MarketingMondays_David McKie: 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 welcome back to another episode of Marketing Mondays. I’m your host, Andreea Borcea, CMO at Dia Creative, a marketing agency. I am excited to bring David McKie here with us and we’re going to talk about a whole ‘nother side of marketing today. He is the VP of Life Sciences Marketing at Dassault Systèmes. David, tell us a little bit more about yourself.
David McKie:
Well, thank you, I’m very glad to be here on the podcast today. So yes, I am the VP of Life Sciences Marketing. I joined Medidata Solutions, which is a software company focused on clinical trial technology in 2016, and initially responsible for marketing strategy and technology, and operations, and over time, I slowly moved into the demand marketing side of things. I think it was in 2018, I officially moved into that role and in 2019 Dassault Systèmes announced their intention to acquire Medidata Solutions. So now we are part of a larger company and it’s been an interesting journey, this whole acquisition, it’s almost been like a reverse acquisition. Rather than taking Medidata Solutions and folding it into the, just kind of collapsing it into the Dassault Systèmes structure, they’ve actually asked us to take the lead, marketing the rest of their portfolio into life sciences companies.
Andreea Borcea:
Interesting.
David McKie:
So we’re pulling their solutions into our processes and infrastructure and we’ve had to build out capabilities to market beyond just the clinical trial folks that these life sciences companies. We now look at the R&D side as well as the manufacturing and to a lesser extent the commercial side of the business as well.
Andreea Borcea:
So have you had to kind of scale-out the marketing to all these different audiences? Are you finding any particular challenges in how you’ve been traditionally doing things that you’ve had to adjust?
David McKie:
I would say yeah, a couple of things come to mind. First off, I mean, we have, due to GDPR, there were a lot of challenges with getting access to the contact database for these audiences from the Dassault Systèmes side of the house. So we’ve had to build up our capabilities basically from scratch. And it’s amazing trying to go from 0 to 60 in three months by buying contact data off the shelf. It’s not an effective approach for scaling, and it’s taken us some time to really ramp up and grow the business from that perspective. And at the same time, I would say with the market, where it’s been going at with the COVID lockdown, initially, people were really hungry to jump on virtual events and webinars and we got a lot of traction with some of the things, the marketing activities we were doing, but it has gotten harder and harder to work through webinars and to get people on to commit to them, and so trying to build your audience through those types of activities hasn’t been very fruitful. I will say, though, that since we’ve gotten back to in-person events last year, there has been such an appetite for in-person events and we’re seeing such a great reception, great engagement from customers. You know, it’ll be interesting to see how long that lasts before people start to get fatigued from all the back-to-in-person events activities happening, but for now, it’s working out great.
Andreea Borcea:
I believe that. I mean, I think when we’re all stuck at home, we’re like, What should I do today? I might as well go to a webinar because, why not? We … get out.
David McKie:
Yeah, and you have it, my perspective has been that when you do these types of virtual, and some of the virtual events we’ve done have been kind of maybe a little bit long in the tooth, right? I think the attention span for people that are in their homes is pretty low. People have multiple monitors now, they’re multitasking, so they’re just not as engaged. But when you’re at a physical event, it’s very hard to do that same kind of multitasking, and you are focused on what’s happening in front.
Andreea Borcea:
Right, definitely. So you’re primarily targeting, you said pharmaceutical medical device, clinical.
David McKie:
I tried, research organizations are the other big area. They’re actually our largest customers actually.
Andreea Borcea:
Interesting, so when you’ve been looking at these different target markets, where do you even start, right? Like how do you identify? Because these are organizations, but you still need to attract a human being within that organization. So how do you even identify who is the appropriate human being to try to attract and then mapping out that user journey so that maybe they’re your first contact, but they’re not your decision-maker? Like how did you map that all out?
David McKie:
Well, I think we’re still in the process of mapping out the journey. What’s a little bit different about our industry is that in some way, shape or form, we are engaged with every potential customer or at least the top end of the scale. Typically, we talk about the large 25 pharma companies, the largest 25 in the world. Some of them are not traditionally, I mean, we always say anywhere from 20 to 22 or 23 are very strong customers of ours at any given time, few of them are not. Pfizer’s one that has tended to be with the competitor who I shall not name, but even in those situations, we do have engagement in different parts of the business. So even though they’re not a large customer, there’s some level of engagement. So this, the idea of how do you figure out who to engage with? To a certain extent, we’re already engaged and know some of these people already, and then it becomes more of a question of how do we remain top of mind and how do we understand exactly what they’re interested in and focused on at any given moment. Pfizer is a great example, which, maybe I shouldn’t be using customer names, but with Pfizer, one of the things we’ve been doing is leveraging our, both our first-party intent data, as well as some third-party intent data, and we find certain areas of interest that are spiking. So I would say our bigger challenge is not who to talk to but what to talk to them about. We have a pretty broad portfolio of products and so the third-party and first-party intent data kind of lets us know when the time is ripe for certain type of discussion. We’ll play that kind of gives you a little bit of…
Andreea Borcea:
Yeah, it does. I mean, when you’re talking about this first-party and third-party data, is the strategy more to enter these conversations with these target markets almost with like a carrot or like a, let us show you what we can do for you, let me give you an example of how we can impact your business in a positive way?
