Go To Market Strategy |
AHA Hosted Buyer Forum
The AHA needed to revitalize sponsorship sales at its flagship national conferences. I was responsible for introducing a new sponsorship product to prevent churn and attract new sponsors. The AHA Hosted Buyer Forum, a private showcase connecting hospital leaders and solution providers tailored to the needs of AHA members and event sponsors.
Under my leadership we saw three consecutive years of growth in attendance and sales. Including an 88% year-over-year increase in sponsorship sales in 2025, and a 10x increase in sales and 450% increase in registrations over three years. Growing from a single session to three sessions, and proven to be an extremely valuable destination for sponsors and attendees.
What is a hosted buyer event?
A hosted buyer event is a way for sponsors to connect with high-value conference attendees face-to-face. In order to participate attendees have to fill out an application and be approved to join.
Attendees are closely involved in their organization’s buying decisions. Either as a decision-maker or as someone who is influential on the buying committee.
Creating an environment where sponsors know they will be introduced to contacts that play an important role and are interested in finding new solutions for their organization. Rather than relying on a game of chance at their booth or a reception — a key challenge facing event sponsors.
STRATEGIC GTM PILLARS FOR GETTING STARTED
Market Research - Understand marketplace expectations as you lay the foundation of your work. What does your ideal customer expect from this experience? What is required to make that happen? We identified key deliverables for participants and sponsors that needed to happen for a successful launch.
Evaluate Your Tools - You don’t need an advanced tech stack, you need the right strategy to get key jobs done. After you have identified key deliverables in your research, find the right workflows using the tools you have available.
Find Your Unique Differentiation - We saw a golden opportunity in positioning our experience differently from the competition. By consolidating the event into a 3 hour forum that guaranteed a brief presentation and face time with all participants we created an extremely valuable difference from existing hosted buyer program sponsorships.
This improved SEO performance and allowed us to own the term “hosted buyer forum”. Separating the product from the competition (hosted buyer programs) by creating a similar, but different product experience. Giving us the ability to set expectations and change the run-of-show to fit our vision.Define Jobs To Be Done - Segment your work into concise jobs that are critical to your Go To Market strategy. We identified eight areas that were critical to a successful launch. Then drilled down to identify the specific jobs to be done in each segment, and who owned each segment. This brought clarity to our work and allowed our small team to execute across several channels.
Create Your Business Case - Combine everything above into a clear plan of action to share with your leadership team. Having a well thought out and strategic process shows that you have thought through all of the GTM touch points and are ready for a go/no go decision.
Hosted Buyer Forum Product Research and Go To Market Workflow
A traditional hosted buyer program requires several meetings spread across multiple days, typically scheduled with a third-party service.
Knowing that this could limit user adoption we pivoted to a three hour forum hosted on the first day of the conference that did not require any additional scheduling. Ensuring a better user experience by building the event around the preferences of the people we needed to have in the room.
HOSTED BUYER FORUM: 5 STRATEGIC TAKEAWAYS FOR GTM LEADERS
1. Quantify Your ICPs: Don't just list ideal personas; collaborate with sales to establish clear, data-driven targets for both buyers and sponsors based on projected ROI. That meant establishing a required 2:1 ratio early to set expectations.
2. Eliminate UX Friction: Always put user experience at the center of your work. Analyze the entire user journey for barriers to entry, such as forcing non-tech-savvy users into secondary applications or creating duplicative registration workflows. Third-party tools and Technical capabilities are worthless without adoption.
3. Radical Simplification as Differentiation: Consider using a "less is more" approach. We replaced a multi-day logistics burden with an extremely valuable three-hour event prioritizing the user's existing conference flow and time.
4. Operationalize the "Job to be Done": Frame your event lifecycle—from application via MS Forms to on-site badge scanning—as a series of specific "jobs". Build a cohesive operational pathway that ensures seamless high-fidelity data and quality control.
5. Map Ops to the Business Case: Bridge the gap between a "Go/No-Go" executive decision and execution by designing the granular marketing operations frameworks that are necessary to deliver a flawless experience on day one.
USER FEEDBACK + VOICE OF CUSTOMER
A critical component of this product was the experience of health care executives that participated. This event was tailored to their preferences and we needed to validate that we had the right structure in place.
Product development needs to be informed by the voice of participants and customers. Feedback was collected through onsite postcard surveys, conference attendee surveys, account executives, direct outreach requests and online survey of attendees. Responses and suggestions guided our strategy of what to focus on and knowing why it was valuable. Enhancing the experience by addressing their needs.
Collecting feedback and having testimonials ready to share allowed my team to substantiate the value we had created. We let our users do the talking for us and their words became a way to build credibility internally and externally. Without their voice we would not have achieved the same buy-in or success.
"The Hosted Buyer Forum was excellent. It was a great way to learn about new products and technologies without having to sift through the hundreds of emails or cold calls each day.”
— Holly A. McCormack, DNP, RN, President & Chief Executive Officer, Cottage Hospital
"The Hosted Buyer Forum gave me an opportunity to understand the vendor's product in a relaxed manner and be able to listen to other hospital CEO perspectives.”
— Suzanne L. Cooner, Chief Executive Officer, Audubon County Memorial Hospital
"The Hosted Buyer Forum was as good as the conference to me. It allows you to learn about products that may help advance your hospital operations. I appreciated it being low pressure.”
— Brett Altman, CEO, Cass Health