Marketing Mondays _ Shawn Malloy: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Andreea Borcea:
Welcome to the Marketing Mondays podcast, where we explore how we can make your offerings stand out in the health and wellness space. Through conversations with thought leaders and innovators in health and wellness marketing, we’ll discuss marketing best practices, case studies, and innovative ideas to help scale your business and grow revenues with impact. I’m excited to be your host. My name is Andreea Borcea. I’m a fractional CMO and owner of the Dia Creative Marketing Agency.
Andreea Borcea:
Hi everyone! And we’re back with another Marketing Mondays. My name is Andreea Borcea and I’m CMO of Dia Creative, and I’m super excited to be talking to Shawn Malloy, VP of Marketing at Curebase. So thank you so much for joining us, Shawn.
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, thanks for having me!
Andreea Borcea:
So tell me a little bit about what Curebase does.
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, for sure, so Curebase is a decentralized clinical trial company. If you kind of think about the way that clinical trials have traditionally been run, they’re mostly around like sites, hospitals, patients are going in and out of facilities in order to have every aspect of a clinical trial done with them. So what Curebase does is it essentially takes that construct and deconstructs it. So think about instead of maybe going for a simple blood draw or having a visit with a physician, maybe you’re doing that at home or you’re having a mobile phlebotomist or nurse come to your house and do that for you. So you can just kind of think of it as a patient-centric way of running and conducting clinical trials. Curebase is founded on a software technology system that we’ve built from the ground up that really allows that sort of construct to take place. So whether that’s using telemedicine, whether that’s dispatching some of these mobile providers to patients’ homes, or even working with the sites to oversee some of these activities. You can think of Curebase as kind of that central hub that allows that to happen.
Andreea Borcea:
Wow, so then if I’m getting this right, you’re actually marketing to quite a few different target markets all at the same time.
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, exactly, it’s quite a complex industry. You know, if you think of it, there’s a B2B element in that we are going to sponsors, so think of your major drug companies, your device companies, and convincing them that, hey, you know, we can open up access to your studies if you can run them in this way, run your studies with Curebase. In addition, though, you can kind of think of it as we’re going to physicians as well and we’re saying, hey, we can alleviate a lot of the burden that you take on as part of clinical trials. If you run studies with us, we have lots of principal investigators that work with us that, they’ve been affiliated with large academic institutions, and they’re also small mom-and-pop docs that might say, hey, you know, I’ve always wanted to get involved in clinical research, but it’s always been very cumbersome, there’s a lot of baggage that comes along with it, and what we basically provide is the ability to offload a lot of that on the part of the physician. In addition, there’s kind of this third component that’s more B2C where, well, we need patients for the studies. So our marketing organization actually does do patient recruitment efforts in order to directly B2C market to patients and bring them into the studies that we run.
Andreea Borcea:
That’s incredible. That feels like, I really like the sell, the pitch, especially to the mom-and-pops because I can totally see that as like your resolving barrier to entry there, but for patients in the larger organizations, those two target markets seem a little bit more challenging. Like how do you convince patients that this is still the right access or that it’s still a legit trial, even though it’s done through a more sophisticated platform?
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, it’s a really good insight. I will say, especially on our early days, like that’s a lot of the feedback and the challenges that you get directly from patients. You know, we’re running a lot of direct-to-patient marketing campaigns and you receive that sort of feedback, you know, is this a scam? This doesn’t, seems too good to be true, how do I know? And what you want to do is provide an air of legitimacy as much as you possibly can. So putting forward as much information about the trial as possible is important. Also tying it to maybe institutions that they see and recognize and know, so maybe like the principal investigator is part of an academic institution and their logo will be right on the landing page of the website, you know, and just maybe even things like putting out a press release with the sponsor saying like, hey, we’re doing this study together, it’s going to be run fully virtual. So if a patient like really has questions about it, what do most people do when they’re skeptical about a topic? They Google it and they say, hey, you know, is this thing real? And there are all kinds of pieces of evidence that they can now pull up and say, oh, Curebase, this study is like a legitimate study and these are the reasons why.
Andreea Borcea:
You probably are spending quite a bit of time on content marketing then, and press marketing, just to kind of be out there. Because you’re right, if people Google it, it can’t just come from you, it’s got to come from other sources that they already know and trust.
