formatting, parent-child ambiguity, and overlapping records across systems. Without a structured matching process, sales and marketing teams risk acting on fragmented, duplicated, or incomplete account views.

Using furball, Cat Media matched and standardised more than 50,000 company and contact records. Cat Media also created a unique project identifier to support data continuity, helping Blackford maintain a consistent view of each organisation as records were enriched, updated, merged, or associated with parent and child entities.

As part of the data quality process, 12% of the matched and standardised records were identified as duplicates and merged. This reduced CRM noise, improved reporting accuracy, and gave teams greater confidence in account-level segmentation and outreach.

Once the data foundation was prepared, Cat Media built healthcare-specific parent-child association logic inside HubSpot. This enabled Blackford to represent complex healthcare relationships across:

• IDN parents
• IDNs
• Hospitals
• Parent imaging groups
• Imaging centres
• VA divisions
• VISNs
• GPOs

This hierarchy allowed Blackford’s teams to move beyond flat company records and work with a more accurate view of the healthcare market. Sales representatives could see where a hospital sat within a wider network. Marketing could segment accounts by parent or child structure. Leadership could assess market coverage, account ownership, and commercial opportunity with greater confidence.

Cat Media also implemented ZeroBounce email validation as part of the ongoing data quality framework. ZeroBounce was used to validate email addresses, identify risky or invalid emails, support exclusion logic, and help protect email deliverability. This complemented the furball matching and standardisation work by ensuring that contact data was not only correctly structured, but also safer to use in marketing and sales outreach.

This approach followed Cat Media’s wider email validation framework, where HubSpot Data Hub workflows and custom code actions can automatically validate new or updated email addresses through the ZeroBounce API. Invalid or risky email addresses can then be excluded from future campaigns to reduce bounce risk and improve list quality.

With the data model in place, Cat Media used the enriched healthcare intelligence to support territory assignment and product ownership. Reps could be aligned to accounts based on commercially relevant factors, including organisation type, size, location, hierarchy, imaging relationship, health system structure, number of beds, fiscal year, and strategic fit.

The team also developed landgrab criteria to help Blackford identify, tier, and prioritise target accounts. These criteria helped classify parent and child companies, identify high-value accounts, and build a more structured ABM motion.

This enabled Blackford to support:

• Target account identification for ABM
• Educational campaign segmentation
• Sponsored content targeting
• Prospecting list building
• Warm outreach
• Territory-based sales plays
• Product ownership assignment
• Continuous enrichment through ZoomInfo signals

Cat Media helped Blackford use it as an active revenue operations system, where healthcare market intelligence could inform sales, marketing, and leadership decision-making.

The Results

The project gave Blackford a stronger data foundation for healthcare AI sales and marketing.

By using furball to match, clean, standardise, deduplicate, and format complex healthcare datasets before activating them in HubSpot, Cat Media helped Blackford turn fragmented market intelligence into a structured revenue operations asset.

The new HubSpot data model reflected the complexity of healthcare buying structures while remaining practical for day-to-day commercial execution. Sales teams could view parent-child relationships across IDNs, hospitals, imaging groups, imaging centres, VA divisions, and VISNs. Marketing teams could segment and prioritise accounts with greater accuracy. Leadership could make decisions based on cleaner, more consistent, and more commercially useful data.

The solution also enabled Blackford to launch a more focused landgrab ABM motion. With clearer account tiers and more accurate hierarchy logic, the team could identify target accounts, prioritise outreach, build more relevant educational campaigns, activate sponsored content, and support warmer prospecting.

The improved data foundation contributed to stronger campaign activation, better account prioritisation, and a clearer connection between healthcare market intelligence and revenue activity. Marketing-influenced revenue grew by 20%, supported by cleaner data, stronger segmentation, and more connected sales and marketing execution.

Closing Summary

Cat Media helped Blackford transform healthcare market intelligence into a scalable HubSpot revenue operations model.

By matching Definitive Healthcare data with HubSpot, using furball to standardise and deduplicate records, creating a unique identifier for data continuity, building healthcare-specific parent-child association logic, mapping VA and VISN structures, and enabling ABM segmentation, Cat Media gave Blackford a stronger commercial foundation for healthcare AI growth.

The result was a cleaner, more connected, and more actionable CRM environment. Blackford’s sales and marketing teams gained the ability to understand complex healthcare relationships, prioritise the right accounts, assign territory and product ownership more effectively, and activate targeted campaigns with greater confidence.