Healthcare

CMO: The Toughest Job You’ll Ever Love

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Rapid change. Complex analytics. Brand advocacy, creativity and strategic leadership. Judged on execution and impact….and by the way, the clock is ticking.

These are some of the challenges that face to the evolving role of the modern Marketing leader, requiring a dizzying array of skills to deal with a rapidly changing environment and high CEO expectations.

RAPID CHANGE

As McKinsey & Company presaged a few years ago, “Few senior-executive positions will be subject to as much change over the next few years as that of the chief marketing officer”.  A number of factors are driving that change:

  • The liberation of the information consumers use in making buying decisions
  • Multiple, online channels of interaction between consumers and brands
  • Rapid evolution of digital marketing technology
  • Competitive intensity and the shortening lifespan of competitive advantage

The Liberation of Information:

Consumers today have access to product reviews, detailed product descriptions, comparative price data…and that’s before they ever hit your company’s website.  “CMOs face a power shift from selectively informed consumers to consumers “armed to their teeth” with information and choice”, as detailed in The Changing Role of the CMO – Evolution and Revolution At Work by the Vivaldi Partners Group.

The empowered consumer can be at multiple phases in the buying cycle (awareness, consideration, investigate, purchase and use) at the same time, quickly obsoleting any notion of a linear narrative with your customer.  In addition, being transparent, factual and honest about your brand has never been more consequential given that customers will detect gaps and inconsistencies across your message points (customer service, technical support, trade shows, in-person sales, online, print, etc.).

Multiple Online Channels of Interaction:

Of course customers will, if you’re skillful and can break through the noise, be listening to your messages across your platforms (blogs, social media, Pay-per-Click advertising, your website(s), and email).  “Designing a consistently positive, rewarding experience across all those touchpoints takes system-wide thinking and an integrated service-delivery approach. Point solutions, such as focusing on the call center, the store, or the website, no longer cut it in a multichannel environment”, says Peter Dahlstrom, Chris Davis, Fabian Hieronimus, and Marc Singer in the Rebirth of the CMO,  (HBR Oct. 2014).

But as important your messages on your platforms (and they best cohere), the messages about your company and products/services hosted on 3rd-party sites are potentially even more important.  These include other purchase channels that have customer reviews, consumer interest groups (these exist in both B2C and B2B), user-developed content and the social media ‘twittersphere’ and beyond.  Being keenly aware of the digital conversations about your brand, bringing that information into your organization, and appropriately directly or indirectly responding can be critical.

Rapid evolution of digital marketing technology:

As Aditya Joshi states in Technology Questions Every CMO Must Ask (HBR Oct. 2014), “Marketers today encounter a mind-boggling array of technologies.  CMOs I talk to are swamped by meeting requests from technology vendors, and most feel an acute pressure to climb on the tech bandwagon”.  Marketing technology has dramatically evolved over the last decade and continues to quickly mature.

Digital Marketing platforms (for landing page and forms development, social media management, email marketing), Web platforms (for eCommerce, product and content search, and online customer experiences), CRMs (customer relationship management for a 360 degree view of your prospects and customers), Customer Review platforms, Analytical tools (Google Analytics, KISS metrics, etc.), Online communities (for customer engagement, customer feedback, and market research) et al. are enabling marketers to track how well they are evolving customer relationships and which activities are positively contributing to each step of the customer journey.

These systems create multiple imperatives:

  • From the sea of data these systems produces, what actionable insights are being generated?
  • How will you scale Marketing’s impact by connecting the dots across these systems and the other critical enterprise systems linked to production, development, finance, reporting, etc.?
  • Can you successfully set expectations for return-on-investment timing and business impact?

Competitive Intensity:

In the Rebirth of the CMO the authors state: “Digital disruption…has created an increasingly commoditized product and service environment. Digital has removed barriers across sectors, even in old-line businesses known for “sticky” products, such as telecom and insurance. And that same transparency has radically shortened the shelf-life of any new competitive advantage.”  As information has become more democratized, barriers to awareness have been lowered.  A firm I worked with saw it’s competitive ranks climb from 30 to over 300 competitors in less five years.

TOUGH AND GETTING TOUGHER

The pace of change will not slacken in coming years and the systems and technology will necessarily (thankfully) continue to evolve.  Role expectations will not soften either.

