Healthcare Market Matrix

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The Episode in 60 Seconds

Golden Spiral’s own Chris Turner, Senior Director of Digital Strategy and Performance Analytics, joins us via Zoom to discuss how companies, specifically marketing leaders, can transition, think, plan, and strategize during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chris eats, sleeps, and breathes digital strategy and has a tremendous backdrop that has facilitated his deep expertise in the field.

This interview delves into:

• The three categories B2B tech companies are falling into amidst the crisis
• Why this isn’t the time for bold actions
• How and when to advance your B2B tech company
• Why it’s critical to fortify your digital marketing infrastructure
• How to avoid data paralysis during the COVID-19 pandemic

Our Guest

Chris Turner is Golden Spiral’s Senior Director of Digital Strategy and Performance Analytics and an expert in all things digital. Chris manages and monitors the online strategies for our clients related to paid media, content, social media marketing, and digital optimization.

Chris helps our teams build synergistic digital strategies that touch on everything from relationship building with partners to content creation and syndication — all to help clients make an impact through their business. He leverages his experience of 10+ years of marketing leadership to direct marketing teams to success based on addressable KPIs and data-driven tactics.

Chris has a bachelor’s degree in information technology and a master’s in information systems. He is well educated, heavily experienced, and always seeking more knowledge.

Show Notes

Before diving into data analytics, learn how to create and maintain a SaaS marketing and sales scorecard.

We created a comprehensive guide to fortifying your marketing infrastructure. Check it out.

The marketing and sales funnel is rapidly evolving.

To learn more about optimization from Chris, check out his Compete SEO Guide for B2B Tech Marketing.

How Does Your B2B Tech Company React During a Time of Crisis?

Given the current coronavirus pandemic, B2B companies are generally falling into these three categories:

1. The company’s solution meets a need that has been accelerated by the crisis (i.e. healthcare, healthtech, health IT)
2. The company’s solution remains essential regardless of the crisis
3. The company’s solution transforms a workflow — increasing efficiency and offering significant savings — but isn’t seen as essential amidst the crisis

Most B2B tech companies are falling into the third category. If your solution isn’t essential to overcoming the crisis, it will be difficult for your company to start conversations. It’s not a great time for your company to act boldly.

If your funnel has evaporated overnight, your salespeople can’t get anyone to return calls, your open rates have dropped through the floor, and you’re grasping at straws trying to figure out how to engage in the market…

“It’s not time to advance right now, but it is time to fortify.” - John Farkas

Don’t Give Up Now: Here’s How Your B2B Tech Company Can Advance

Just because the environment around you changes, it doesn’t mean you can’t still keep moving forward. The journey will just look a little different.

It’s important for B2B companies to expand focus into innovation and transformation, so when the time comes, they’ll be ready to enter the conversation.

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” - Benjamin Franklin

Your key asset is your people. Ask them what your company should do to make an impact in the future.

Why You Must Fortify Your Digital Marketing Infrastructure

If you put your soldiers in place now, when the time comes, you’ll be more than ready to win the battle.

Fortifying the essentials means understanding and optimizing the assets that you currently have while also planning for the assets you need to have.

There are three prerequisites before you are able to fortify your digital marketing infrastructure:

1. Have a clear view of your goals and make sure they’re in line with the rest of your organization. What do you want to see happen by the end of the next quarter?
2. Have a solid understanding of your buyer's needs. Then, articulate your solutions in the context of those needs.
3. Have a clear view of your competition. What are they declaring right now in the market, and how can you present your product or service in a way that’s clearly differentiated?

1. Evaluate Your Toolbox

You must understand what you have that solves the problems your buyers are really trying to figure out.

Evaluate not only your content and digital assets, but also the assets in human capital that can help you move forward.

Determine what elements of your marketing strategy align with the awareness, consideration, and decision phases of the buyer’s journey to know exactly what you need to address.

To appeal to buyers in the consideration and decision phases of the buyer’s journey, it’s essential to dissect your buyer and develop a deep understanding of their motivations.

“It's looking at demographics, it's looking at engagement with your content, it's looking at the ways that buyers want to be engaged.” - Chris Turner

2. Fill Your Toolbox

Once you’ve identified the gaps in your digital strategy, it’s all about taking your insight and understanding of the marketplace and saying “what’s the easiest route to the end goal?”

In the consideration phase, potential buyers are comparing and contrasting different solutions. Are you answering those questions? If you’re not, your competitors may be.

