Strategically Organizing Your Own Customers
Learn from Kristin Russel, CMO at symplr, about creating a category and creating roles for your customers within that category.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faizan, CEO of Cast Me In Studios.
And today, we are joined by a special guest, Kristen.
How are you?
I am very good.
It's great to be here, Ian.
Thanks for inviting me.
Thanks so much for joining.
Thanks for being on the show.
Excited to chat simpler, chat marketing,
and your background, everything in between.
And our show is always brought to you by our friends at qualified.
You can go to qualified.com right now to learn about the number one
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Well, while you're listening to this, I suppose,
number of first question, Kristen, what
was your first job marketing?
So my first job in marketing, it's sort of a quasi job.
I started off as a speech writer for the Office of the Prime
Minister, which may not seem like a total marketing job,
but I actually use those skills all the time.
So I'm from Canada.
It was kind of a cool job at the time.
But from that, I went on to management consulting, MBA in France.
I was an entrepreneur, strategy, M&A.
I promise I'm going to get to marketing from the M&A
activity, product, and product marketing.
So I actually have been doing marketing for about 13 years.
Now.
Incredible.
What's the best lesson for someone
who's trying to write more like a speech writer?
Crisp, short and to the point.
I mean, you can say that again about 50 times.
We all need to be short.
That's why I was just doing a session on how to make your--
basically, how to market your podcast.
And like with a third lesson on the list
was your episodes need to be shorter.
Your copy needs to be shorter.
Your editing needs to be tighter.
Because all of that, no one's going to want to listen to your stuff.
And no one's going to click on the links if you have this long,
laborish copy and everybody seems to like to do that.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, actually in Canada, we used to have a question and answer
period every day.
And so you would have to prepare the Prime Minister for whatever
kind of question and answer he's going to get.
And so we would have copy and literally three bullets
to cover world affairs.
And on top of that, he wanted to come across as authentic,
like-- but you're thinking on your feet.
So we would add a little kind of joke or a little authentic moment
for him so he could kind of flub it in English.
We would include the--
we're talking about that issue with Taylor's, for example,
we would have a Stitch in Time, Save's Nine.
But exactly how he was going to mess it up as well in French
to English just to kind of be relatable to the audiences.
So I guess that's a pretty good lesson as well
from a marketing perspective.
Be relatable.
Yeah, indeed.
Anywho, flash forward to today.
You're no longer a speechwriter, but in some ways you are a speech
writer.
Tell us a little bit about your current role.
Absolutely.
So I am the Chief Marketing Officer at Simpler.
Simpler exists to make health care easier.
And so what we think about is if we do our job well,
caregivers have more time to give care.
That's kind of the top line.
But what I mean by that is we're really in technology software.
We focus on hospitals here in the United States,
as well as health plans.
So there's about 6,900 hospitals and 900 payers.
We're all about servicing back office, administrative,
solutions to those folks.
You can think provider data management solutions,
workforce management, supplier, spend management.
It's a lot of-- to your point, don't speak in jargon.
Bottom line, average hospital has somewhere between 500 to 1,500
nurses, and all of those folks have to get scheduled.
So we'll help with the scheduling.
We'll help make sure they're showing up when they need to show up
that the right teams are put together.
We also credential physicians.
So the doctors that are taking care of your kids,
you actually kind of want to make sure they actually
are a doctor, went to med school,
graduated, all that good stuff.
We've got the software and the systems to support that.
We put it all together.
And we really think about the fact that now we're
able to offer a single platform in this space we call health care
operations.
Sounds like--
I'm looking at your face to make sure you're still tracking.
Like if you were like, hmm, that's a bit confusing.
I would stop and explain more.
No, not at all.
I think it makes perfect sense.
Sounds like you make health care simpler.
You've got it.
Five in my way.
Perfectly named company.
That tracks exactly.
And we're going to dig more into that in our first segment.
The trust tree where we go and feel honest and trusted,
and you can share those deepest, darkest marketing secrets.
So we know a little bit more about the 6,900-ish types
of organizations, types of health care companies
that y'all do business with.
Tell us a little bit more about that buying committee.
Who buys your stuff?
Yeah.
So we sell to really primarily to the CIO.
This is going to be kind of the key kingpin in our world.
Cheap information officers and then the VPs of IT,
sometimes it's a director.
But I use that term CIO to sort of catch that entire group.
That's really our primary area of focus.
However, we have a lot of different solutions.
We've got 31 different solutions across the space
of health care operations, health care administrative solutions.
