How to Connect Marketing to Revenue

but started off with us jokingly calling chat GPT chat. You know, now we've got clotted. We, you know, we have family. We've got all these things. And so what you get is you get people bringing two different scorecards to the table and marketing saying, "I optimized for MQLs. I optimized for lead volume. This is what you asked me to do based on your calculations." And sales says, "But we're left holding the bag on revenue. These two things are not aligned." So I think that's kind of why it's so dysfunctional. Welcome to the Health Deck Marketing Show. I'm your host, Adam Turenes. I'm the CEO of Health Launchpad, one of this podcast presenting sponsors. Thank you so much for listening. If this is your first time tuning in, please do subscribe using whatever podcast that you use. There you can find us a Spotify app or YouTube. Yeah, we're all over the place. Just search for the Health Deck Marketing Show on YouTube or on whatever podcast application you use and I'm sure you'll find us. A big thank you to our sponsors, the lovely people at HealthCare now radio. This is a 24/7 online radio station dedicated to all things health care. And they've also got a really amazing podcast syndication network which we are loving being part of. It's expanded our reach enormously and we're genuinely grateful to everything that they do. Now, today's episode. I want to start with a question I hear quite often from marketing leaders in our community. Is traditional demand generation actually dead? The MQL, the marketing qualified lead, was supposed to be the shared language between marketing and sales. But for a lot of organization, that language is broken down. Marketing used to celebrate lead volume and but sales was left holding the bag on revenue. And you know what, it just wasn't really working that well for many companies. What's been replacing it is something fundamentally different. A model where marketing is accountable for revenue along with sales, not just the pipeline that leads to revenue. And this is where quite often, the customer's success is also part of a go-to-market team, not just a downstream afterthought. And this is where the buyer's journey is treated as one continuous experience, rather than a series of departmental handoffs. And today I've got two guests joining me who are living this transformation and they're both wonderful guests. So first of all, is Paula Cobb. Paula is the VP of marketing at Ava Shaw. This is a mid-size, private equity-backed virtual care platform. Paula has over 30 years of healthcare marketing experience, including leadership at Phillips, McKesson and DXC. She runs a go-to-market model. She describes as peanut butter and jelly. And I'll let her explain that. It's really kind of nifty. What I love about her perspective is how tightly she's integrated, marketing with sales and customer success. And the fact that AI has part of the org chart. You'll hear why a bit later on. We then hear from the amazing Alex Eskivel, Alex leads marketing at Luma Health. And she's got really unusual background. She's incredibly sharp on the business side. And that's because she came up through finance and operations before moving into marketing. And that makes backgrounds, makes her particularly clear-eyed about why traditional demand Gen was. And in her words, doomed from the start. And she'll describe what a genuinely revenue-accountable marketing model looks like in practice. Both of them offer different perspectives and different views on ways of structuring a modern go-to-market operation. I strongly recommend you listen to both of these interviews. And also, do stay right till the end, because at the end, I'm going to come back and I'm going to provide five key takeaways from these conversations. Two great conversations coming up. One topic that is on everybody's mind right now. So let's get into it. Hi, I'm Paula Cobb, I'm the Vice President of Marketing for Avassure. We are a mid-size startup, private equity backed. I have over 30 years of health care marketing experience. Prior to being with Avassure and a few other startups, I worked at Phillips Healthcare, ran the Connected Care Global Marketing Team there. Also worked with McKesson. And DXC was covering insurance as well as health care. So I've been doing this for a really long time. And love the art and science of marketing. Wow, what a great pedigree. And so I'm so interested to talk to you about the evolution of, you know, used to be called DemarGen, well, she's still called DemarGeneration. But, you know, now we talk about the GTM model, the go-to-market model. Tell us a little bit about your model at Avassure. Yeah, it's really interesting, because you know, it's not, it's traditional, but it's not. Things move so much more iterative and faster these days with products. I mean, when you're, you know, coming up with the idea of where you're going from an upstream viewpoint, that's happening so much faster now. We're releasing products, you know, it's not planned out years and advance its months. And so that force is marketing to actually be very, very much involved in doing a lot of the business case development at the top of, you know, the ideation phase. And so you're creating a lot of what you would do in the traditional marketing phase later on. You're doing it up front. So I think that's been a big change for us in the world of delivering things in the cloud and with AI capabilities like we're building out. I think the other big change is your constantly responding to a very noisy, very best competitive environment. So you see things change like it used to be. You would set your product strategy and your price and you kind of leave that alone for a while. And now we're iterating on, you know, who is the true buyer in pricing all the way through the funnel? And it becomes much more flexible. So it requires us to really stay on our toes and to understand who that buyer is, what's happening, the influences that are happening within the healthcare systems to just make it a little bit messy. But you still have to do the same thing. You still need to know who the persona is, what problem you're solving and how you actually drive the right engagement with the right message at the right time in order to drive success in marketing. So a change from a sort of traditional sequential model, you design the product, you get customer feedback on the products, then you develop your marketing strategy, then you launch it and then you market it and you create demands. What you're describing is more like, I can't like hockey. It's a more real time, right? And everything's sort of happening at once and it's dynamic. So that's really interesting. So how do you describe what that looks, what a typical month or a quarter looks like in the life of your marketing team? And by the way, how is your GCM team organized? Who's in charge of it? What's past of it? How do you operate? - Yeah, so overall our go-to-market team, we're organized with three basic components. We have our commercial arm, which includes sales and sales operations. Then there's the marketing arm, which is my team and we have all of demand gen, we have products marketing and we have customer marketing because we do have a very large customer base and they've been with us for some time. So we're having to make sure that we market to them and bring them along to understand all these new capabilities. You don't buy a product anymore and you lead them alone and you use it and occasionally do upgrades where are constantly iterating, adding new capabilities and giving them capabilities to expand beyond their current use cases. So that marketing arm and the customer piece is a really, really important element. And then of course our customer success team is critical in our