‘Quarterback of the Sales Lifecycle’: Andrew Weintraub and the Case for Client Success
After building the client success function at Mesmerize, Weintraub has turned his attention to affirming its utility
Of the myriad roles and functions in pharma media and health-tech, client/customer success may be the most misunderstood. That’s likely related to its breadth: On any given day, client success execs might be called upon for strategic counsel, tech support, expectation management, refereeing or group therapy. They troubleshoot. They stanch the bleeding.
When Andrew Weintraub arrived at Mesmerize in September 2021, no such function existed. The company was in the middle of a growth spurt that would pinnacle with its acquisition in February 2023 by MJH Life Sciences, but its sales and operations groups too often found themselves siloed off from one another.
Enter Weintraub, who was battle-tested from his time serving as a client success manager at Outcome Health and PatientPoint, which acquired Outcome during his tenure. “Mesmerize wasn’t doing anything wrong, per se, but the alignment might not have fully been there,” he says. “My goal was to have client success serve as a bridge between the client and our sales and operations people. I wanted us to become the quarterback of the entire sales lifecycle.”
Now more than four years into his Mesmerize tenure and promoted into the role of senior director of client success, Weintraub heads up a team of five. He has brought discipline and process to the client success function, including the development of a best practices onboarding program for new clients. No longer is there any substantial push-and-pull between internal teams: Sales sells and operations executes.
Mesmerize SVP Paul Ellis paints Weintraub’s impact as genuinely transformational. “‘Jack of all trades’ doesn’t do Andrew justice. He’s the fulcrum of everything we do,” he says. “Our missing piece was a client success function. When Andrew got here, everything just clicked.”
‘A new language’
Growing up in East Brunswick, New Jersey, Weintraub batted around the possibility of a parent-pleasing career in law, medicine or finance. After taking biology and chemistry courses during his first years at Binghamton University, he decided to major in psychology. On the side, he did volunteer design work for local Jewish community clubs and campus organizations.
His professional path didn’t immediately materialize. “Healthcare was something I thought about, but at that point in my life I was more interested in the technology field.” He joined Havas in March 2018, working in its digital investments and connections planning groups. It was there he was first exposed to pharma clients, and what he saw piqued his interest.
So when the Outcome Health opportunity presented itself, Weintraub jumped. Once settled in, he embarked on a crash course in pharma and point-of-care media. “It was a new language – the FDA legalities, target lists, safety information, all of it. My first few months were all about figuring out this new space,” he recalls.
Weintraub also learned how to listen and prioritize, two skills that continue to serve him well. He’s a big believer in the need for regular feedback, both given and received. When asked about a piece of feedback that helped him evolve in the client success role, Weintraub goes straight to his inbox. “I’m not quoting it exactly here, but I saved one about making sure you understand the importance of the way you communicate via email. If a situation gets emotional, you take a breather and respond later. You can’t lead with your emotions at that particular moment.”
When the offer to join Mesmerize was extended, Weintraub happily accepted and immediately started planning the construction of the client success function. It proved a heavier lift than he expected.
After conveying his vision to company leadership – “I showed them how client success could be complementary to other departments and workflows, and remove a lot of the friction we’d been seeing” – Weintraub went about selling it internally. The process took about a year to fully flesh out.
Resistance to change, he learned, is not easily overcome, regardless of a broader organizational embrace of the processes and ideas being put forward. “I wanted to do it right, which meant we needed to get people truly, fully on board,” Weintraub says. “Traditional salespeople can be a little bit territorial – which isn’t a bad thing, because they know what works best for them. I had to convince them that the presence of a strong client success group would let them focus on selling. We’d deal with everything else.”
The infrastructural expansion has paid dividends. Weintraub reports that Mesmerize manages twice as many programs as it did four years ago and has seen an influx of RFPs. The surge in activity, in turn, has prompted the client success team to evolve the way it goes about its day-to-day business.
“What we’ve learned how to do is what I’d call ‘strategically prioritize,’” he explains. “Every day is different but there are always going to be priorities, and that’s what we focus on. It’s not just about doing everything in the quickest fashion.”
Weintraub hopes to spend the rest of his career in or around the point-of-care space, in client-adjacent roles that ultimately bolster his leadership bona fides. “He can speak so intelligently about all sides of what we do and how we do it. That translates into any business, any career opportunity,” Ellis says.
Weintraub recently became a father for the first time and, as such, finds himself with just a bit less free time on his hands than he once did. That said, the new addition has cemented his belief in the importance of community – personally, professionally and otherwise. Look for that to inform his career arc going forward.
“Mesmerize works with so many community organizations and client success itself is very community-oriented. There are internal stakeholders and there are external stakeholders, and you serve as kind of the connective tissue,” he says. “Working together more closely, in the way we try to do it, makes everything more manageable and productive.”
This profile is part of the solli Elevate series, celebrating the Next Generation of Pharma Media Leaders. View all profiles here