So within that, we find that there's
a different ICP for different groups.
And so to keep ourselves somewhat organized,
we organized all of our solutions into four pillars.
We've got about seven to nine ICPs that
are going to be in a average buying committee
that we will focus on.
Think about like a chief nursing officer,
chief financial officer, the CIO.
You've got your directors of quality,
directors of credentialing.
It's going to depend on the specific solution set
and the pillar that we're going after.
But by and large, it's certainly a complex sale.
I mean, Brent Adamson, that challenger crew,
would eat their hearts out on the stuff that we'll do over here.
But it's definitely a five, seven, nine person buying committee
that we're working with on average.
And what we typically see is the primary ICP, that CIO,
working alongside with one of those SMEs, who's bringing us in.
They may be our champion.
And then they've got to get the CIO, who owns the budget,
who has all the IT purchasing power aligned.
But the upside of that is because we're doing a platform play
and we've got all of these different solutions,
when the CIO kind of gets it and sees,
ah, OK, wait, hold on a second.
I work with this one vendor here.
Why don't I work with them over there?
We see a lot of pull, actually, from the CIO as well.
The ability to influence the buying committee
and bring in more solutions under that single vendor concept.
Can I tell you that I love that on your website, simple.com,
s-y-m-p-l-r.com, that you'll put by role next to solutions.
Because it drives me crazy when people don't do that.
Because that's how we-- you know, people just--
that's how you search for people, right?
For things.
You're like, hey, is this for me?
Am I supposed to be owning this?
Does somebody else own this?
Et cetera.
And so it's so easy to go there and to CIO compliance
and IT and medical staff, nursing, et cetera, et cetera.
So anywho, I feel like that that--
Honestly, I love that you called that out.
I was with our whole sales team this morning.
We had a sales town hall and I was talking with them
about the fact that--
I played this like myth or fact game, like myth or fact.
Is marketing developing content for people specifically
or just our products?
Because we really are focused on developing the content,
on going to market with the human in mind.
It's a big focus of kind of how we're going to market right
now.
And it's one, yes, the content has to be specific to the role.
But also, I believe that the creative, the marketing itself
has to be aligned with the human.
Which in health care is kind of a big deal.
Because I don't know how much time you spend in this space.
But B2B, health care man, if you are a model
and want to go take a picture in Baby Blue with an iPad,
you're just going to make money all day long on soft photography.
That stuff.
I don't think it resonates.
I think it's old school.
I don't think anybody's really buying it anymore.
And so we're really--
it's simpler.
We're trying to be a little different.
We're trying to be authentic.
It's not all there yet on our symplr.com website.
But we are excited to be coming out with a new approach that
really aligns to the humans that buy, sell, use, engage
with our solutions.
Yeah.
I think that there's just been this--
we're getting right into it here.
But there's this shift that I think toward authenticity now,
where it's like having a bunch of people's faces
on your website that are models versus having
a bunch of people on your website that are real people that
actually buy from you or partner with you
or do business with you is a pretty big shift.
And a place like HealthCare, which
is like extremely regulated.
And there's all this other stuff going on.
So you have other concerns there.
For a lot of tech companies where
you don't have a lot of that stuff,
you have definitely have no excuse there.
But it's like, put your customers' faces on there.
Put Jane Doe.
Who's your VP of IT?
Throw her on the website.
That's right.
Put her in your app.
Definitely.
Couldn't agree more.
And how has your team built to acquire those accounts?
How's your marketing team built?
Yeah.
So a couple things.
First of all, we're in about nine out of 10 hospitals today.
So we've got a pretty broad presence.
And I call that out because it means
we're not actually acquiring new business.
We're not acquiring from accounts who we don't have.
We're increasing our footprint by and large.
We've also grown pretty quickly through acquisition,
as well as organic.
So that creates a couple challenges
and a couple opportunities, to be perfectly honest.
The challenges that we've got a lot of legacy brands,
that in certain cases are more well known than our current
brand.
We've also got to bring all of these different solutions
together, get them organized.
I mentioned that pillar concept.
And so we've organized our solutions
into these four different kind of pillars.
But those are loosely organized around buyers, as well.
So my marketing team, kind of at the core of the marketing
team, is product marketing.
And our product marketers align to buyer solution pillars.
They're the ones that are thinking about the deep messaging,
the so what, if you will, of why this thing that we're offering
is going to bring value to our customers.
Surrounding that product marketing is growth marketing.
So growth marketing definitely helps us support
a deeper focus on things like SEO, paid search.