go-to-market strategy overall. So you take those three elements along with the overall development and product team, which is very, very marketing centric as well. It becomes a lot of people involved and a lot of people that need to understand messaging that are our channels that take out and deliver the content and the engagement cycles. - And do the three of you report to the CEO? Do you report to somebody else, the Chief Commercial Officer? - Yeah, so it's a little bit of a mixture. I report to the CEO, our sales channel, reports into our go-to-market operations leader as well as our customer success. And I think that strategy is also because I'm responsible for the corporate brand, all of corporate communications and the internal aspects of helping our employees. So that's where I actually kind of have a different reporting structure than the other Steve. But we function as a single unit. We like to call ourselves peanut butter and jelly because it's not good without one of the components. and just happens to match our first initials of our names. - Now that is becoming a leading model for how many modern marketing teams operate for folks listening to this. Can it contrast where that either came from or other marketing operations that sort of stretches that you've worked in? What the differences are? - Yeah, I mean, I would tell you and different entities, you would have a corporate marketing structure that was really worried about comms and brand. And it's kind of setting that, you know, 100,000 foot view of, you know, here's our tagline and what our vision and our purposes. And in our structure now, we have one entity that does marketing and we do worry about that, but we need to make sure that that mission, vision, and brand actually represents the products and the solutions that we go to market. We're one in the same. There's, you know, even though we have multiple products within our product suite and we serve a broad range of customers, it's really important that every employee within the organization is aligned on the value of that product and that being the heart and soul of what we're selling and how we get a market. - And so who actually develops the product? Is there a product management team that's more sort of technical and our process oriented? - Yeah, so that's correct. In our case, our product managers, they, we base how clinical as well as technical managers, but they're building business cases in conjunction with marketing. You know, we design kind of where the strategy, where we want to go, we provide the data and the feedback from our customers, the insights, what we're hearing from competitors, the opportunity to bring partnerships in, and we work together to develop that strategy and launching and taking that to market. - So it sounds like you spend a lot of your time and you and your team's time working on alignment and partnership with the product management development side of things as well as sales as well. Is that fair, is that sort of? - 100% sales and customer service and success. It really is all of us together. And marketing's kind of the common piece that's going through and working with each of these teams to bring us together to stay and see and to make sure that we do have that common voice in the market. - So you're facilitating the collaboration, the connection across all of the entities there. - Yeah, 100%. - That's very interesting. I want to dive into the demand generation side of things because that's where it's been a lot of change there. Now the MQL, marketing qualified lead was supposed to be the shared language between marketing and sales. - Where does that sit within your organization? Do you use MQLs? Is that evolving? - Yeah, I mean, we still use the phrase MQL. I think what's changed for me just across the years and in particular in our organization is to be a volume game. And like, you know, I celebrated the number of qualified leads that we would turn over. And then you just kind of watched it. And I was like, hey, let's see where this goes. And you know, you've got to celebrate maybe six, nine months down the road with the sales cycle links that we have in healthcare. But that's really not the case anymore. Like we nurture those leads, anything, any sort of touch point, marketing spends a significant amount of time actually nurturing the leads further qualifying and doing more discovery. So we're handing them off what I feel like is a little bit later in the sales cycle, a little bit later in the top of funnel before the sales team or inside sales team starts to engage with the customer. So it's still really important. We still track those in measurement, but I feel it marketing stays within the pipeline a lot longer because we work together on what are the right next steps in the engagement cycle for this particular product? What level of content, like once a right time to do the demo? It used to be thrown in MQL over and the very first thing they did was a demo. And now we're really going and doing much more deeper discovery, alignment with stakeholders well up front. And then getting through, making sure that we understand they truly have a need and we can truly solve the problem that they want. And then towards the end, we start demonstrating the products and the capabilities and getting them excited about what they're about to implement and utilize. So a big shift from quantity to quality. How do you know when something is qualified and have high enough quality to hand off to sales? Yeah, when we have the customer talking and great detail about the problem, they need to solve. And we know based on our experience that we can actually solve that, then that becomes a truly qualified lead. If we often hear customers saying, "I'm interested in blah, blah, blah." "I'm interested in virtual care and our sense." And what does that mean to you? And what's the definition of that? And where are you and within your organization and making this decision is IT going to be involved? We spent a lot of time in the early cycle of nurturing those leads, educating them what is going to take to actually get this project through their organization. And is it the STRs who have the conversation? Is it, you know, the, and do the STRs report to you or do they report to sales? STRs report into marketing, and I think that's a secret sauce. You know, they're all talented individuals that ultimately will likely go into sales, but they're the ones that are on the hot seat developing that and taking the customers through the discovery phase at the beginning. So, and I think being a marketing is a secret sauce. So sales and marketing alignment is always a bonus contention and it's often the reason why GTM fails. I'm curious, how is it structured in your organization? How do you achieve good sales and marketing alignment? We have incredible go-to-market alignment in sales and marketing alignment. I think it's because we share common goals and it used to be, you know, marketing celebrated leads. We celebrated creating awareness and media mentions and, you know, my team gets compensated and bonuses based on us actually closing deals. So marketing has skin in the game all the way to the end. It is important that we understand that our engine and the marketing engine is here to create opportunity and growth and we're also here for retention and renewals. We are not just about creating a top of funnel anymore, a root throughout the funnel and actually throughout the customer lifecycle. So, you know, my partner, sales leader is fantastic. We know how we solve common problems together. We approach training of our teams together. We are aligned on our strategy. We report with it going to the board on what it means to go through an entire cycle from introduction of a product to creating leads to driving that