Shelagh Collins reports that the IDC Predicts Hard Times Ahead for CMOs (CMS Wire, Dec. 2014) that “One in four CMOs will be replaced every year through 2018.”  Why?  “Chief marketing officer turnover is partially due to a disparity between CEO expectations and the hiring of the CMO to execute them. ‘If the CEO isn’t sure what he wants when he makes the job requisitions specification, it’s not surprising that the CEO might be disappointed if the CMO doesn’t perform over those first 12 or 24 months’, according to Rich Vancil, Group VP, Executive Advisory Group.”

Last year Fortune reported that although CMO tenure has improved in some sectors, it remains significantly lower than CIOs or CEOs.  They report that CMO tenure is “shortest in the healthcare, automotive, restaurant and communications/media sectors, averaging between 28 to 32 months.”

Ty Montague (Are CEOs to Blame for Short CMO Tenures?  HBR July 2013) states CMO tenure is “astonishingly low compared to other execs in the C-Suite: eight years for CEOs and ten years for CFOs. So why is CMO tenure so short? Experts have pointed to a host of reasons: the explosion of social media, the rise of big data, general complexity and chaos, incompetence…”

SO WHY DO IT?

While as Dahlstrom et al state “The need to deliver on organization-wide imperatives creates lots of pressure for CMOs”, it also “has elevated – and complicated – the role of CMO. Delivering above-market growth increasingly hinges on differentiating the customer experience and building tighter customer relationships . That in turn relies on not only having excellent marketing capabilities, but also connecting marketing with the entire organization.”

To be a CMO today is to be at the cross-currents of change, with customers, technology and the organization.  Technology is enabling marketing capacity and capabilities to positively impact the strategic direction of the company, customer engagement, product definition, brand vibrancy, and revenue growth.

Marketers experience in their personal lives, and see all around them, dramatic changes in the way customers learn about and purchase products.  Marketing leaders have a unique opportunity to work across the entire organization to build a shared vision for uniquely delivering value to customers.

Executing against that vision, with products and programs that result in dynamic customer relationships, could not be more critically important or rewarding in business today.  If you like leading change, technology and analytics, creativity and strategy, and continuously evolving yourself and your team’s marketing skills, being a CMO is the toughest job you’ll ever love.

Medtech Innovation: Everything but the prototype. Answer these 5 questions first.

So you’ve got an idea for a new medical device. What’s the first thing you want to do?

If get money to make prototypes is your response, perhaps you might want to think again.

Sure, SBIRs (Small Business Innovation Research grants from the US government) are out there specifically to support such work. The urge to get hands on and make something is tough to resist, especially if you’re an engineer by training. But if your goal is to build a business and solve a problem, I recommend holding off on the proof of concepts, bench-top testing, and rapid prototypes.

I know, if you have a working prototype you can get customer feedback and use it to get funding for your company. But those funders, whether angel investors or venture capitalists, will ask you these types of questions before giving you one red cent:

  • What’s your “killer app”? (I know, you’d think they wouldn’t say that in healthcare!). By killer app they mean what is the critical problem you solve with your idea? In today’s healthcare environment that boils down to can you make care faster, better or cheaper…and ideally all of the above.
  • What is the evidence (data) that validates your idea that you can improve patient outcomes, improve safety/quality of care, or reduce the cost of care? You may be thinking how am I going to get evidence without a working device, but at the early stages you need a rationale and then a plan to validate your rationale.
  • Who are the 5 KOL (key opinion leader) clinicians that will attest to the fact that your idea (a) will do what you claim (assuming the technology works out) and (b) will buy it when it’s approved for sale.
  • What is your reimbursement strategy? It’s hard to get hospitals/physicians to purchase and clinicians to adopt new technology unless there’s an economic incentive to do so. If “new code” comes out of your mouth, you’re in trouble because it’s unpredictable and takes a long time to get a new code. So, if you can get approval for reimbursement using an existing code, all the better.
  • What is your regulatory pathway? To investors, the FDA is an unpredictable, time-sucking hurdle. The fact that current approval processes are under review and changing creates uncertainty, the enemy of VCs and Angels. Ideally you have a number of recent predicates that will enable a 510k submission. And if you were thinking of going the CE route and enter the U.S. market after a European entry, be prepared to reduce the early sales in your revenue model as the healthcare markets are smaller and adopt more slowly than the U.S. market.

Bottom line: Investors will be thinking up front how they are going to get their money out of your company up front. The first step in building that case is getting really solid answers to the above questions. Following that you can begin to think about your team, technology and testing plans…and your company’s exit strategy. But before you put money and time into prototypes, think about building your healthcare business case. If you do, you may find a way to bootstrap your business as good ideas attract money and people.