We still do that, events, webinars,
because as much as we're in the existing hospital,
a lot of times we find it's with one of the buyer groups
and not all of them.
And so we need to make sure they're aware of what we do.
Obviously, ABM is a huge piece of this.
I'm sure we'll talk about this multiple times
during this conversation.
But the ability kind of lays your focus in on the exact buyer
that we're looking for with our growth marketing initiatives
is a huge value plus for us.
I have a creative team that is actually pretty important,
again, back to that human-specific marketing
and building out a very focused approach
to how we go to market that is a little bit different.
Means we spend a good bit of time making sure
our creative really resonates, that our content
has high engagement.
And then marketing operations underpinning that work.
Across the board, our corporate marketing team
is what's driving brand awareness, which for, again,
in our world is pretty damn important.
Beyond the fact that we're also bringing these solutions
together, we're creating a category,
which is kind of a cool, fun thing to be a part of.
It's a, I guess I can't cuss here.
It's a lot of work.
I was gonna say a heck of a ton of work.
I don't know.
But yeah, creating a category has been an interesting
opportunity for us.
And so my corporate marketing team
has a really big role to play
in driving that thought leadership.
- Yeah, and what's your marketing strategy
in a little elevator pitch here?
- Yeah, so, I mean, first and foremost,
it is sort of this, you know, our thesis is that
all of these different areas exist in healthcare technology.
The average hospital kind of buys into three different areas.
They buy on electronic health records,
the things that keep track of, you know,
our visits to the hospital.
They have to spend money on their enterprise resource programs,
kind of how the payments work,
on the rev cycle management,
the back and forth of the claims.
But then there's all of these other things
that a hospital has to buy,
and they've previously done it independently.
So, simpler's thesis is that,
listen, I can bring all of these different solutions
to 150 solutions that you typically have
and have to manage.
I can replace those with my single offering.
I can be your single vendor for that work.
As I'm doing this, I'm investing in development
and technology so that I'm starting to tie
those pieces together as well,
putting them onto a single platform,
creating a really interesting and important workflows
for our customers.
When I came on board, and it's kind of funny,
you know, spend a lot of time with your customers,
you understand, what are they thinking about?
How are they doing in, you know, market research?
We call that.
So, through that process of early market research,
we came to find out that our CIOs and VPs of IT
called all this other stuff.
They literally just called it the other budget.
And so, it was clearly an area in need of a category name
and a way to sort of label this.
And our investors had called it
governance risk and compliance.
And so we were sort of saying,
"Hey, where are the governance risk and compliance leaders?"
Nobody knew what the hell we were talking about,
not that catchy.
And people, you kind of stumble on it as it comes out.
And so we started calling ourselves
in the solutions that we were offering
healthcare operations.
And we started educating analysts on healthcare operations,
educating the market on healthcare operations,
ultimately and inadvertently educating
our competitors as well.
But today, healthcare operations and the creation
of this category has been incredibly important for us.
And so our marketing strategy is really around
building out the category,
driving simpler brand recognition,
but having tight alignment across our go-to-market functions.
So that does mean driving pipeline.
I mean, at the end of the day,
that's how we're gonna get paid.
So marketing contributes 30% of the pipeline to simpler.
About 15% of our opportunities are closing today.
We'd like to see that grow.
But that's really a big piece
of our marketing strategy is driving growth.
The second one is supporting the innovation,
the product marketing that I talked about earlier.
And the third component of our strategy is around brand.
We wanna see ourselves as number one and share a voice,
which we've been for the last about seven quarters now.
- Yeah, it's so important.
I love the idea of like better operations, better outcomes
and using healthcare operations
because I know a lot of people in healthcare.
I mean, in a way, I'm not even in a way.
I literally used to be in healthcare when I was in the army.
And let me tell you,
if you wanna look at some funky HR operations
or healthcare operations,
it could take you a decade back into the United States army.
And so I'm like, you know,
put the gunner at the days, right?
Surely it can't be like that anymore.
Well, you know, I was talking to one of my friends
who's in healthcare.
They were doing clinical rotation
and they were faxing all of their information
at the end of every day.
And I said, I haven't seen a physical fax machine,
I think since I was in the army,
but it's like not that any,
there are certain industries that are farther along
in their technology than others,
but what should be the most far along is healthcare, right?
And so because it leads to patient outcomes, right?
It's like, that's why is because it does.
And so I just, I love the opposition.
So kudos to you and the team.
The idea is like, oh, we're not just doing operations
for operations sake.