“It’s not about what the environment's doing, it's what your buyers doing and how you can address that buyer in a meaningful way.” - Chris Turner

3. Optimize Your Assets

The rubber meets the road when you combine the great assets that you've now crafted or developed, but you also need to make sure they’re visible in the right ways and at the right places. Not all content needs to be everywhere.

There are three keys to optimization:

• Understanding the feedback you receive. SEO, and any marketing efforts, should be executed based on the data of the people you’re targeting. Sometimes those changes will be drastic, sometimes they’ll be minimal.
• Connecting the dots between existing pieces of material that help to foster the whole journey. There’s an actual physical path that people will take through your website.
• Leading people towards the final goal, otherwise known as conversion optimization.

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The Episode in 60 Seconds

Kyle Lacy, CMO of Lessonly, joins us via Zoom from Indianapolis, Ind. to talk marketing/sales alignment, customer experience, leadership during COVID-19, and golden llamas.

Kyle brings over 12 years of experience in marketing strategy and digital operations and is obsessed with how technology influences and changes human behavior. Additionally, Kyle has written three books: Twitter Marketing for Dummies, Branding Yourself, and Social CRM for Dummies.

This interview delves into:

• The importance of storytelling in marketing and branding
• A unified approach to sales and marketing
• Differentiating your company in some way outside of your product’s features
• The power of customer experience
• Lessonly’s approach to COVID-19 challenges
• The mentality of a successful CMO

Our Guest

Kyle Lacy leads marketing for Lessonly, a training and enablement software company based in Indianapolis, Ind. Kyle's team touches everything you can imagine when it comes to marketing, including demand generation, content marketing, branding, design, messaging, go-to-market development, and thought leadership. He drives growth at Lessonly using the knowledge he has gained while working at a venture capital firm, the largest software company in the world, and the fastest-growing email marketing company.

Kyle has authored three books that have been published in five languages and seven countries. The books include Twitter Marketing for Dummies, Branding Yourself, and Social CRM for Dummies.

Kyle has spent the last seven years traveling the world speaking at marketing and technology industry events and has been recognized as as one of Indiana’s Forty-under-40 by the Indianapolis Business Journal, Anderson University's Young Alumni of the Year, and TechPoint's Young Professional of the Year. 

Show Notes

Check out Lessonly CEO Max Yoder’s book Do Better Work. Lessonly sends this book to prospects throughout the entire sales cycle.

Your best stories come from your customers. They are your best salespeople.

Companies either approach the sales funnel with the power of customer experience or a feature push. Where do you stand?

A Unified Approach to Sales and Marketing

The traditional sales funnel has radically transformed over the last five years. We’ve seen this self-service sales framework begin to develop in marketing where people are doing a lot of research independent from any sales conversations.

Kyle Lacy’s marketing team transitioned from being only top of funnel to being full funnel, touching 100% of everything happening at the company.

“The team felt renewed. They were more positive. They felt challenged in a good way. And then because of that, because they had the feeling that they were accomplishing something, we started to see success.” - Kyle Lacy

As its sales and marketing teams grew, Lessonly then focused on organization and process development to adjust alignment.

The True Value of Brand Experience in B2B Tech

If you don’t differentiate in some other way outside of features, you’ll just be another demo. Try telling a story that’s a little bit different, a bit more human.

A few things Lessonly has done to humanize the sales cycle:

• Sent prospects Donors Choose gift cards to give to a classroom in need in their city, so kids can do better work, too 
• Developed a 13-page coloring book to help working parents entertain their kids during quarantine
• Sent employees, prospects, and customers golden llamas (spray painted by Kyle, himself!) modeled after Lessonly’s mascot, Ollie Llama.

Lessonly receives most of its customer feedback from a weekly personal and leadership development newsletter sent by Lessonly CEO Max Yoder.

Kyle on sending prospects Golden Llamas…

“We don’t talk about Lessonly at all as a product, but it’s a first touch for us. It works extremely well because it’s different, and it has nothing to do with our product.” - Kyle Lacy

Here’s an unboxing of Lessonly’s Golden Llama by Sendoso.

Lessonly has also launched a word search, a board game called Llama Land for their software users, and a Lego Llama.

(And if you haven't seen Ludacris freestyle the children's book, Llama Llama Red Pajama, check it out.)

Kyle Lacy's Mentality as A Successful CMO

What’s the essential mentality for a Chief Marketing Officer to be successful? Timeframes.