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, definitely, there’s a lot of education that needs to be done, you know, within the patient community as well as the sponsors and the physicians themselves. A big part of that is just getting earned media in addition to like what you’re putting up on your website, maybe in blogs and whatnot, but really just getting the message out there through whatever means that you can. Also, like I mentioned before, the partnership thing is really important. If you are putting your name with another name that there is that air of legitimacy to, that’s how you kind of build traction, right? Like people can see based on the logos and where the presence is that, there is that third party testimonial that this is something that, to be taken seriously.
Andreea Borcea:
So switching over to that partnership side, how did you work at convincing kind of these longer, larger, well-established giants, right? Especially in the medical industry where everyone is slow to adopt new technology, how did you really convince them that they could get the same results, if not better, by using something like Curebase?
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, definitely, I think with any high-growth organization, you have to start from somewhere, and where we tended to start was, you know, who are the people that are willing to take those risks, who have the most to gain? And what we found is, especially with the sponsor side, a lot of like startups that really needed to run studies really fast, really quickly, they came to us and built a very large base of our original business. In addition to that, when you think about the physicians, as I mentioned, that we’ve worked with everyone from your large academic institutions to your smaller mom-and-pop doctors, we were able to convince pretty early on several physicians that they’ve never run clinical trials before, they’re research naive, they’ve always wanted to, but they didn’t want to hire a massive staff of clinical research coordinators, they wouldn’t want to deal with all the paperwork, with the IRBs, and all this other stuff. And we built a pretty big following in the early days, and we had the data to show for it. We ran many successful trials with this model, and then your bigger incumbents always want to see the proof in the pudding, whether that is a big pharmaceutical company, whether that is the Mayo Clinic or another prestigious academic center, they want to see that this has been successfully done before and then they’re willing to follow suit. And what we did is we built that body of evidence in the early days, and, you know, data speaks for itself. These people are very science-driven, data-driven people like myself, and we were able to build that momentum from sort of the ground up in a very grassroots manner.
Andreea Borcea:
That body of evidence, I think, is that key, right? In both angles, you’re establishing trust, right? Is, are you legit? How do I know? But it’s so interesting that for individual patients, it’s, can I Google you? For this one, it’s like, show me the numbers. That’s hilarious. Have you found any sort of other differences between navigating across the spectrum of customers? Like how do you balance that internally with your own marketing organization so you don’t get lost and drop the ball?
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, definitely. There’s a lot of market segmentation that takes place, so we need to think about what is important to the different market segments that we may placate to, right? So I mentioned in our early days a big part of our effort was really just these startups that they didn’t have a lot of experience with clinical trials and their focus was really on just like how do we deliver in an efficient and fast way. So they cared about things like just what the end results really were that the study, the way that we ran it with the technology, and the resources that we had could deliver that end result. Now, shift to where we’re at now that we’re serving a lot more, I would say like enterprise-wide incumbents and whatnot, they’re focused on very different things. So maybe you have one customer that they want a complete, like overhaul of their systems the way that they collect data in a much more, I would say like searchable variable manner. They maybe not, don’t care as much about reducing cost, right? Like they want to deliver these sort of patient and also sponsor-centric experiences in such a way that they’re going to use the technology so they can very easily use that data later on. So again, just like very different needs amongst these different market segments, you know, we’ve served everyone from the digital therapeutic space where you have these like really app-based, technology-based medicines and they’re much more willing to innovate. So you, when you speak to them, you don’t need to talk necessarily too much about, well, you don’t want to use a paper-based system, you want to use like an electronic-based system, that’s a foregone conclusion for them. But when you’re talking to some of the other customer segments, it’s more about a matter of those basic fundamental, sort of underlying value propositions that we take for granted. That’s where their needs are really focused and where we need that sort of like body of evidence that you’d mentioned before to convince them that this is the way to go.
Andreea Borcea:
So how are, how did you go about discovering those underlying principles? Were you using like focus groups or ongoing research? Like, how do you actually learn that?
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, yeah, it’s a great question. I’d say I had the fortunate opportunity of being on the sales team in the early days. You know, myself and one other individual really made up all of the early sales of Curebase and it’s kind of trial by fire. We had interacted with a variety of different market segments, and at that point, we saw what resonated with what particular customer sets, and we learned a lot of hard lessons along the way, but it made us better for it. When you’re very, very early on and you’re just starting and getting your first sales, you can’t expect that every big top ten pharmaceutical company is going to immediately leap at your doorstep and say that they want this. But what you’re doing is you’re basically collecting the data to say, Where are those objections and how can I respond to those objections in the future? And it goes back to the theme of data. In a lot of cases, their objections are, well, we need evidence to show how this works and this works, and what we do is we work with our operations and our product team to basically build in how do we collect that evidence and then now build that into the marketing materials for the future so that we can appropriately address all those objections in those market segments.