It's like better operations lead to better outcomes.
Like crystal clear, Ian got it from the jump.
- 100% you got it.
And you know, our customers are actually the ones
that really came up with that for us.
I mean, they are outcomes focused all day long.
And so even if it's not clinical outcomes,
if it is, you know, outcomes associated with administrative,
that is a driver for healthcare.
I mean, you know this, one of the challenges
in healthcare, the margins are super duper thin.
And so efficiency, operational efficiency,
it's kind of a critical play in everything they do,
which is why when we talk about better operations,
you've got to be talking about those outcomes,
whether it's ROI or time saved,
or however you're going to talk about it.
But that's sort of a top of mind
for most of our customers.
I used to work for Surner and went on a tour in Ireland
with our chief nursing officer at the time,
a woman named Charlotte Weaver.
And we visited a hospital in Ireland
that was 100% paper.
And so, and this is kind of like, I tell the story,
because we're not that far away from that world,
where you're storing the records in little carts,
driving them around, pulling them out,
and hoping that your physician's reading
through the whole thing.
To be honest, I mean, we're a little further
with medical records, but AI has got some interesting promise
that it can bring to this space, certainly.
But that's it.
The digital record piece will be another conversation.
I'm happy to dive in,
but I probably know enough these days to be dangerous.
- Well, yeah, and the reason why I say that,
and the reason why I think it's important
for our conversation right now to talk about marketing,
is like that as we go into how you spend your money,
it is important to think about like where the mindset is
of the buyer in that journey.
Like we talk about digital transformation a lot,
but they're thinking about these things as like a massive,
never-ending, up-taking.
But there are parts that in healthcare specifically
that are pretty darn far behind.
- You're right.
There's a lot of on-premise stuff.
I mean, we even see that all the time.
That's part of what we're able to do
is, and we're investing is taking on-premise software,
moving it to the cloud.
And it's crazy, but gosh, I think it was a year ago,
I ran a HIMS focus group at HIMS,
which is this big healthcare information management society.
And we were asking the group questions about the cloud,
their cloud infrastructure kind of conversations.
Here at Silicon Valley, it would be,
this is pretty boring conversation.
I don't even need to ask questions.
Well, 50% of the CIOs in the room were actually reluctant
to even talk about the cloud,
'cause they have so many on-prem solutions
that they're still running.
They're just not even set up to start thinking about that.
Like it's crazy, but that's really, you're right.
Faxx's on-prem software.
I mean, we've got some work to do
in our healthcare systems today.
- Yeah, it's different than the CIO
of a tech company.
- 100%.
- And the problem is way harder too.
I shouldn't, like the problem is infinitely harder
and infinitely, not to say it's more or less important
than for tech, but like you're,
obviously people are at stake.
And so they need better operations.
And let's talk about how you get it to 'em.
For our next segment, the playbook where you open up
the playbook and talk about the tactics that help you win,
what are your three channels or tactics
that are your most uncuttable budget items?
- Absolutely.
So my number one, I love this question, by the way,
I'm actually gonna call it brand quizzician.
So we don't have a huge budget.
We try not to spend a lot on superfluous stuff here at Sempler
so we can direct as much as we can
back into our product development efforts.
So that means that when I think about a brand budget
and advertising budget and an acquisition budget,
I just don't have that luxury.
I gotta kind of smoosh these two things together.
And to be honest, it serves us well from a B2B perspective.
So my brand quizzician efforts,
which is really around driving acquisition
with a very recognizable brand,
is kind of a critical success factor.
So I would not cut that.
And that would definitely be an area
that I would continue to kind of lean into.
I certainly, you know, you talk about healthcare
and the needs in healthcare.
And so as we start to drive awareness
of some of the work that we're doing,
that brand acquisition means that
as people start to hear about us, they can search for us.
But they can't search, they can't buy
if they've never heard from us.
So if they don't even know who the heck Sempler is
or that Sempler even exists
and maybe they're associating some of the work
we're doing with some of our legacy brands,
we're dead in the water.
So that brand acquisition means that I'm gonna be able
to kind of rise up in search terms.
I'm gonna be able to be something that
you can talk about with the guy down the hall.
You can ask questions about, you can go research on
a little bit to understand more about what we're doing.
And even if it's not just Sempler,
but even just that notion of healthcare operations
that, hey, there's this way that we're starting
to think about healthcare,
that means we can be more operationally efficient
in our back office administrative software.
You know, heck, I'll take that all day long.