through the sales pipeline to closing the business and continuing to service that customer. In the way that you measure and report this, are there any different ways that you show the contribution marketing's making versus other aspects of the business? Or is it just looked at as one single contribution? KPI? Yeah. Now, you know, I use different metrics. I would say now probably the marketing, you know, KPI is in results that we're tracking as complicated as anything it's ever been. You know, we're tracking AI visibility now, you know, as we advance and leverage G O more. We're not just looking at leads and cost of leads, but we're looking at time in the sales cycle, the velocity that it takes to go from one face to the next. Are we utilizing the right tools? Do we have the right stakeholders? Do we understand how those buyers and leaders may be changing and what the pressures may be coming to them from other forces and not just in the area that we serve? So the dashboards are quite complicated. I'll tell you, I have like three spreadsheets of them that I'm looking out with my team every month. We take a portion of that up to the leadership team for the things in the areas where we feel like we may be seen trends and areas for us as an entire organization to improve. And then there's a portion of that that then we also share with our board to make sure that they understand exactly what's happening in the industry and what's happening in buying cycles and why things are either slowing down or speeding up and why we need to make some of the strategic shifts that we do. So you reference generous AI. I'm curious about changes that you've seen in buyer behavior over the last few years. Yeah, generous AI has wanted it. But I'm just sort of curious of you seeing differences in the way that buying the organizations that you're setting to that have buying committees of eight to 20 people involved with it. How is that changing and how have you adapted to that? Well, I think it's definitely changing. We're finding the buyers to come in a lot more educated or at least they think they're educated on the business problem. They're all doing their end searches and doing competitive analysis and comparisons well at front, not just during RFP cycles. and things that they would use in the past. You know, I think for us, what we have to change and marketing as the type of content that we deliver, I think you know, more of the how to, more of the educational pieces, but also underlying that with the tree, like clinical studies and IT studies on ROI, that actually shows value and examples and not just feature function comparatives, which makes a difference in what the type of data they're looking at. - The way that the organization is, the buyers that you're setting to, how is the way that they discover you changing? - Oh, well, you know, in healthcare, first and foremost, I don't think this has changed a lot, but it certainly is now probably 80% of decisions are made by Phonina Forent. They are making their one to two vendors are gonna bring into the buying cycle or to make decisions, and they have already called everybody they know and talk to them whether they're doing it through their association memberships or just their long term friendships that exist in healthcare. So it's important for us to make our customers more of our feet on the street than even our own voice. We've got to continue to show them the ROI because we know they're probably going to be the first voice that ever mentions our name to someone who's trying to make a decision. - Drill down on how you foster that and activate it. - So that's one of the reasons why customer success is truly a part of go to market. It's nurturing that relationship. We do incredible KBRs and engagement with our accounts along the way. We make sure that they know what ROI they're receiving. We provide them the tools. We work with them on the studies. We actually help them do their job and report up to their leadership. So that way we're aligned on those values and truly the advancements that the technology that they're utilizing is bringing to their organization. So you create really informed leaders in the industry and you let them go out and be the voice. And we try whenever there's industry opportunities or show, I really don't get excited when it's someone for my team actually doing interviews. It's really exciting when my customers are on stage and they're talking with their peers and they're talking about what they've accomplished. And so that's what we try to do is let them be the voice because we know that they trust each other and in healthcare it's a tight knit relationship society and they'd rather hear from each other than to hear from any vendor. - So getting them speaking opportunities at HEMS and vibe and the other shows. - Yes, absolutely. - Are there other things that you tried like podcasts or anything like that? - Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of podcasts that we participate in. We also encourage our customers when there's opportunities to go and participate. For example, this week held spots like various customers cheated the retons that we certainly are encouraging our customers and connecting them with the right resources so they can be involved. - Oh, Kiyos, you mentioned this week health. That's part of Project 229. I'm never quite clear. They've got lots of, I always think it's like, that's Bill Russell's thing. So that's the media arm of it with Drex DeFord and I can't remember the name of the other person. Actually, I think he runs it. - Yeah, and Sarah and Sarah Truxton. So it's an interesting thing. It's a very localized community-based engagement place. So they bring together people within a region and they come together frequently whether they're doing dinners or having networking time or whatever it is, city tours. They show each other their facilities and share their business plans and really talk about the real problems that are happening within that. So it's neat because you start to see the peer-to-peer network get very regionalized within their format, which allows you to also understand what's happening in the region and their states that may have a different impact than what you'd see in a national level. It's very interesting watching how face-to-face marketing, event marketing, experience, marketing, whatever you want to define it is changing. I think we've had a great discussion recently in the health tech marketing network and the kind of takeaway is, one is it's more important than ever. It's almost like a reaction against AI, which is to be as personal as possible. And the other thing was everybody is now moving towards more of a focus on smaller, more intimate events, as well as going as large as they can at hymns and vibe. In some cases, actually some players, some vendors are choosing not to have a big booth presence but to focus on getting a speaker, so getting a cast like yourself, getting a customer out there and then building the program at the event there. So it's quite interesting how that's evolving. The project 229 is kind of, it's a big disruption and all this. I think it's fascinating what's going on. - It is a fascinating time to be in health care marketing. I feel like you still have a lot of the traditional things that we have to do. Having a booth being able to allow people to come see what the solutions look like. You can't, when you've got seven or eight different solutions that are integrated on a platform and like for us, we have a 72 partner ecosystem. So we've got lots of things that are running on our platform. You've got to be able to show that. That's very hard to do virtually. And it also is often conceptually, really hard for a clinical team to like say, wait, all these things in this hospital room can