Rebuilding Trust and Refocusing Growth:
Denova Health
TL;DR
- Client: Denova Health - behavioral health provider expanding across Arizona
- Problem: A fresh rebrand eroded brand recognition, ambitious growth goals, and a weak strategic foundation.
- Solution: Strategic advisory focused on patient acquisition, provider referral strategy, and messaging grounded in patient experience.
- Shift: Moved from "throw tactics at ambitious goals" to building a strategic foundation centered on patient needs and provider trust.
- Impact: Clear strategic direction, messaging aligned to actual patient and provider concerns, restored partnership trust, and a growth plan that the team could actually execute.
The Challenge
Denova had recently rebranded from Bayless, wiping out the brand recognition they'd built. But leadership expectations hadn't adjusted - they wanted more net new patients per week, brand awareness built from scratch, and an expanded provider referral network despite providers already delivering 70% of patient flow.
The work was scattered. Lots of channels, no cohesive message, and an unfinished foundational strategy. Internal leadership was misaligned on priorities. Trust in their agency partner was also eroding.
The symptoms showing up:
- Ambitious growth targets with no strategic foundation to support them
- Marketing activity happening without a clear connection to business goals
- Provider referral partners unclear on what Denova offered or why to refer
- Patient messaging making promises the experience couldn't deliver
- Agency stuck in reactive execution mode
- Leadership misaligned on what success looked like and how to measure it
- Brand name that didn't communicate what they actually did
- Little brand awareness in a category already plagued by stigma and skepticism
The market reality made it worse: behavioral health carries stigma, patient audiences have wildly different needs and access barriers, and providers are skeptical about where to send patients. Denova was trying to scale without the basics in place.
Debbie Longley
Group Account Director
Lane Terralever
For Denova, one of Arizona’s largest outpatient behavioral healthcare providers, we needed help articulating a clear, confident patient acquisition strategy that leadership could truly rally behind. From messaging validation to laying the groundwork for patient insights research, Sunny brought the clarity we were missing. She didn’t just refine our thinking; she helped us transform it into a compelling narrative that aligned directly with our 2025 strategic plan. It was exactly the reset we needed to help Denova move forward with confidence.
Sunny was a true partner, thoughtful, steady, and always a few steps ahead. She made complex problems feel solvable and brought out the best in our team.
The Shift
What made this work worth doing: Denova needed to stop throwing tactics at ambitious goals and start building a strategic foundation. You can't scale trust, and that's what behavioral health requires.
The belief that had to change: "We just need more marketing activity to hit our numbers." → "We need strategic clarity on who we serve and why they should trust us before we can scale anything."
The barriers they faced: Internal leadership unintentionally created competing priorities. A rebrand that erased recognition without building new awareness. Provider partners who didn't understand the value proposition. Patient audiences with complex needs weren't addressed in the messaging. An agency relationship was in jeopardy because no one trusted the recommendations.
The Work
- Strategic foundation reset
Presented a clear strategic point of view to the CEO and the leadership team, connecting every marketing effort back to business goals: patient acquisition, provider awareness, referral network expansion. This gave leadership a shared language to evaluate work and make decisions instead of reacting to whoever spoke loudest. - Audience-specific conversion frameworks
Built frameworks for patients and providers separately, mapping who cares, what the offer is, why it's valuable, and what objections had to be overcome. This stopped the team from treating all audiences the same and gave them structure to evaluate messaging effectiveness. - Patient insight strategy
Set up patient research and message testing to validate what actually mattered to patients instead of guessing based on internal assumptions. This shifted conversations from "I think patients care about X" to "patients told us Y is what drives their decision." - Provider education approach
Most referral partners didn't know what Denova offered or why it mattered to their patients. Built a strategy to educate providers on services, referral process, and patient outcomes so they could refer with confidence instead of hesitation. - Messaging aligned to patient experience
Stopped promising things the experience couldn't deliver (like 24-hour appointments when patients couldn't actually get them). Grounded all messaging in what patients would actually experience, building trust through realistic expectations instead of eroding it with overpromises. - Realistic KPI framework
Worked with the client to workshop smarter growth goals and helped anchor all strategy discussions in the actual path to 300 patients per week. This gave leadership realistic milestones and stopped the cycle of setting targets disconnected from operational reality. - Agency relationship stabilization
Acted as a strategic advisor, helping the agency shift from reactive order-taking to proactive strategic guidance. Reset how progress got reported and how metrics translated to business impact, restoring credibility in the partnership. - "Aha" moment: When leadership realized they were expecting marketing to generate increased volume of patients per week, while providers who already trusted them could only deliver a smaller amount per month total. The gap wasn't marketing execution - it was operational capacity and provider education. Marketing couldn't fix what operations and clinical relationships hadn't built yet.
The Outcome
- What's different now:
Denova has alignment across leadership on what success looks like and how to measure it. Marketing efforts connect to business outcomes instead of just generating activity. The team has a framework for messaging that addresses actual patient and provider concerns instead of what they assumed mattered.
The agency partnership stabilized because everyone's working from a shared strategy instead of competing internal opinions. The team can now evaluate marketing recommendations against the strategic framework instead of gut reactions. - Decisions enabled:
Leadership can prioritize initiatives based on strategic impact instead of whoever argues loudest. The team knows which patient segments to focus on and what messages resonate with each. They understand which provider relationships to deepen and what education those providers need to refer confidently.
Marketing can now push back on requests that don't serve strategy without political fallout because everyone agrees on the framework.
Internal wins:
When leadership aligned on strategy and realistic goals, decisions got made faster with less friction. Marketing and clinical teams can find shared language around patient experience, reducing the disconnect between what marketing promised and what operations could deliver.
The agency partner moved from reactive to proactive because they had frameworks to guide recommendations.
The Takeaway
For other organizations:
If you're setting ambitious growth goals in healthcare (especially behavioral health) without a strategic foundation, more marketing activity won't fix it. You need clarity on who you serve, what they need to hear, and whether your operational reality can deliver on your promises. Trust doesn't scale through paid media - it scales through consistent experience that matches what you said would happen.
Who's probably in the same stuck place:
Healthcare organizations post-rebrand are trying to build awareness from scratch while hitting aggressive growth targets. Companies where marketing and clinical operations aren't aligned on what the patient experience actually delivers. Teams with rocky agency partnerships because internal misalignment makes every recommendation an ongoing discussion instead of a strategic decision.
What this case proves:
You can't market your way out of operational or strategic gaps. Behavioral health requires trust, and trust requires messaging aligned to actual patient experience, providers who understand and believe in your approach, and internal leadership aligned on realistic goals. Strategic clarity beats marketing volume every time, especially in categories where skepticism is the default and overpromising permanently destroys credibility.