David McKie:
I think it depends on different solutions that we’re looking at. We’re trying to pivot actually towards a little bit more of a buyer’s journey conversation. So we have, we are one of those companies that sometimes has a challenge of coming in with the product and pitching the idea of how this product can help. And we’re having discussions to step back a little bit and instead to talk about the challenges that our customers face, first, and engage with them on that level before we start to talk about how we can help with our specific solutions or technology.
Andreea Borcea:
Gotcha, so still along the similar lines of let us help you make your life easier. And by the way, here’s all these other things that we have that can make your life easier.
David McKie:
Yeah, we have, we’re running, we’re doing an event series, a dinner series with our AI technologies. And one of the things that we’ve talked about is in order to engage with senior executives, rather than going right in and pitching our products, we want to have an open dialogue and an open conversation around how data and data science is being used to help move forward the clinical development pipeline that these life sciences companies have. What are the challenges, the successes, and where people are struggling or where they’re getting traction? And we can add our voice to that. It has the benefit of doing a couple of things. One, it elevates the conversation above the tactical, here’s how this solution helps. Two, we can hear from our customers more open-ended about what they’re struggling with rather than narrowing the conversation down. And three, then it gives us, then, we do get that opening to have a conversation about how we can help. But, you know, the big, one of the biggest challenges that we always have in demand generation is narrowing the scope of the conversation too soon, and you really don’t want to do that. And when you pitch things in terms of a product, as opposed to kind of coming at it at a higher level or talking to your customers, that’s where you run the risk of closing down areas of discussion that could actually be more fruitful than the particular product you’re trying to talk about.
Andreea Borcea:
Absolutely, it sounds, I mean, I’m hearing a lot of in-person, I think it is a key part of marketing in the professional space at this point because it gives you that opening in a way that they’re not distracted by the multitasking, right? But it also sounds like messaging is a big part of it, and starting at that broad and going narrow, have you found that you can test out different messaging through these conversations to really figure out what works? Or is every conversation completely unique and you have to really trust in the salesperson?
David McKie:
Most of them are pretty unique. It actually, in this space, which is very enterprise-focused, and maybe this is a little bit of the difference between the patient type of marketing versus the enterprise type marketing. It, you look at the sales forecast on a quarterly basis and you look at where we hit our numbers, and the parade rule still is the law of the land, 80% of your revenue comes from the top 20% of your customers. And what ends up happening is each of those customers you treat as a bespoke selling opportunity, and you do have to narrow down that messaging quite a bit. And that’s one of the struggles that we’ve had since I joined as a, we’re a little bit more of a decentralized marketing organization now than when I joined. And I know the chief marketing officer that we had at the time, and I think this is natural for anybody who wants to develop their career, you want to control and manage things more broadly and build out a message that resonates across the market. And what we’ve found is that, in fact, you have to customize that message based on the different product areas, the different segments, the different types of companies, the size of company. And so our demand organization, demand marketing organization has really started to evolve in a way that we partner up with different segments, the way the sales team is organized so that we can help craft and communicate a message that is more relevant for that particular segment. And that’s again, where some of the account-based marketing work starts to come in, where individual customers are going to have a very specific situation or dynamic, and the way you go into that customer starts becoming much more strategic. You can’t think that one-size-fits-all messaging into that account.
Andreea Borcea:
That makes a lot of sense, especially since, I mean, I want to say it was almost, when I was asking the question, I was like, for every enterprise, it’s like, how can we save you money? How can we make you more profitable? But it actually, it ends up being a lot more complicated than that because depending on who you’re talking to in the organization, yes, the bottom line is the bottom line, but their particular contribution to the bottom line is really where they want your solution, right?