run on one platform. So it's important for us to do traditional and have the booth and the demo to actually show that and bring it to light. But then on the other side is how are you helping them drive and prioritize their agenda? We're doing that with the traditional more, small curated events, the chime and 2T9 and others are doing there. - Yeah, got it. It's interesting. One thing you haven't mentioned is the B word. I don't think you've actually said brand once in this interview, which is not a criticism at all. It's just sort of, it's interesting. How does the B word play in your organization? - Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, we have the advantage that in our organization, we started and created a tool or capability with tele-sitting. And that's what we're very well known for. No one else was doing it in your first market. The hard part for our organization is we've grown so far beyond that. And we are a true virtual care platform. So when I think about brand, it really is about changing perception in the market. - Yeah. - It's important because you have plenty of startups that are coming in and may do a piece of what we do and compete with us in smaller areas. So our brand is continuing to focus on, we've been doing this for a long time. We understand what's happening in your hospital. We've been there and we're growing like you. We're continuing to solve the adjacent problems as you've solved the core problem that's having one-to-one sitting for patients. Now you can take that to a complete AI generated smart room that's giving you all the data you need to more successfully get those patients and then out of the hospital as quickly as possible. - So for you, brand is category creation. - Correct. - One interesting. - Now you referenced generous AI early on. I'm curious in your GTM model, where does AI play? - It's playing everywhere. I think my team now we actually refer to a lot of the tools that we utilize by their first name, their members of the team. It started off with us jokingly calling chat GPT chat. Now we've bought a clodette. We have Bambi, we've got all these things and their members is a team. (laughing) - Which one's Bambi? - That's a tool that we've created specifically helping us with RFPs and responses. So yeah, absolutely. So she's a hunter out there trying to make sure we're getting all the data right and running ahead of where the competition is. So yeah, so it's part of everything that we do, absolutely. And as a tool externally, we realize that that's exactly what our customers are doing as well. They're learning, they're utilizing it. So it's all the way, the more that we are creating and improving our speed to create the right content and get it out into the market, the better they'll understand who we are. - So AI is almost on the org chart. - Yes, 100%. - Yeah, they are fascinating. That's really, really cool. And it's also, it's refreshing because so many people talk about AI for content creation and for research, which is totally understandable. It's a wonderful use case for it. They RFP example, you're given. Can you un-pick that a little bit? That's very interesting. - Yeah, 100%. So, you know, we're a RFP heavy industry in healthcare. I mean, we probably got more this year than we had at the midpoint of last year, say they're rolling in fast. We've created some tools that are allowing us to understand what are the common questions? How do we better respond to those? We look at not only our data, we look at the competitive data, what, how would we, our AI tools, and how would they potentially respond to this? And then how do we make sure that we're differentiating the difference of what we know we do compared to what we know. they do. We also use a lot of the customer stories. We've had customers that have piloted competitors and tried it in different areas and they've come back to us because we do have the pre-bun processes and implementation and training and we've got to really, really mature services and implementation and support organization. So we leverage the training material there to make sure that we're highlighting these differences. So it's become a lot more complicated than a really bright person just answering questions and scouring free data that now we're generating our content for RFPs and then you're using multiple people from product to sales to marketing to look at that and say, how does this fit with the customer that we know that's asking for this information? Great example. Great use case. So a lot of the folks who are listening to this are somewhere on the journey towards the traditional volume based approach to more of the quality approach that you're taking and also I think what I think is really interesting about your model is that you're one of the few companies that operates a team of one which is sales, marketing, product and customer success working in a very tightly coupled way rather than operating in silos. What would you advise if somebody in the community came to you instead, hey, Paula, how do we get started with this? We really need to get moving. What would you advise them? You know, I think the first thing I would advise anyone going into this is marketing should be the strategic leader. Your job is to bring the organization together. Align on the goals, take, be that voice in the rain that says, all right, we're aligned on strategies. Let's all run in the same direction. Look at the way we're reporting and functioning as an organization and operationalize ourselves. So you do have that great sceneless team and I can trust that in football terms that I can be the quarterback and my receivers, I'm throwing to the spot, not to the runner, that somebody's in front of me and they're blocking and they're tackling. So we have to function in that environment and it is absolutely 100% marketing's job to sit in that role and be that person. Barbos, that's a great, great piece of advice. The last question for you. This is a little dark, but I want to ask it to, so if you were to write an obituary for traditional demand generation, what would that be? Oh goodness, I would probably say farewell to all of the things that used to be mailed to collecting business cards and to showing up and hoping that someone will stop by to see you. You should be instead aggressively going out using every second and treating it like it is an experience that somebody wants to be involved and you are constantly talking whether it's your mouth moving or the screens and the content that you put out there. That was impressive, that was poetic. She did it for a living. That's marvelous. Paula, that was great. I really appreciate you sharing your feedback and your perspective so candidly. Thank you for being on the show. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. It was a lot of fun. So that's Paula Cobb and I think she gave us a really vivid picture of what a modern GTM model looks like when it's actually working. Marketing embedded in product decisions, SDRs, sitting in the marketing team, customer success as a core part of go-to-market and AI on the org jar. It's integrated in a way which a lot of organizations are still trying to figure out. My next guest is tackling the same question from a different angle and with a very different background. Alex Eskivel leads marketing at Luma Health, a patient access platform. And what makes Alex unusual is her background which she'll describe in detail. So with that, let's get on with Alex. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to talk to you about this. And I agree. It's been a long time coming. I'm Alex Eskivel. I lead marketing at Luma Health. I have been in healthcare my entire career but I actually started on the finance and operations side of the business and have worked my way into marketing. I found that that part of the business was a little drier than I would have liked. A little too black and white. So I love that marketing can still be data driven. You're still very involved in the finance and operations part of the business but you get to bring that creative element that you maybe don't necessarily get to see in those other. Well, you're rare breed. I don't think I've come across anybody who's come from the finance side and moved it. And that's actually a huge strength. I'm really fascinated to get your perspective. So let's dive into it. So this episode is about how the GTM model, the go-to-market model has changed. But let's start with a little bit of history, which is the MQL. The marketing qualified lead was supposed to be the shared language between marketing and sales. It's sort of become dysfunctional. I mean, I think that there are still a lot of companies that are using it. The definitions are changing. What's your perspective on the evolution and what's it been replaced with? Yeah. To be honest, I think it was doomed from a start. I think demand and lead gen got synonymous really quickly and we have the MQL. We tried to reverse engineer from a revenue number that we needed to hit and say, okay, if we need this much revenue, we need 4 to 5x pipeline, marketing you own this piece. If you have an outbound team, you own this piece based on historical conversion rates, marketing you go get this many leads but sales you're accountable for revenue. And so what you get is you get people bringing two different scorecards to the table and marketing saying, I optimized for MQLs. This is what you asked me to do based on your calculations and sales says, but we're left holding the bag on revenue. These two things are not aligned. So I think that's kind of why it's so dysfunctional. In terms of what's replacing it, I'm a strong believer that marketing needs to be accountable for revenue and not necessarily closed one because there's a lot of that sales process that we can partner on but not control, but stage three at the very least. So not just we booked a meeting but that meeting happened, sales had that conversation and they said against their criteria, yes, this is a viable opportunity at the very least. Break that down for me a bit. How do you go about measuring that? Yeah, I think you set the criteria in partnership with your revenue operations team in partnership with your sales team to be able to say, this is what constitutes a qualified opportunity and then you measure against that. I think it's really easy to get caught up in your attribution model too when it comes to that. But I think you kind of just have to pick one and go with it and I've not met a marketer that's really solved attribution per se. It's incredibly hard and I think when an opportunity gets to a sales stage, it's pretty binary, right? You know, there's a qualification criteria, whatever you happen to use. And then if something moves ahead or it doesn't move ahead, you know it's binary. From a marketing perspective, you're handing over an opportunity. By the way, what do you name them in your organization? At the point where it's handed over what's it called? An opportunity, a Lee, I mean, an opportunity. So I don't we actually don't measure mqls at all. We start at we call s1 just a stage one opportunity. So we generate a certain number of stage ones and we're not too wrapped up in the revenue piece of it at that point. It's just the number of s1s. And then in Salesforce, we track that through okay. Stage two, there's a little bit of discovery going on. Like what are they looking for? Can we meet their needs? But then stage three is what we call stage three qualified is at the point that sales has said, you know, against their criteria, they use med picks are like against their criteria that like this is viable. It could go somewhere. And so what's the criteria for something to be a stage one? That they've agreed to a meeting. And so we have a couple of sub stages within that too. So one, they've agreed to the meeting and that's open. But we don't actually start like measuring it until the intro is complete. So the meeting has happened. I see. That's very disciplined. And do you own the SDRs? Do you? And do you have it? So you don't own the SDRs now? No, we're on a revenue team. So I sit with an SDR leader, a sales leader and myself all under a SVP of revenue, but we're all very aligned. Gotcha. Excellent. So is the typical kind of process that you start to actually know what rather me assuming was typical process, take me through the process. What does it take to get an account to become an opportunity? A lot. And I think maybe this is also part of why traditional demand or lead gen is dead. Because I think there are like three stages that you have to do really well to get to that point. I think you have to create demand. And some people would say, well, that's brands, jog. Well, that really, the way I see it, that also sits in demand. So you have to create the demand itself. You have to capture the demand in some way. And then you have to actually convert it is the point that we're talking about. And I think the number one thing that you can do to enable that process is to know your audience really well. So make sure you have that product market fit. Make sure you're not only talking to customers but also prospects on a regular basis. What do you care about? Who are you accountable to? Where do you spend your time learning about things? Who do you trust to go to for information? Also, we use gong, so gong calls are great source of that information too. We hear a lot or get a lot of inspiration from like, hey, so and so a sales person was on a call and this account, like they just lit up when they heard about this feature of this piece of this benefit, we might wanna test that with our market. So I think really knowing your audience and what they care about is a good place to start and then you could kind of get into the channel mix of it all. - So do you take an account based approach to this? - We do multiple different things. So I think the short answer is yes, I think all marketing has a story, it has to be. - Yeah, the step back sort of paint a picture of your GTM model from a marketing perspective. - Sure, so we've kind of killed the traditional campaign model, which I think we'll get into more on the AI side of things, but we do short, it erode topics, I would say, and we go really quickly from idea to execution and testing that on like maybe some of our most efficient channels and then expanding from there, but then we do have an account based motion, which is really interesting. We started that, those long time having. So we started testing pieces of that, but I think really we got the engine humming in Q3, Q4 of last year. And I think what that took was a really good SDR partnership. So we started taking, we started with our enterprise accounts, let's say in, 'cause those buying committees are really complex, they're really big, but we have a lot of enterprise accounts and we had a lot of things to model after. So we kind of dug into like, why do we win in these accounts? And then tried to model that after. And then it becomes almost like, I have hesitate to say this, but like almost stalking your account. So who's involved in the buying process at this account? What did they care about? Who do they work with? Who are they accountable? Do we know anybody? Do we have any, maybe relationships already? Are they going to be at any shows? We're big fan. I was actually just reading your newsletter this morning about the new events model and the smaller group event. So we do a lot of those as well. So are they going to be at any of these things? Can we invite them? Can we pair them with a current customer? Who maybe looks