So that means, you know, investing in search engine
optimization, which is really, really more about content,
meaningful content that is going to align with the humans
that ICP that is looking for whatever the case may be,
if they're looking to understand how can I get efficiency
out of my quality outcomes or out of my compliance efforts?
We wanna have the content there to help you think about
what to look for when you're buying a supply chain
software, for example.
So that's really important to us.
And obviously doing that activity through things like events,
webinars, paid search, all critical.
So that would be my number one, brand acquisition.
- By the way, I say brand gen all the time.
- You do? Oh, I love that.
Okay, brand gen.
- This is basically years ago when I was thinking about
sort of like certain types of initiatives.
So like you could say like an event,
a dinner party, doing a podcast.
There's certain types of events where you're sort of like
co-creating with the people that you're selling to.
And I just thought, well, it's brand
because you have this brand halo effect, right?
If someone speaks on your stage with you in your conference,
everyone who's watching and who's attending or watching online,
they're getting the brand halo effect.
But the individual experience of the people who are doing
that stuff, like that's also, you know, it's acquisition.
It's a demand gen piece of it.
I thought, isn't that sort of a blended thing?
Whereas like search is not, right?
Like search is like paid search is like part of,
it is like purely a demand gen.
Yeah, there's a little bit of brand in there, of course,
but like it's not like 50/50 like some of these other things are.
And no, making a podcast series or doing event
or whatever.
So anyways, that's how I always thought of it
and find you somebody who can do both, right?
And that's like, that's the any brand gen campaign to me
is someone where you can point at like, we shaped seven accounts
that are key accounts for us.
And by the way, you know, 100 people watched, listened,
engaged in some way too.
Those sound like pretty good metrics.
I'll take those all day long.
I know, right.
Right.
You're exactly right.
I think that's the way we think about it.
I don't know that I hear you on paid search.
I do think a little bit of the, some of the paid search work,
at least that we were doing.
And it's becoming more demand gen as we've gone along our path
and we're three years in now with the simpler name
and kind of bringing all of these different solutions together.
But certainly at the beginning, a lot of, or even our paid search
was just around driving one awareness for simpler
and what we do.
And then also starting to bring in and attract folks
to our thought leadership activities.
Yeah, totally.
And one, it's a great point.
I mean, promoting content, promoting thought leadership,
and of course, like when you, when you relaunch a brand,
it's a different universe.
That's why we talk all the stuff at the top of this episode
is you got to learn exactly where you are coming from.
Because otherwise, otherwise the tactics wouldn't make sense.
Yeah, that's super helpful.
OK, so number two.
So now we, for inquisition, I'm going to take that on my,
on my budget line item.
The other one I'm going to do is that category creation.
So product alignment, to me, that is just really been,
it's really important for how we are showing up.
And really, it's taking this huge bucket of solutions,
the one that I talked about with the IT team,
that their other bucket and making it make sense,
driving awareness.
We do that with, obviously, our product marketing team.
I mentioned that earlier, building the category.
But we also invest in market intelligence
and our relationships with the analysts, which
is so, so critical to us.
It's educating the analysts.
It's helping them understand what we do
so that, in turn, they can actually write about us.
We're finally at the point this last summer where
one of the biggest analysts, probably the biggest analysts
in health care, from our perspective class,
they're kind of like the consumer reports for health care
technology spend.
They put out a report on health care operations.
So we were really excited to see them talking about and aligning
and bringing the market together around this need
and recognizing that there's a category of solutions,
the solutions can address your complex issues
in terms of managing spend and having more efficiency,
managing your workforce, managing your provider data.
And that was exactly how we designed the category.
So we worked with them.
Actually, we educated them.
They also educated us.
It was a two-way relationship.
But the ability to have an analyst start talking about us
from a category creation perspective was a huge win.
Under that category creation piece,
when you think about creating a category,
world's sort of thinking a little bit about how do we create
people whose names who work in that category?
How do I create a health care operations director
or the manager of health care operations for workforce?
And so crazily enough, but thinking about not just our content,
but also working with our training team,
working with the ways that we're reaching out
and organizing our own customers and helping them
to learn and think about health care operations
just to really embed this into the way
that they are using not only our solutions,
but training themselves.
And that does a couple things.
It helps-- it does help our competitors probably a little bit,
but it really helps simpler as well.
It helps health care.
Because now I'm training you to be a health care operations
specialist, which means you're going to think about not just
those one-point solutions anymore,
but the opportunities to align workflows.
Wouldn't it be cool if that workforce management staffing
piece I was talking about earlier,
if I knew all the people that were in the hospital
were also credentialed?