Andreea Borcea:
That seems so important, but I feel like so many people miss that, it’s like talking to your customers, being on the sales for being part of customer support, like that’s where you actually hear the reality of the situation. As you’ve been building out your marketing efforts, what kind of KPIs are you using for success, especially when you have kind of a longer sales cycle like I’m assuming you do?
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, definitely, I’d say, you know, I’m a very data-driven person. It’s been a pretty big undertaking within the company here, and I think we’re in a really good position where we’re using the data to drive, you know, where we should focus our efforts to get the most ROI on, on what we’re doing. So when I think about KPIs, I think about like your basics of, you know, your MQLs, your SELs, your SQLs, etc. So thinking about what is the acquisition cost associated with each of those, you know how between all my channels that I’m utilizing, am I getting the right bang for my buck when it comes to MQL acquisition or sales meetings book through SELs and whatnot, and then we also need to think about the conversion rate. So not every SEL is going to be like super high quality and we can distill trends based on what market segment are they a part of, like what channels did they come through? And by distilling those trends and sort of nailing down the conversion rates between them, those KPIs really help us inform how we tweak our marketing strategy. You know, what levers and knobs we need to turn to basically dump the appropriate resources into where I am, have the highest likelihood of not only getting MQLs and SELs but also converting them to opportunities in book business for us.
Andreea Borcea:
So really it’s a lot about segmenting the right message for the right customer and, and optimizing each of those channels for each of those customers. So when you started out, did you just focus on one target customer, really nail that in, and then add to that? Or were you already segmenting at the beginning based on who you wanted to target?
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, I’d say it was definitely an evolution like we knew in the very early days before we really had a marketing presence, you know what our cash cows were, where our like high-growth areas were. I’ve mentioned this a few times, but basically the startup space, a lot of digital therapeutics, diagnostics, we really built a book of business in that area. And then what we did is we took those insights from the different market segments that we maybe did not have as much traction within the very early days and started using that data to build out like, these are the customer personas, these are their user needs, really identify a strategy for how to address that, and then we finally started to, I’d say, build a much more diverse portfolio of customers based on that. But it was really a matter of, I’d say, early data collection. We knew based on the sales data and the sales interactions where we were having the most success and then ultimately taking the data from the objections, as I mentioned before, and using that to build a much more diversified market segmentation strategy on moving forward.
Andreea Borcea:
Nice, yeah, it does seem like you can start with the, if you’re in the med-tech space and innovation space, you can probably start with other innovators because they’re probably the most open to it, and then prove yourself and grow up as it is. With healthcare the way it is today, and wellness, and clinical studies, and process, and FDA, are you seeing a lot more startups in this space that are looking to use your platform, for example, as a way to get an edge over the larger, more established entities?
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, definitely, I mean, the space continues to grow to this day. Looking back, one of the fortunate decisions that I think we made was to really invest heavily in this startup space with medicines that were nontraditional, that were really making waves, especially with a series of FDA approvals, especially in the digital therapeutic space. So essentially what we look to do was take advantage of the synergies associated with those types of treatments and the type of delivery that we were offering as part of running clinical trials. So, you know, harmonizing the fact that they’re two technology-based entities and being able to extract data, deliver the study in a very efficient manner. That was important, especially since they are startups, they need, they’re under a lot more pressure to deliver very quickly and in a much more efficient manner. So essentially what we can do is we can look at those trends and we can say, hey, these are important ways for us to double down and say, you know, this is what has been working. We are going to continue to build that and build that as we sort of just think about how the marketing strategy of the company evolves moving forward.
Andreea Borcea:
Nice, yeah, if you were going to start again today from day one, is there anything you learned that you would do differently?