like them? For example, for going into an academic medical center, we have academic medical center customers. So can we get them to just talk to each other about what they're doing? And maybe if there are any of their initiatives, any initiatives that they have in common? So let me just kind of step back a second. Just to make sure I understand it correctly. So you're basically casting a wide net to a long list of accounts. And if you're going for enterprise-- No, I maybe skipped over that part. So I think step one was that we sat with the rep and the SDR. And we said, give us your top 10. And then let's get it down to three and start there. Ah, so that's for the ABM motion. I see. And so you separated that very much sort of one to one ABM. You're probably handling a small number every quarter and rotating them. So change that mixer. Exactly. And then on the other side of the house, we have five primary go-to-market segments. So our content and our motions and that inter-rev process that I mentioned, it's pretty narrow by go-to-market segment. So it's maybe one to few or one to many model, but depending on the segment. But yes, that's the best thing. And so in that case, are the segments in the tens or the hundreds or thousands? The hundreds or the thousands depending on which segment. And are you looking for a signal, where? Yes, we do have software to help us with intent. And we do pull that into a scoring model. But the scoring model is not for MQL. The scoring model is for like, okay, we should, you know, look at this. We should send this to the SDR team. We should invite them to more things. We should customize their at maybe a different stage than other companies and the content should look different for them. Right. So you're using demand and awareness tactics across a defined segment to figure out who's sort of like not putting a hand up, but showing signs of potentially being a in market. Precisely. And our scoring model, it's part fit because our ICP is so specific that it's part fit and then it's part engagement. Parts engagement, we got it. And so what would you mind sort of revealing a bit about from what you're looking at from an engagement standpoint? Yeah. I mean, we have a pretty high bar for engagement. Like they open an email is not necessarily scoring very high. That doesn't really help anybody in lots of people open their emails. But a click through on an email or an ad engagement or things like that. Also, like I mentioned, we have some like website software that can help de-anonymize some of the traffic on our website. So those types of things can help alert us. We've been trying a whole bunch of them. Which one of you, which one should you read? We've tried knock two is more. Oh, I don't know. We use it. Don't know that one. And we've been able to build it into our HubSpot model. Yeah, I've tried Vector. I've tried Rb2b. I've tried Gets Squid. And Virtual Vista, I don't like any of them. To me, the problem with them is that the promises, oh my god, I'm going to be able to identify everybody. No, you're going to be able to identify. No, what I do like about it though is you can by role. So the data they have is pretty good. So for us, like patient access is a big part of our target market. And so I can identify patient access leaders. And so we don't alert on everything. So a lot of it doesn't get scored. But anything that's like patient access leader that gets scored fairly highly in comes to the SDR team. We'll reach out in that case. Got it. OK. So in terms of reporting this, what do you report and to whom and what frequency? I mean, I'm in my dashboard daily for sure from my own perspective. And then we've got a pretty healthy cadence with the marketing team. So we have a daily standup that's pretty quick. But on Mondays, we go through metrics as a team. And then we have like a monthly readout process with our leadership team, with our executive team that we're kind of reading progress against goals. And then there are quarterly goals. And what are the KPIs that the leadership team is interested in? Primarily stage three revenue. So if I'm talking through my dashboard, we look at stage three revenue as like my primary gold star. And that's that qualified pipeline that sales has agreed like yes, this is a viable opportunity. But then I like to break that down over different time horizons. I'm looking at like month quarter, comparing it to previous. But then also I look at it by go-to-market segment. So do we have balance across our pipeline? Is our reach struggling in any particular area as one taking off? Are we doing something right? In one area that we should maybe replicate in others. We stop doing things. I also, even before that, if we look higher up in the funnel, I like to look at ICP coverage. So we have a certain number of contacts in our system, ICP, like what percentage of those are recovering and of what we're covering. How many of those are engaging with us? So I like coverage to say pretty high. And engagement is one of those that we monitor and kind of tweak and iterate on how we can improve. You know, when I poll across the health tech marketing network, the community, the biggest issue that consistently comes up is selling the value of marketing to the C suite. How does your leadership team view marketing? And what do you get challenged on in terms of the contribution that marketing makes? Yeah, I think-- I mean, building trust with executive team is one of the most important things that you could do to make sure that your team has the resources that they need to succeed. And honestly, whenever I've been joining a new organization, that's part of my interview processes to make sure that there's already at least a little bit of the mentality there that-- hey, marketing is a key contributor and has a seat at the table here. Because I think that's really important. Because sometimes there's not going to be a way to convincing. So I think having that conversation even upfront is important. But then in terms of how-- like getting support, I think just showing that we're accountable to revenue, I think there's a hesitancy to be accountable to revenue because it's hard. I think it can be simple and straightforward, but it's not easy by any stretch of the imagination. So I think taking that ownership and saying, I guess we will own a revenue number. And we will be accountable to that. And our goal is to create pipeline that sales can close. I think it's hard for a leadership team to say no to that, but then you have to go and prove it and do it, which we've been able to do to a reasonable degree. I think brand spend, like any marketer, brand spend probably gets questioned more than anybody else. So showing-- I like to call them leading indicators. These are leading indicators of pipeline. If we have good PR coverage and good brand engagement on website traffic looks healthy, and time on site looks healthy, all of those things I would call leading indicators. And I think we've been able to get by and like that those things do eventually convert into pipeline. It's actually really interesting. So when I joined, speaking of joining organization, my background is in demand. I didn't start ahead of marketing. So I came up in marketing through demand. And in joining a new organization, one of the first things I like to do is talk to everybody and say, OK, sales, like, tell me all the details. What do you hate about working with marketing? What do you love about working with marketing? And I asked that across all different areas of the organization. And usually in past lives, what I've heard is the lead suck, with some version of that. But when I joined, Luma, it was actually really interesting, because I heard more than anything across the board, the consistent thing I heard is like, I go somewhere, I