“Marketing directors think in quarters. Chief Marketing Officers should think in years when it comes to strategy development.” - Kyle Lacy

Make your customer the hero. To achieve that, avoid a constant focus on feature development and growth.

Instead of focusing on the top of the funnel, CMOs and marketing leaders should focus on two things:

1. Owning a revenue number (and a seat at board meetings)
2. Influencing 100% of company decisions that are related to money

Lessonly's Approach to Leadership During the COVID-19 Crisis

When attempting to make decisions on an unknown, you must over-communicate

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The Episode in 60 Seconds

Rishad Tobaccowala has invested a lifetime understanding human connection and leading a team to influence and persuade others through Publicis Groupe, one of the largest advertising and communications companies in the world.

In his new book, Restoring the Soul of Business, he outlines how companies can learn to live in the balance between spreadsheets and stories.

He has also spent time considering the implications of a worldwide pandemic on business and leadership.

This interview delves into:

• understanding your audience in a new light
• the five characteristics of a successful human leader
• the six words to remove from your communication
• how to maximize your distributed workforce
  

Our Guest

Rishad Tobaccowala is the Senior Advisor to Publicis Groupe, an advertising and communications firm with 80,000 employees worldwide. Over his 37-year career, Tobaccowala has worked across almost every area of marketing including brand advertising, media, database, direct and interactive marketing. As a pioneer in digital marketing, Tobaccowala was named by BusinessWeek as one of the top business leaders for his pioneering innovation and TIME magazine dubbed him one of five Marketing Innovators. He is in the Ad Age Interactive Hall of Fame and has received a lifetime achievement silver medal award from the Chicago Ad Federation.

Rishad is also is chairman of The Tobaccowala Foundation, which helps over 10,000 people gain better access to health and education in India.

He regularly presents keynotes at industry conferences and speaks at global organizations such as Kellogg’s, IBM, Amazon, Google, and Facebook.

He is the author of Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in an Age of Data.

Show Notes

Companies can be boiled down to two major components: a math component or data-driven component and the story side of business.

John Farkas on the soul of business

Technology is extremely important as an enabler, but not as a discussion point even if you are selling technology. - Rishad Tobaccowala

56% of people who work in business in America are not engaged at work. They just show up.

The Six Factors of Retaining Employees

1. Money
2. Fame
3. Power for the senior executives, autonomy for growing employees
4. Growth
5. Purpose and Values
6. Connections

What is the best word to use for your prospective customers? Customer? Consumer? Prospects? Targets? Audience? Gods?

Think about this: technology has enabled us to have god-like powers.

Your number one salesforce is not happy customers, it's your employees. Happy employees. Happy company.

The Six Words You Can't Say in Your Presentations

• Personalization
• Datalake
• Database
• Disruption
• Platform
• Optimization

#gibberishings

Your Customers Need You to S.A.V.E. Them

Show me a solution

Make it accessible

Give me value

Give me a great experience

How to Lead a Distributed Workforce

You have to be a leader of your team and a leader of yourself.

The Five Criteria of Successful Human Leaders

• Capability
• Integrity
• Empathy (read more about empathy on Golden Spiral's blog)
• Inspiration
• Vulnerability

Meetings are not conversations. They are gatherings around a modern fireplace—the spreadsheet on a screen. A true meeting is when we look into each other's eyes and talk. Genuinely talk.  - Rishad Tobaccowala

What Automattic does with their distributed workforce. [listen at 22:00]

The stronger the offline bond, the more online relationships can work. - Rishad Tobaccowala 

Three Things to Consider for Your B2B Tech Company in a Time of Chaos

• What is your product/pricing mix?
• What are you messaging? How should you change it?
• During times like this, your audience will see the true caliber of your company. What is it?

Understanding the Turd on the Table

We are in the midst of corporate, national, and personal crap. [listen more at 29:19]

How do you put Humpty Dumpty back together again? [listen at 32:45]

Golden Spiral articles on trust

Golden Spiral articles on empathy

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The Episode in 60 Seconds

Chief Marketing Officers have the shortest tenure in the C-Suite. In tech businesses, that tenure is even shorter.

How marketing executives handle the first few months sets the tone for the rest of their tenures.

Kevin Fliess, VP of Marketing for Cofense, just wrapped up his first 12 months in the role. In this episode of Studio CMO, we explore the decisions, strategies, and tactics he implemented and the lessons he's learned along the way, including how to:

• fully implement a rebranding movement, even if your company has tried before
• press a new mission into every nook, cranny, and heart of your team
• bring sales and marketing synergy to your organization, not just alignment

Kevin also talks about "The Translation Layer" that marketing creates between the product team and the executive team.