Those are two separate systems today.
Yeah.
Great.
OK, so now I'm only staffing and scheduling people
who actually have the right skill set.
Or if there's a quality incident,
I can immediately kind of connect
that the challenges associated with that quality incident,
the work that we're doing.
I can align it with the staffing, the scheduling,
as well as that credentialing piece.
So there's lots of ways that those workflows start
to connect in very meaningful manners.
So it's not a human and a spreadsheet that's having to do it,
but we're actually letting that happen with our product.
But bottom line, that's all about category creation for us
and product alignment.
I love that anytime the category creation sort of playbook
is being used.
I strongly believe what you believe, which
is that there's a new job created and somebody's
got to be sitting in it.
The idea that the CIO is this person who
owns all of technology for a company that worked 20 years ago.
It definitively does not work today.
We all know that.
And CIOs know that too.
And that's why line of business unit owners
have so much more control over that stuff than they ever did.
My point being is that I love the idea
that you're pushing towards, hey, someone
needs to sit in this seat and oversee all of this
because it's connected and it should be one person who's
looking at it all.
I think that to really ultimately own or say you have
created a category, I think you kind of need to have three
things.
I definitely think you've got to have analysts talking
about this category.
It can't just be me standing up here saying,
I created a category and you saying, OK,
Kristen, tell me about your category.
I'm like, oh, well.
But I think you've got to have other people,
and not just my mom and my dad, but actual industry analysts
talking about the category.
I think you do need to have people that are--
if it's really a category, you're
going to have jobs around it.
There's a whole ways of working around that thing
that exists in the category.
And then I also think, though, good, bad, or ugly,
that you've got competition starting
to say they offer solutions in that category.
And we're certainly seeing that on our side.
We're seeing competition using our messaging,
taking all kinds of stuff.
But it's a good thing.
It definitely is keeping us on our toes.
But I think those are the three elements that really--
you can put the-- what do you call it?
The stake in the ground that says, yeah,
I've got a category here.
All right, but, item number three.
So item number three for me is really
kind of this notion of business to human marketing.
It's what we were talking about earlier.
And so when I think about marketing to the human,
the mom that goes home is the single mom
and takes care of her kids is going
to be using a variety of different sources
of digital media, connecting with the person that's
got a weekend, that's planned, watching golf, or whatever,
we consider that moment of how do we
resonate with the person.
And so we're investing in creative, strong brand strategy
to drive alignment and having really good creative that
is engaging.
And I mean both the content, the writing,
but also the way it looks.
I want to pick this thing up or I want to click on that
and dive deeper into that website or that web page
because it speaks to me.
And so thinking about how we do that
means really understanding our ideal customer persona.
But it also means investing in a unique point of view
that is maybe a little bit different than anything else
that's out there.
How do you think about bringing that message to the market?
What are the different ways you do that?
And certainly as if you look at some of the work we're doing,
we're getting ready to showcase some new ways
that we're thinking about simpler.
It's an evolution.
Your brand grows, it's got a life.
Thinking about how we show up from our website
to our events, to the ways that the clothing we wear,
the way our associates kind of talk about us.
I think there's multiple different touch points,
but they've all got to resonate around an aligned
personality and an aligned brand voice.
And so we want to make--
to be honest, we're going through the exercise right now.
So we've been probably about three years
with our current brand personality voice
that we've been using.
It's time to do a little bit, kind of just a juzhing
and a cleanup.
And so we're going through that.
And it's a fun exercise.
It means certainly we think about it, our team.
And we're probably the ones that are guiding
those conversations.
But also, we're driven by our customers.
The voice of customers is really important to us,
understanding how our customers perceive us,
what is important to them, and then thinking
about how our brand shows up with that in mind.
Are we kind of the nerdy, quirky leader that can help them,
you know, get the job done, save money?
How much of an expert are we versus a partner?
We're sort of playing with some of those elements right now.
And it also has to align with who we are as a company.
So we're a pretty transparent company.
We're pretty young.
We're pretty-- even--
I'm not talking about age.
I'm talking about like personality and the way
that we operate.
We're virtual.
Our CEO does not come from tech or from health care.
He comes from tech.
So we've got a mix of personalities, our executive team.
We've got some really deep health care experts,
but we've also got folks from other industries.
And so we're taking a little bit of a different approach
at Simpler.
And to be honest, our customers are rewarding us for it.
It's a little bit of a fresh approach.
So our brand needs to speak to that.