start talking to people, like, this sounds great. Why have I never heard of you before? So I was like, oh, we have a brand awareness issue. There's not necessarily like a-- nobody's complaining about the content. Nobody's complaining about the crappy leads. I mean, everybody always wants more leads, but that was the number one thing that I heard. And so we kind of focused on that for a little bit and have continued to focus there. It's such an interesting point. Tell us about how you've gone about, first of all, making the case for brand marketing. And then what type of activities Did you do? - Yeah, so we definitely had to start with demand. So that was the first thing that I did focus on was like, okay, let's, and part of the, I don't know if I said the issue, but part of what I did originally was like, look at the reporting and look at what's happening. And I think part of what was being misinterpreted was that marketing was actually doing fairly well, but the infrastructure wasn't there to show it. So that's where I initially started is working very closely with RevOps and our revenue leaders to say like, this is how I suggest we track things. This is how I suggest we measure things. This is what I suggest that the reports, that dashboards look like. And so we started there to be actually able to show that hey, marketing is contributing to pipeline. And then digging into like, okay, how do we make that better? Because it's still not where it needs to be. So how do we make that better? Where do you turn the levers? How do we get more volume there? So I did have to start with like actually showing pipeline, but from there, I think part of it is, it depends on your leadership team too and what they care about. But part of it is to be able to point to competitors and say like, look, they're getting covered in these places. They're doing PR or they're doing brand activities. You know, don't you think this would be a good place to start? And so you just start testing too and you're very clear from the beginning of what you're going to measure and how you're going to determine success because you go into brand activities, expecting a direct ROI and revenue pay off and to see that in your data. I think that's pretty unlikely. It's such a frustrating issue for marketers because most sophisticated marketers know that in the industries that we deal with, it's a long sales cycle. They're going to do the buyers, the buying group is doing their own research and they're doing that for nine months before they'll talk to anybody and they will talk to you when they're good and ready. And they start the process with a short list. Yes. And many cases they've already kind of decided do they want to go and it's all about actually justifying their biases from the get go. And that we can't do, you can't get on the list without brand awareness. However, you've generated that brand awareness but you can't get on this. If I haven't heard of you, not on the list, but it's so hard to convince many CEOs that you've got to invest in brand. Let's kind of stay in the softer stuff, which is a lot of influence of health test buyers is happening in places we can't track. If that might be in private Slack communities, it might be conversations that are happening in private groups like Project 229, it might be, it's all the stuff that goes on on LinkedIn that's happening in DMs, the peer conversations, all that stuff. How do you account for that stuff if it's all? Well, from a reporting standpoint, I don't really, I love this though because I think it should be happening that way. And I think that's the number one reason to talk to your ICP and to listen to Gonkel's. I love nothing more than to be able to talk to a customer. All the questions I mentioned at the beginning, like, who do you talk to to learn about new solutions? Like, what sources do you trust? Like, are you reading beckers every day or like, are you getting, do you go to his talk? Like, where are you getting your industry news from when shows do you attend? What do you like to do when you're at those shows? Like, what do you think, would you see this? I think that's probably the most important place you can start because it enables you to create content that is interesting if they care about. Because if you're not doing that, almost everything else doesn't matter. You kind of blend in with the rest of the noise that's out there. The other thing that we've done for that that maybe is some level of tracking. We have this. How did you hear about us? Field on our demo form? And I know that's not novel. But we have some pretty specific prompting. They're like, if you asked, chat, GPT, Cloud, et cetera, what was the prompt that you used? And we have that on our form as a free text field. And it's not the easiest thing to report on, but it's really informative. Because we've heard people say, oh, actually, we came through the Athena Marketplace. And we might have a UTM on that. But if they didn't click directly from that, it's not going to come through in our tracking. So we get a lot of really interesting things about how people are prompting AI, what they asked it, who they're talking to, what customer referred them that we wouldn't otherwise get. And then we're able to say, OK, like, we know anecdotally that maybe we should try more of this. And then you can kind of measure that and see if your pipeline is increasing or not. That's really interesting. How do you take action on what you're learning? I think that goes back to killing the traditional campaign. And I just love being able to go from idea to execute. Like, if you look at Loomah's LinkedIn right now, we're doing a series on containment in voice AI. That was something that I learned a little bit more about last week. Like, how to conversation with the team, like, hey, I don't think a lot of people know what this means. Like, should we break it down? And so it started with just like a couple simple organic posts. But now it's gotten interesting. So it's become a full series. We have a blog on it. I think going by today or next week. So just kind of continuing to iterate and see what's working on things like that and trying those things that maybe come through that form as channels and then being able to measure that. Now, you brought this up earlier on. And I-- it's become a mandatory, right? You can't do a podcast without mentioning AI. And obviously it's particularly relevant here. How's AI changing the way that you guys are operating? Yeah, I think for everybody, it's changing a ton of how we're operating. I think for us, especially, our product development is so much faster than it used to be. So marketing doesn't have the luxury of taking eight weeks to put a campaign together for a launch. Like, product is moving so fast that if you take that time, like, there are already onto the next thing. So I think the speed is one thing I don't love AI for content or image generation. I think most of what you see, it's fairly easy to tell that it's AI generated and it's not-- like, it's boring and it's not good quality. But from an efficiency standpoint, it's huge. I think it allows us to connect with the tools that we use on a daily basis. So like, you're going to have a spot in cloud working together or even on its own, it enables us to look at data in a much more efficient way that something manually would have taken a significant amount of time. You can give AI the data and you can ask specific questions. And of course, you have to validate app that you can get insights more quickly than before. And then you can action on those. And I think it is a good starting point for some brainstorming, but in terms of the output itself. I'm curious about the way that you're using AI and Cloud together. HubSpot and Cloud together? Sorry, HubSpot. HubSpot. Yeah, we're