Our Guest

Kevin Fliess is Senior Vice President of Marketing of marketing for Cofense, an anti-phishing platform company for global enterprise companies. Cofense provides end-to-end phishing protection to stop attacks in minutes, not days. He is responsible for facilitating Cofense’s global growth by overseeing the planning, development, and execution of Cofense’s marketing strategy across all channels.

Kevin has been a marketing leader for more than two decades in SaaS, internet-based companies, and the event planning industry. Past companies include ATPCO, Cvent, Room 77 (acquired by Expedia), SAP, and HP.

Kevin is a named inventor on six technology patents and holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics at Washington and Lee University.

Show Notes

CMO Tenure Data

Who are the three bald, dancing dads? Check it out.

This episode was recorded at the 2020 RSA Conference.

Cybersecurity is an exciting industry. The problem set is always changing.

Cybersecurity is mission-driven. You're actually helping organizations and people deal with problems and pressing issues.

Check out Cofense's rebranding: then and now.

Psishing affects everyone and all companies, including these landmark examples:

Target breach

Equifax breach

John Podesta's campaign affected by phishing

Creating a purpose-driven culture is beyond just a mission statement, it's about creating something that is integral to the company.

A Scaleable Marketing Organization

1. You've got to have great people in every role. Give them the organizational North Star and let them run.

2. Build strong relationships with your sales team. Be aligned on what success looks like.

3. Strategy should follow your goals, however you measure success

Everything we do has a sales executive sponsor and a marketing executive sponsor. We are clear about what the outcomes we're going to work on together.

4. Establish a clear roadmap and then have constant dialogue about where we are. (Google's OKR method) Constant communication is key.

The pace of change in enterprise software companies and in technology is so rapid that it requires regular check-in and communication between teams in order to stay on track.

The Translation Layer

Companies don't have an unlimited number of arrows in their quivers. Marketing straddles the gap between sales and product. Marketing keeps those arrows pointed to the right opportunities that make the most sense and yield the highest outcome.

Take the gobbledygook and turn it into something your customers care about.

Take important, technically-sophisticated features and functions and translate them into use cases that make sense to customers.

Understand what sales is hearing and what pain points actually exist

Tailor the message 

What are customers asking for, that they will need in 12 - 18 months, that are not on the product road map?

A Special Message from John Farkas

We wanted to share this important message with you. You can lead your company from chaos to growth.

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The Episode in 60 Seconds

Our world seems enamored with AI. Should our marketing be?

We discuss:

• Brand is the human bridge your prospects and customers cross to get to you
• Category creation is, at its core, a human process
• Anthony Kennada's thoughts on human marketing

Plus, we tell stories about what happened at The Dead Rabbit, at a private dinner with a start-up founder, and on a plane back from Manhattan.

Our Guest

Anthony Kennada is Chief Marketing Officer at Front. His team is taking on email. He said, "Email is the workplace communication standard that has not seen much innovation since Wilson Phillips was on top of the global music charts."

Prior to joining Front, Anthony was the founding CMO at Gainsight where he created the Customer Success category.

He is the author of Category Creation published by Wiley.

He has previously worked at Box, LiveOffice, Symantec, and serves as an investor, advisor, and board member to enterprise software startups around the globe.

He calls himself a "B2C marketer trapped in a B2B body."

Anthony is married and the father of a sweet daughter.

Show Notes

Category Creation is not for the faint of heart. It's also inherently human.

John Farkas: "Anytime something new happens, you have to mark the moment. You have to say, 'Think about this differently.'"

Allen Gannett, The Creative Curve: "You always have to mix the novel with the known."

Listen to the entire interview with Anthony Kennada.

Download a free excerpt from Anthony's book, Category Creation.

John Farkas: "Brand is the human bridge."

John Farkas articles on Category Creation:

Category Creation: The Power of Understanding Your Buyer's Problems

Do You Have What it Takes to Be a Category Creator?

John Farkas: "Don't miss the handshake."

Read more about empathy here and here.

Mark Whitlock: "I learned about The Power of One through my radio experience."

In this 30-minute interview, CMO of Front, Anthony Kennada discusses with Golden Spiral:

• What is Category Creation?
• Is creating a new category a good idea for every company?
• Are Gartner and Forrester still relevant?
• The signals that you should pursue category creation
• Lessons learned from being a CMO

Download a free excerpt from his book

Amazon link to book