David McKie:
Well, and I’ll give you a very specific example, right, without naming the customer. We’ve had one customer for a very long time, and over the years we’ve done a lot of customizations of our software for them. And if you know anything about software development, customizations don’t make for the best customer experience, right? Because it’s harder to maintain, you get more bugs, more issues. And because of some of the challenges with maintaining the custom path of the software, there’s a central IT team that wants us to do everything through them. They’re our main point of contact, but some of our newer solutions and offerings are really could be beneficial for groups outside that main IT group, some of the clinical development groups, or the clinical operations groups. And so we partnered up with the account rep on that particular account and it became a question of how do we bring that message more broadly, if the sales rep is being told, you have to do everything through IT, but he wants to get a more specific message about how a solution around end-of-study media can help with the managing regulatory documents after the finish of a clinical trial. And so because there’s a process benefit that could be realized and the benefit for that team is much stronger than maybe the downside to this IT team that just wants to control and say we’re going to use any more engagement with us as sort of a club to get you guys to fix all these issues over here. And so it does become very strategic on an account-by-account basis. Like, what is the message? Who do we need to go after? How do the different groups have competing needs and priorities, and how do you balance them off without upsetting someone to the extent that they shut the door and they close off any further avenues of discussion? There’s a lot that goes on, goes, a lot that goes into it.
Andreea Borcea:
So along those same lines, what typical sales cycle, or is there a typical sales cycle that if another company is also trying to hit that same target market that you’ve seen historically, like how long does that conversation take?
David McKie:
That’s the age-old question. Yeah, I mean, there’s the, how long does it really take? And then there’s the, when does it show up in your CRM system just before it closes, right? And I would say I have seen conversations that take, that can take multiple years from the point of, we are connecting them with the sales team. There’s a little bit of, let’s stay connected, let’s have a conversation, time’s not right, and then it can take two or three years for it to blossom into, all right, we actually were able to enter a sales cycle and then win the business, all the way to the other side of it where it’s, literally could be weeks or even just one or two months. And those are probably less frequent, they tend to be more of a crisis situation where we need to get this up and running quickly. A great example of that with some of the COVID vaccine work we did in 2020, right? And at the risk of getting too deep into the life sciences piece of it. Operation Warp Speed was the government funding billions of dollars to pre-purchase and prepay for the vaccine trials and production of the vaccine individual vials. So in that case, the clinical trial process was compressed from typically taking up to ten years, they did it in less than a year. And they just wanted, who can we do this with that’s reliable? Cost is no object. So we ended up winning a lot of business there in a very compressed time scale. That’s not the norm.
Andreea Borcea:
Right, aside from that not-normal experience, I would also think it has to do with maybe size of the customer you’re looking for. Are you finding that smaller ones do move faster or are they more hesitant because it’s a bigger expenditure for them?
David McKie:
No, they definitely do move faster. In addition to moving faster, one of the things that we’ve noticed is that with some of our AI applications, the smaller companies seem to be a little more willing to take on the risk of a new approach.
Andreea Borcea:
Oh, interesting.
David McKie:
And.
Andreea Borcea:
Or maybe as like a way to kind of try to get ahead from the competition?
David McKie:
Yeah, and well, yes, to get ahead. Sometimes it’s not so much the competition as much as it is, We need to move this forward and we need some data and data science applications in order to even be successful. And a lot of companies, the larger companies where there are layers upon layers, the people making decisions on the clinical trials are probably much less likely to take a risk than at a smaller company where the people making decisions are very connected with the leadership and they may only have 1 to 3 different drugs under development, so everybody knows what’s going on and it’s bought in, and so there’s a little bit less, I guess, individual risk-taking in those kinds of decisions.
Andreea Borcea:
That makes a lot of sense with where the economy is heading and corporations reassessing their budgets. Are you finding any challenges as you’re looking at the next 1 to 5 years ahead, or is there more opportunity because software like yours is a more cost-effective, impactful solution than maybe older traditional methods?
David McKie:
That’s a great point. We definitely saw some of that during COVID where some of our sales picked up because we could actually help with, in fact, in that case, it was larger trials that had to run quicker and so customers had to get over their hesitance about using technology and automating some of these processes in order to actually meet the timelines that COVID demanded. I would say that still a bulk of our sales and revenue is still tied to individual clinical trial starts. And I think the macro environment that we’re starting to see is that some companies are starting to pull back a little bit on clinical trial starts. I don’t think it’s going to be huge because the life sciences industry is relatively recession-proof. People need medicine and they’re going to continue to develop new medicines and it’s they’re going to continue to roll it out, but we do see some tightening of the belt.