just starting to scratch the surface. So this is a new one for us. So we're not using it for content. To generation, we're using it for data analysis and insights more than anything. I see. Got it. Yeah. I have to say-- I started the AI journey like everybody else like what is it, three years ago now. And I was a massive Cloud fan from content. As a company, about a year ago, we decided that we needed to consolidate what we're doing and take a much more strategic approach. Everybody was using it tactically. And we decided for reasons that made sense back at that time that we would platform-- OpenAI is our platform. OK. And that was great until February, when the new models came out. And we've just flipped to Cloud. Yeah. In fact, we're using-- unfortunately, we're a cost perspective. It sucks because we're actually using both, because we built a lot of our stack on OpenAI. But-- Sure. Cloud eats some amazing what you can do, Cloud. It is chipped. It's really-- It's really. Yeah. They fixed the PowerPoint problem. It's like now it's generating beautiful slides. It's just incredible. Anyway, I could go on forever about that. If a health tech CMO came to you tomorrow and said, I need to rebuild the way that we are GTM model from scratch, where would you tell them to start? Yeah. I think there's a couple things to think about. I think product market fit is always number one for me. If you don't have that, the rest of your go-to-market motion doesn't really matter. From there, you'll notice a theme here. I would say, talk to your ICP, learn everything you can potentially learn about them. And then I would develop a content strategy from there so that you're talking about the things that they care about that they're interested in. I think there's the old saying that content is king. And I really don't think that that's ever changed. I think content. And that can look like a variety of different things. I don't necessarily mean blogging. I mean, to me, content could be the content that you're presenting at a small group event. So we do a lot of these small customer events, but we're really thoughtful and intentional about, what do they care about? What do they want to know? What do they want to know about? Luma, what do they want to know about the industry? What is going to provide value to them if they attend one of these things? So I think the content is the most important thing above any of the champs. Everybody's like, what channels in Campaigns should I run? Well, it doesn't matter unless you know what you need to say to your audience. And then probably building the right team. I think this is one thing that I pride myself on is hiring. I tend to not hire for some of your traditional marketing skill set. I like to look for curiosity. I like to look for ownership and accountability. And just pride in your work in general. So an interview process, if I can see those things, I'm more likely to hire even if they've never used LinkedIn Campaign Manager in their life and have no idea how to create a re-targeting audience. Like those types of things are easy to teach, but those skills are not. So I would probably advise to build the right team with those qualities. And then move fast and iterate would be probably the last thing. You're very clear on it. I think this is going to be extremely helpful. Because I think everybody is on the journey from the traditional model to a more modern GTM approach that you've, I think, depicted very clearly. If you grew up with Demar Jen, if you had to write in a bit sharing. for the traditional model. What would you say? - Yeah, I think, I mean, it would be pretty straightforward. It would be like, here lies Demand Jen. Everyone thought I was Lee Jen, but I wasn't. Because I think Demand is still very well in a lie, but it's just that people got wrapped up in the lead component and so it became incredibly dysfunctional. - Yeah, perfectly said. Alex, thank you. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. - Likewise, Adam, I have a joy to attract today. Thank you. Wow, what a great, rich couple of conversations. Two marketers who've done the real work in rebuilding how their teams connect to revenue. So here are five key takeaways that I hope you all take away with you. So number one, the MQL isn't necessary dead, but the way most people use it is. So both Alex and Paula have moved well past treating MQLs as a volume game. In fact, Alex doesn't actually measure MQLs at all. Alex's team starts at stage ones in sales, which only counts once a meeting has actually taken place. That's a pretty tough standard. Paula describes staying in the funnel much longer than before and doing deeper discovery before any handoff to sales. The shared principle that they had is that marketing should be accountable for revenue, not just activity. Take away number two. Where your SDRs live changes everything. Paula was emphatic that the SDRs have to report into marketing and that's the secret source. Because they're the ones doing real discovery at the top of the funnel. They're the ones who are often educating prospects on what it will take them to get a project through their organization. And Alex echoed this. In her case, the SDRs sit in a unified revenue team that's tightly aligned with both marketing and sales. So essentially sitting alongside marketing, not as part of the marketing team. But in both cases, the job isn't to hand off fast. It's to hand off right. Take away three. The GTM team is one unit, not three departments. Paula's peanut butter and jelly model, sales, marketing and customer success in Seperal is a useful mental model here. Marketing role, marketing is role in that structure. Is to be the quarterback, holding strategy together across all the teams, staying in sync, being the common voice in the market. Alex runs a similar playbook. Short iterative content cycles, fast idea to execution with an ABM motion led on top of enterprise accounts. In both cases, the silos are gone by design. Number four, in healthcare, the buyer's peer network is still the most powerful channel you can't directly control. Paula made the point that, and I think it's easy to underestimate this, is that 80% of decisions in healthcare start with someone folding a friend. The peer network, associations, regional communities like Project 229, longstanding relationships, is where vendor short lists get built. That means your customers are the most effective salespeople you have, and building that asset through customer success, through quarterly business reviews, and by giving them speaker opportunities, should be a strategic priority, not just a nice to have. Five, AI is on the org chart now. I loved Paula's framing here. Her team names their AI tools, chat GPT is chat, Claude is Claude Ed, and there's Bambi, a purpose built tool for RFP responses that hunts competitive data and builds differentiated answers. Alex is using AI along HubSpot for data analysis and insight generation, moving away from the traditional eight-week campaign model to with something much faster, much more iterative and much more responsive. In both cases, AI is in the tool you dabble in, it's become a cool part of the GTM infrastructure. So that's it for today. Now, if this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone else who's still working through what modern demand gen actually looks like in health tech. Because a lot of people in this industry on the journey, and they could really benefit from hearing how Paula and Alex are doing it. And if you're enjoying the show, a five-star rating on Spotify or Apple goes a hell of a long way to helping people find us. So with that, I'm Adam Trinus, and I'll see you on the next episode of the health tech marketing show. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]