What about something that you're not investing in?
You're one of your cuttable budget items.
Yes.
So myself, probably any one of my team
will tell you what we're not investing in is email.
We do email.
We probably do more than we should,
but we're definitely not doing a lot of email.
We don't find that it's necessary.
It's not that effective.
The big, broad email brushes, kind of the spray and pray
approach, we just--
one, I think we bother people with it.
I don't like it.
I try to cut that spam as fast as I can.
I will say, when I talk about email,
I'm talking about email programs,
kind of the traditional marketing programs.
There's certainly a space.
And my BDR team does a terrific job
of direct outreach leveraging email.
Having a conversation, both a digital conversation
as well as a verbal conversation with a customer.
We do that, for sure.
But old school email, I think it's dead.
Interesting.
Do you feel like people have too much of it?
Do you feel like the newsletter stuff isn't working?
Do you feel like it's not personalized enough?
I guess what email do you like receiving?
So it's a great point.
And I am talking about the mass, broad email of, hey, simpler.
Let me tell you about simpler.
Let me just send you an email about a product.
Those, you know, ch-ch-ch-ch.
I think we do see a time and place, actually,
for communicating with our existing customers.
So from a customer marketing perspective,
there's absolutely a time and place for email.
And it is a helpful way for us to get in front of our customers.
As much as possible, we want to give them information
while they're in their applications themselves.
So using tools like Fendo, for example,
providing that, using that as a service in a way
to kind of get them their newsletters and their content.
But for those that aren't there, and for the products that aren't there,
providing, you know, a newsletter, a way to keep people updated
about what's going on, letting them know about different events
that we're going to.
Email does have a place in time for that.
And we have to use it.
I'm just saying it's not-- you see the open rates,
you see the amount of people that delete it.
It's-- I don't think it's that successful.
I don't know that we figured out the perfect alternative to jump to.
In B to B, text is a little tricky for multiple reasons.
But there's interesting conversations
that I see happening on our website with our chat tool, for example.
Yeah.
There's deeper conversations that are happening
where the customers are starting to do their research and engaging and buying.
Then there are in a kind of an older model of just like,
"Let me send you something.
You're going to receive it at a certain point in time and then come back."
Yeah, I totally agree.
Using great tools like Qualified.
What about like your little experiment budget, your 5% budget,
something that you want to invest in,
that you haven't invested in yet, that you're excited about?
So more than 5%, we are investing in ABM.
We do have pretty much a test and learn mentality across the board.
And so there's-- I'm a big fan, maybe a little bit of a risk taker,
but let's try it.
Let's get it out there, test it, fail fast, and then move on.
And so we do that across the board.
But right now, our big investment is really going towards ABM.
And we're standing up that whole program.
We're figuring out what works, what doesn't.
We're working with our partners who've been super helpful,
bringing us along the path as well as with our own teams,
with our sales and product and growth teams to get that in place.
But that's really right now where we're putting any dollars that are test
dollars.
Of course.
Let's get to our next segment, The Dust Up,
where we talk about healthy tension, whether that's with your board,
your sales teams, your competitors, or just anyone else.
Kristen, have you had a memorable dust up in your career?
Of course.
I think, like, you'd be a crazy person if you said you hadn't.
And honestly, I had to look up dust up for this little chip shaft.
So I was like, what is a dust up?
Yeah.
So I remember a time-- I had an old boss.
I did not see eye to eye with.
He wanted to market technology that wasn't complete.
We couldn't live up to our value proposition.
We didn't have customers live on this.
It was super tricky.
This would be more than I would say healthy tension.
So ultimately, marketing the solution would create a lot of confusion for
potential customers.
And my concern was that it would create irreparable brand damage as well.
In the end, we really didn't see eye to eye.
Unfortunately.
So that just did not work myself and the number of others ended up walking away
But I think that, gosh, there's dust ups all the time.
And I do think, here it's simpler, we have-- we've taken this Lencioni approach
I don't know if you're familiar with that, the advantage.
It's a way of thinking about how organizations, how executive teams can have
organizational health.
He proposes a number of different ways of supporting and managing yourself.
But bottom line, it's like build a really cohesive leadership team, which means
getting
into being able to have a difficult conversation, being okay with healthy
tension and finding
ways to work through that, driving clarity, and then over communicating the
clarity.
So once you've got the clarity, you over communicate the clarity, and then you
reinforce the clarity.
And so that's something we do at Simpler.
We have a management operating structure that we're really intentional about
that gives us
to come together and disagree, quite honestly, and then to work through any
disagreements.