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, I would say it’s a matter of just like, the data-driven thing is really a sticking point for me, and when we make decisions and sort of like a haphazard manner, like, for example, you know, we really want to dive into a particular market segment that we just frankly don’t know a lot about, and we’re just taking shots in the dark, it’s, it does, it’s not just necessarily like a monetary resource thing, but it’s a human capital resource thing. You know, resources are hard to come by in the startup high-growth environment and you need to be very considerate of where you allocate, especially your human capital. So I would say before you make any sort of major strategic decisions, you really want to think about how, you know, what is my probability of success in doing this? What data do I have that says that it might work well? So I think you mentioned some techniques earlier around like maybe focus grouping, even just simple surveying and whatnot, just to get some insights and distill thoughts on how a specific brand might resonate with a particular market segment. That could help us sort of at least de-risk in some ways where we would allocate those resources in that capital or at least come up with a decision beforehand of how do we position the product within those segments that have the highest probability of success.
Andreea Borcea:
Nice, yeah, I think not getting too excited is a hard part for a lot of startups.
Shawn Malloy:
That’s a good way to put it, yes.
Andreea Borcea:
They get excited and they’re like, Let’s just do everything all at once, and you’re like, nope, that’s just not going to end well for anybody. As you’re kind of exploring marketing and growing in it, with healthcare marketing in particular, do you see anything changing in the next 10, 15, 20 years with how you market to healthcare, who you target, how you communicate more effectively?
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, definitely, a big trend that I talk about with my team that I think we’re seeing unfold now is really just like how the consumers, be it they’re businesses or patients, are much more, I would say, taking accountability and responsibility for their own healthcare and the decisions around it. You know, there is something to be said about the informed consumer these days and that they are really doing a lot of research before they come to you before they are convinced to move forward with buying or participating in one of your studies. There’s just a wealth of information that is available in the Internet age, and it’s incumbent upon companies like us to make sure that that information, that those people need to make those buying decisions is available to them, and convincing enough that they are willing to take these chances even though, I mentioned in the beginning of the segment, there’s a lot of hesitation and whatnot with being fully virtual and online, but at the same time, if you think about just buying habits with everyday products and how they’ve changed recently, whether it’s a car, whether it’s a baby stroller or something like that, there is so much research that happens on behalf of the consumer before that buying decision is made. And it’s not like the way that it used to be where, you know, you might walk into a conference and you’ve never heard of a company before and they convince you right on the spot to buy their product or do business with them at some trade show. It’s really a matter of taking that insight from the consumer that we need to just accept moving forward, that the consumer is going to take much more accountability and responsibility in the decisions that they make from a buying perspective, and we need to feed into that. We need to provide the right information out there that they can use to then make informed decisions.
Andreea Borcea:
I’m actually super curious then if anyone ends up finding you by accident, then because they’re being an informed consumer and they’re out there Googling and they’re like, I wonder if there’s a clinical trial for me and they end up finding you. Has that happened at all?
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, yeah, I’d say on both the B2B side as well as B2C side, you know, there is a paid element to a lot of these things. So if you do pay-per-click search, paid search advertising, you look at the keywords of, if I’m the consumer and this is an intent-based channel, you know, I’m Googling for solutions. I’m looking for, you know, a study for my breast cancer, my stage two breast cancer. I’m looking for a study for some disease that I might have, and I’m looking for solutions, you know, we want to make sure that the information available for those solutions will show up for them. There is a difference, though, between like the paid and the organic side of things. Like organically speaking, it is very difficult to, unless you’re like a super incumbent and you have lots of material out there, that you’re the premier resource for whatever it is that you’re selling, that you’re going to get a ton of natural traffic. So we kind of do supplement with the paid traffic as well, but making sure that you’re hitting on all those right keywords and that intent with those searches so that if a patient wants a particular type of study, if they are looking for that study, you better show up in some way, shape or form whether that is paid or organic.
Andreea Borcea:
Yeah, it really feels like a big part of the marketing that you have to do in this space is, yes, outreach and getting, and introducing yourself to other people, but also making it easy for someone to find you if they’re looking for you, which I don’t know that a lot of companies in the medical space were doing for a long time. I think it was, it’s always been much like healthcare has been very cute, the marketing for healthcare has also been very cute.
Shawn Malloy:
Exactly, yeah, I mean, I experienced that. In the very beginning, when I first joined this industry, I was just like, you know, it’s very difficult to actually find the solutions that you’re looking for. And then you, this sort of happenstance, run into it, it’s like, why can’t, why have I never heard about this before? Like, that’s the type of sentiment that I want to eventually see go away, especially like any good marketer in this space, that should be their goal is, somebody that has actively been going out there looking for a solution that I provide, I want them to find it, as opposed to just like by happenstance, encountering it and asking themselves, gee, why wasn’t I able to find this before?
