Ben Buchanan Learned to Close Games. Now He Opens Markets.

The day job now involves print, web campaigns, conference rooms and an unusually dense vocabulary of claims, payments and integrations. But the cleanest way into Ben Buchanan’s story is through a different piece of specialist language: win in the morning, save in the afternoon.

That was his assignment during the 2006 Big South Tournament. UNC Asheville played High Point at 11 a.m. Buchanan took the win. Later, against Liberty, he returned to record the save that sent the Bulldogs into the title game. Baseball generally likes its roles labeled - starter, reliever, closer - and then occasionally produces a day that makes labels look rather precious.

Buchanan could start. He could close. He could take an emergency assignment. His college biography offered the compact scouting report that “he can be used in any situation.” Nearly two decades later, his business résumé reads like a long proof of the same sentence.

The closer’s education

Buchanan arrived at UNC Asheville from East Mecklenburg High School, where he had been a four-year starter, a two-time all-conference selection and a senior captain. As a freshman in 2005, he made 11 starts. Against High Point, he struck out 10 over eight innings in a 2-1 loss. It is an annoyingly useful lesson for anyone headed toward executive work: sometimes the best individual line still sits beside the wrong team result.

His role changed in 2006. He took over as closer, recorded six saves and, across four outings from April 22 to May 6, retired 22 consecutive batters. Nine times that season, every batter he faced went down. The next year he added seven saves and became the school’s career leader at the time. By the end of four seasons, the right-hander had worked 253 innings across 94 appearances, struck out 187 and recorded 15 saves.

The numbers survive in UNC Asheville’s record book. The more interesting residue is behavioral. A closer inherits context. Other people have created the score, the traffic on the bases and the mood in the stadium. He does not get to redesign the first eight innings. He reads what is there, limits the damage and finishes. It is a fine education in operating inside systems you did not build.

From innings to interfaces

Buchanan studied marketing management at UNC Asheville, then earned an MBA from Queens University of Charlotte between 2010 and 2012. His route into technology did not begin with advertising. According to his company biography, he led product management for employer solutions at Atrium Health, then became Director of Relationship Management at TSYS, the payments processor later acquired by Global Payments.

Those jobs sit on useful fault lines. Product management asks what ought to be built, for whom and in what order. Relationship management begins after promises meet clients, contracts and the mild comedy of real-world implementation. Payments work teaches a special respect for invisible infrastructure: nobody applauds a transaction for arriving correctly, but everybody notices when it does not.

At ImagineSoftware, Buchanan moved through strategic solutions and product leadership before becoming chief marketing officer. The company’s current biography gives him responsibility for strategic vision across both marketing and product. Its leadership page defines the growth remit more plainly: print, in-person and web-based channels.

That combination matters. Healthcare software can be sold with a polished sentence and undone by a clumsy handoff. Claims need to move. Payment data needs to reconcile. Software needs to connect with the many systems already occupying a customer’s day. Marketing cannot remain a decorative layer if the product beneath it is a network of consequential workflows.

The marketer who talks plumbing

In a 2025 company interview about ImagineOne, Buchanan chose a telling fact to explain the platform’s reach: “We collaborate with leading organizations to connect over 1,500 unique integrations into ImagineOne.” It is not the language of perfume advertising. It is plumbing, proudly counted.

His public writing follows the same practical instinct. Since at least 2018, Buchanan has published articles about training staff on practice-management software, digital fundamentals, patient retention, payment options, automated workflows, claims clearinghouses and industry policy. The topics have grown more technical as the software has grown more ambitious, but the reader is usually left with a task, a warning sign or a choice to make.

In a webinar about choosing a revenue-cycle partner, he began with four priorities that few buyers would contest: getting paid quickly, conveniently and compliantly, while maximizing reimbursement. Then came the more revealing line: “No one is going to argue that these aren’t critical, but today, the decision is more nuanced.”

Nuance is where operators earn their coffee. Every vendor can agree with the nouns. The work begins in the verbs - connects, checks, posts, corrects, reports. Buchanan’s product background gives his marketing a natural place to stand: close enough to the machinery to know which verbs matter.

A team sport, twice over

Buchanan’s official biography calls him a people-first leader and emphasizes cross-functional teams. Corporate biographies are paid to be polite, but his most substantial public quote about culture adds detail. When ImagineSoftware received a 2022 Culture and Well Being award from the Radiology Business Management Association, he spoke about creating unity through diversity and enabling colleagues to develop their potential, think creatively and bring their full selves to work.

There is a baseball echo here, though it need not be made sentimental. A pitcher appears alone at the center of the diamond while depending on eight teammates, a catcher’s signs, a coach’s judgment and runs supplied by hitters. Marketing leadership can produce the same optical illusion. The public sees the campaign. The outcome depends on product, engineering, sales, support, finance and the clients willing to say what is not working.

In 2021, Buchanan presented an industry webinar on patient engagement. In 2023 and 2024, his byline appeared repeatedly across ImagineSoftware’s resource library. In 2025, he served as a company voice around ImagineOne’s integrations. The pattern is not celebrity. It is repetition - returning to the same operational territory often enough to develop a point of view.

An archive of practical questions

The bylines also show how the territory changed. In 2018, Buchanan wrote about getting more from practice-management software, testing a practice’s digital basics, retaining patients and offering new payment options. These are close-to-the-desk subjects. They begin with what a staff member or customer encounters today, not with a distant forecast about disruption.

By 2023, the frame had widened. His articles covered automated billing workflows, post-service evaluation, patient follow-up and the introduction of ImagineOne. In 2024, the archive moved between claims clearinghouses and policy discussions. The progression follows the company’s expanding platform, but it also demonstrates a marketer learning in public. Each new layer is attached to an old operational question: where does work stall, and what would let it move?

One 2018 headline asked whether a practice had three necessary digital elements. A 2023 headline warned that a billing system could give competitors an advantage. Neither needs a brass band. Both turn software into an observable decision. You can check for the element. You can identify the warning sign. Buchanan’s most consistent device is the diagnostic question, a format that respects a busy reader because it offers somewhere to begin.

That is also the hidden advantage of an operator who writes. Writing exposes the gaps between what a product team knows and what the customer can reasonably be expected to understand. If the bridge requires a fog of acronyms, it is not finished. If a buyer can see the workflow, the tradeoff and the next action, the message has done useful work.

What finishing looks like now

A save is a wonderfully blunt statistic. Either the lead remains or it does not. Executive marketing offers no such tidy box score. Revenue arrives through many hands. A message may influence a sale months before the contract. Product choices alter the credibility of future campaigns. The work resists a single column.

Buchanan’s career still supplies a useful definition of finishing. It is not swooping in for the dramatic last out. It is accepting inherited complexity without using it as an excuse. It is knowing enough about the product to make the promise precise. It is keeping the relationship intact after the pitch. It is being available for a different role when the day’s first assignment has already ended.

The 2006 tournament anecdote lands because it avoids the usual career fable. There was no magical moment when a college pitcher discovered he was secretly a software marketer. There were simply two games, two roles and a teammate trusted to take the ball again. The rest of Buchanan’s path was built the ordinary way: one specialty, then another, with each chapter leaving a tool behind.

Today the mound is a market, the signs are data and the handoff might be an API. The useful habit remains beautifully unromantic. Understand the situation. Make the next thing work. Leave the lead standing.