So it looks something like, on a regular basis, we've got an executive
leadership team meeting
every week.
We do a stand up.
So our ELT is meeting every single day.
So I am meeting with my head of sales, with my chief product office, folks
where I might
have the most tension, CFO, and on a regular basis.
So we're already communicating, driving clarity, and then re-communicating and
reinforcing that
clarity on a regular basis.
And then across our teams, we're holding, we do a monthly town hall.
We do a monthly Q&A.
We do it at the corporate level.
And then again, functionally.
So I've got a marketing town hall, bringing the marketing team together every
single quarter.
And then one on once.
So every single person in the organization is getting a one on one every week
with their
leader kind of rolls up, as you can imagine.
But that alone, I think, helps immensely to drive towards resolution where dust
ups happen.
Let's get to our final segment, quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
Just like how qualified and helps companies generate pipeline quickly.
Happen to your greatest asset, your website, identify your most valuable
visitors, and
instantly, and I mean instantly, start sales conversations.
Quick and easy, just like these questions go to qualified.com to learn more.
Quick hits.
Kristin, are you ready?
Shoot.
Number one, do you have a hidden talent or skill that is not on your resume?
You do.
I think I'm a pretty creative thinker.
I have, my mom was a kindergarten teacher and my dad was a psychologist.
So you put that together and you get behavioral economics with a lot of color
and a little
construction paper.
I have a question about that.
That is not a quick hit.
You got a finance studio arts management thingy from Stanford.
Why did you do that?
That was recent.
Yeah, really recent.
Actually, it's a photography program, fine arts program that I just took.
I'm always learning.
I recently learned how to become a spin instructor.
This is my latest thing.
Every year come New Year's Eve.
I set something that I'm going to do, some crazy thing.
This year I was going to learn photography.
Rather than just learn photography by taking a course at some photography shop,
I thought,
heck, let's go all the way.
Jump into a class in Stanford.
It was amazing.
It was every night, five nights a week.
It kicked my ass a little bit, but really, really interesting.
Honestly, as a head of marketing, wow, I can't believe I didn't know some of
the stuff.
Alignment of art and how we think about color and the positioning of a subject
on a frame.
It was pretty cool.
Favorite book, podcast or TV show that you recommend?
One of my favorite books I ever read was this book called Nudge by Teller and
Sunstein.
An old boss actually recommended it to me.
It's kind of an interesting marketing book, but it's how we influence people's
decisions
with little nudges and the notion that you and I were always going to, we're
kind of
lazy, so we're going to take the path of least resistance.
If you put something in front of us, we're probably going to do it.
Anyway, it's their choice architects.
Great book.
Highly recommend it.
Then my podcast would be New York Times Daily.
I'm just, I'm a junkie.
I listen to it every day.
If you weren't in marketing or business at all, what do you think you'd be
doing?
You know what?
I think I would be the CEO of a canoeing or backpacking company.
I like it.
So years ago, I used to take people on canoes trips up in Northern Ontario in
Canada.
I still do.
We go every summer.
I'm totally offline, but yeah, I think I could totally rock selling canoes.
I'm sold.
I love doing that stuff here in Northern California.
Best advice for a first time CMO.
I think my best advice for a first time CMO is kind of perk your head up.
Get out of your swim lane.
You don't have to just, in fact, I think you're a better CMO if you're not just
focused
on marketing.
If you're thinking about the whole business, the top line, the bottom line, it
's going
to give you an understanding of kind of across the board, what everybody else
is thinking
about from their seat, whether it's the market, the employees, the customers
are bored.
Certainly the CEO.
I think that's just critical for any CMO.
Well, this has been a wonderful conversation, Kristen.
Thanks so much for joining.
For listeners, you can go to simpler.com and check out all their stuff, really
cool marketing.
Check out those roles, all the different roles.
If you're in healthcare, definitely give them a check.
If you know someone in healthcare, you can manage, as Kristen said.
Any final thoughts, anything to plug?
I think the big thing I would plug is our simpler crew.
We have really terrific people.
My team, my marketing team, I'm blessed to work with a ton of creative geniuses
We've got some great vendors and of course our customers.
My biggest plug is just a little grace for our healthcare systems.
I mean, man, they are under pressure, workforce shortages, tight margins.
Now we got claims issues on top of that.
So give them a break.
Indeed, I totally hear you.
Kristen, thanks again.
We will talk soon.
Absolutely.
Thanks for having me.
It's been a pleasure.
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