“Getting to Know David Freeman, Industry Thought Leader”

As it originally appeared on Schwartz Communication’s PRx Blog:

PRx Blog

Getting to Know David Freeman, Industry Thought Leader

Name: David Freeman
Title: President
Company: Freeman & Associates Consulting
My first job in healthcare was: My first job in healthcare was as a PR Specialist and Tradeshow Manager at HP Medical, in the headquarters operation.  I was 26 years old and I remember the feeling of awe when I first came to the company for an interview (the first of 9 interviews). HP was famous at the time for its open workplace environment (read low cubicles). As I rounded a corner I looked across a huge expanse of desks and people and computers on every desk!

It was a great start in healthcare because I had the opportunity to learn about HP’s entire portfolio as well as travel to conferences like the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology, where I got to interact with clinicians, sales reps and marketing professionals from around the world.

What I like most about working in healthcare is: It’s of course trite to say that I work in healthcare to make a difference.  And that the industry attracts good, smart and caring people. All true. But working in an office, caught up in conference calls and cross-functional meetings, a challenging regulatory environment, demanding quality system requirements, it can be easy to forget why I feel so passionate about being in healthcare.

However healthcare has a way of stripping the business veneer away and reminding you of what’s at stake and how you make a difference in a way that I imagine few industries can. Every time I visit a hospital on business, suit and tie, folio in hand, there’s a moment when the environment breaks through and I realize that I’m surrounded by people in crisis and that I’m connected to assessing and preserving health.

I was a pediatrics product manager when the first Iraq war broke out. We were racing to develop a pediatric transesophageal ultrasound imaging transducer. The miniaturization of the electronics was pushing state of the art at the time but my clinical trial sites at children’s hospital in the U.S. and U.K. had conveyed how important this innovation would be to assess surgical repair of congenital heart defects from behind the heart, out of the sterile field, after the repair but before the chest was closed.

The European OEM firm we were working with to develop the transducer had a sister division that got caught up in the night-vision scandal and the State Department put the entire company on hold for business with the U.S. Six months in on a scheduled nine month project we scrambled to find an alternate firm to work with to restart our effort. Our schedules slipped and while we kept our clinical trial sites informed, one day the head of Pediatric Echocardiography from the largest of the U.S. children’s hospitals reached me by phone at my desk.  He proceeded to tell me about a patient they had lost on the table the day before and that the transducer might have saved the patient’s life.  He was upset and emotional and asked me what was taking us so long.

Similarly, I was involved with Schwartz to build awareness of sudden cardiac arrest from the early days when every new airline placing AEDs on board was still news. At each turn, as we worked with corporations, public places, schools and home users, the calls would come in…hi, my name is (pick a name)…and I’m just calling to thank you because my (husband, father, daughter…) was saved by your device.

It’s that vital connection to people, to saving and preserving lives, that keeps me loving this industry.

When I’m not working, I like to: We have four kids and I love spending time with them. Other interests include music (jazz and chill), taking nature photographs, writing poetry, and keeping up with the world and technology.

Who had the biggest influence on your career?: A woman named Cynthia Danaher, who was at HP, has been the most influential person on my career. She heard me interacting with customers on the trade show floor (when I was in my first healthcare job) and recruited me to work in the ultrasound business. She demonstrated a mix of three qualities as a manager that I admire to this day:  (1)  The ability to personally connect with people, (2) Passion for advancing the business, and (3)  Intellectual rigor of the work she did and asked of her team. I learned an enormous amount from Cynthia and HP about management, marketing excellence, and corporate ethics.

People would be most surprised to learn that I: Went to a canoe/survival camp when I was 15 years old in Northern Canada where I learned to portage wood canvas canoes for up to five miles and survived 5 days in the woods with nothing but a match and a knife.

If I wasn’t in healthcare, I would probably be: If I wasn’t in healthcare I would probably be an unknown writer.

You can find me at (email, Twitter, LinkedIn):
Web: www.freemanb2b.com
LinkedIn: http://tinyurl.com/26shj26
Blog: www.freemanure.wordpress.com
Twitter: @freemanb2b

Tags: David Freeman, healthcare, healthcare PR, medical device PR, public relations agency, Schwartz CommunicationsPosted by Jayme Maniatis on December 7, 2010 at 12:31 PM
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