Andreea Borcea:
I think that’s a really poignant statement and I would totally agree. Well, cool, tell us a little bit, I guess, as a final question, where is Curebase going? Where are you going next?
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, so what I would say is in terms of just kind of the nature of the discussion and the evolution that I mentioned, where we came from, where we want to go, Curebase constitutes a couple of big buckets of what we do, right? So I mentioned the software is like very foundational too. Our CEO is a computer scientist from Harvard, like this is the state-of-the-art stuff that need, in my opinion, clinical trials need to run on. In addition to that, though, what we’ve also done is sort of transform the way that sites operate in a lot of ways. I mentioned the fact that there are these mom-and-pop physicians that are now for the very first time able to do clinical research because we’re providing those clinical resources, we have our own staff of clinical research coordinators, we do a lot of the site coordination work providing virtual physicians that can see patients through telemedicine and supplement the efforts of the sites, and then lastly, also the ability to just run the studies themselves. There’s a lot of data management and trial management that takes place and Curebase has that as one of those pillars of, you know, its offering, that basically, we can run the study end to end in, sort of like your traditional CRO manner, but for these companies that want it done in a very technology forward and in a very efficient manner. So the future at Curebase is really diversifying those efforts, and we relied a lot in the beginning on the software, and what we quickly found in the market need is that you know, the software can only take you as far as the people that are driving the software. And so if we’re able to also disrupt the way that the site-based model is being served to patients, in addition to the way that the sponsors are interacting with the people that are running their studies, there are just so many areas that we can really improve upon in this industry. And so finding the right niches and market segments that have the most critical need for better software, the most critical need for more efficient studies to be run, is part of that important mapping exercise, I would say, for us to sort of reach the next level that we want, because not every market segment is going to want every specific offering, but what we quickly found through this journey is that there is a strong need for all three of those sort of categories, and it just depends on where these particular customer personas play in the market.
Andreea Borcea:
And then allowing them to almost kind of custom build their solution based on what they need at the time.
Shawn Malloy:
Exactly, flexibility is a really important thing. I remember maybe like a year or two ago, that was one of the mantras that we really built into our marketing strategy is, you know, it’s not, like we have an out-of-the-box solution, but you want to be able to say every protocol is different and we need the ability to sort of mix and match these offerings to serve the end needs of the customers. Your customer isn’t going to need every single thing that you sell. Your customer may only want one thing, they may only want two things. So you just need the ability to really provide that flexibility for them to take up the solutions. For those of you that don’t know, in marketing vernacular SQL is a sales-qualified lead, MQL is a marketing-qualified lead, and an SEL is a sales engage lead. So essentially think of MQL as your first sort of interactions with marketing material. SEL is when somebody decides, hey, I’m going to take the next step and I’m going to book a meeting with my sales team, and then SELs qualified lead is when that salesperson has had that conversation, they say, yep, this person is someone that could definitely be a buyer and a potential opportunity in the future.
Andreea Borcea:
Nice, well, if anyone is interested in learning more, they can go to Curebase.com, and thank you so much, Shawn, for being here, this was an awesome conversation.
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, a pleasure chatting with you.
Andreea Borcea:
Awesome, I love it. We totally nerded out. This is my thing, so anyway.
Shawn Malloy:
It’s my thing too, I wouldn’t be here otherwise, you know?
Andreea Borcea:
Kirby sounds really cool too. I’m excited. I, I feel like some people were trying to solve clinical trial issues by creating more like, digital personas, but I think your way is actually better because it’s real people just more accessible, which is super.
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you’ve got to kind of fit within the constructs of how things operate currently and think about how to solve like those challenges. We always say like, you can’t make everything virtual. Actually, like most of the studies that we run, there is like a complex therapeutic element that a specialist like either needs to administer it or something like that. So you need to think about how do we make it easier for all the people that are currently involved in that system and tie it all together.
Andreea Borcea:
It’s a great mission, that’s so cool. Well, awesome, thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Shawn Malloy:
Neat, I love it. Pleasure meeting you, Andreea.
Andreea Borcea:
Nice meeting you too, have a good day.
Shawn Malloy:
Take care, bye.
Andreea Borcea:
Thanks again for listening to Marketing Mondays. If you have any marketing questions at all, feel free to reach out to me directly at DiaCreative.com. That’s D I A Creative.com
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