Andreea Borcea:
So do you think that because of COVID and because of that rush that, just like the world is now open up to remote working more, do you think there’s more of an openness to innovate in how we run clinical trials and innovate in how medical processes might not need to take quite as long as they traditionally have? Or do you kind of feel like there’s this push to go back to the way the world was before?
David McKie:
I think it’s an interesting tension between the two. There are certain companies that want to stake their reputation on a new dynamic around drug development, Moderna being one of them. I think that there are so many players that are involved in actually running clinical trials and doing clinical development. We needed a shock to the system like COVID to force everybody to stop looking at their individual slice and say, hey, we need to do this. We need to do things remote. We need to do things digitally. We need to pick up the pace. And now that we’ve done it, I think there is going to continue to be more of a trend in that direction. There’s actually an industry consortium that we were invited to join last year, it was called #NoGoingBack. You know, yeah, it was this whole idea of like, we cannot backslide the gains that we’ve made in terms of advancing clinical research because, you know, even as recent as 8 to 10 years ago, a lot of clinical trials were still being conducted with data being captured on paper, and that’s you know.
Andreea Borcea:
That’s my modeling in a lot of ways.
David McKie:
And to get people to adopt more technology, it takes a big push. And I will say one of the things that we hear with clinical trials is, a clinical trial is basically a pharmaceutical company, oftentimes outsourcing to a contract research organization who then, recruits doctors and physicians’ offices they call sites who, in turn, recruit patients. So and then you’ve got regulators overseeing all of this, say, here’s what’s acceptable, what’s not, and if you don’t do it right, we’re going to reject your entire drug application. So everybody’s really reluctant to tinker with it once it starts working, but there’s other issues that come up. So a clinical trial site, they worry that if we start doing more of the trial remotely, that they’ll be cut out of the process and they will no longer own that patient relationship, and they’re very reluctant to cede that authority. And having gone through COVID and pushing this kind of approach, I think we’re slowly starting to get physicians to realize that doesn’t actually remove them from the process, it just helps complement the work that they’re already doing. And it’s these kinds of things that you have to make people aware of and continue to, it’s change management 101 on a grand scale.
Andreea Borcea:
But medical and pharmaceutical in particular has historically, I mean, in my experience anyway, has always been kind of hesitant to move, just like you said like, if it’s working, don’t touch it, because we, it’s working and it’s too complex and there’s too many actors in this entire ecosystem, whatever the ecosystem is across medical. Are you finding that people are more open to innovation? Do you think there’s any way that we push that along faster or is it just, it’s got to take its time while new entities join that are more into innovation than kind of the older ones that are like, I’ve been doing this way for 100 years, leave me alone.
David McKie:
I do think, how do we move it forward quicker? I mean, we tackle it from a number of different angles. One, we’re continually engaged with regulators, so the FDA, the EMA, the MHRA, to work with them on the different applications that we might have for clinical trials to get their buy-in. So then they will issue guidance to the larger community, life sciences community about what is acceptable use. That’s one of the hurdles that you have that people want the regulators to say this is okay. They do not want to go down the path of trying something, and then the regulators coming back and saying, this isn’t going to work.
Andreea Borcea:
Right.
David McKie:
That’s one piece of it. The other piece of it is the newer players, players like Moderna come in and want to do things in a different way and they will shake up the industry to a certain extent. And a lot of it is just finding those players, the people that are willing to take a risk and to do something different, and then holding them up as a success model that others can adopt. And I think we’ve done this very effectively with synthetic control arms, which is, gosh, I’m going to get the number wrong. I think over the course of our life span for Medidata, we’ve done 28,000 clinical trials in our platform.
Andreea Borcea:
Nice.
David McKie:
And you can imagine how much data we’ve collected over that time. And one of the benefits of having the foresight back when they started the company, in some cases they acquired the data rights to those clinical trials and we are taking that data. Think of a world where, in clinical trials, the biggest one of the biggest challenges people have is recruiting patients, finding patients qualified for your trial amidst the sea of competing trials. And so the biggest reason a clinical trial fails or is late is because you either can’t recruit enough patients or it takes longer than you expected. And imagine if you took a clinical trial and said, well, why am I recruiting patients for what we consider the control arm, if I have a control arm from a previous trial?
Andreea Borcea:
Right.
David McKie:
And it’s more complicated than just, hey, I’ll just use this control arm. But in principle, that’s kind of what we’re doing. And essentially what you’re doing is cutting in half the number of patients you need to recruit. And we did this, I mean, a lot of people didn’t want to do this because of the concern that the regulators would say, no, that we’re not going to accept this. We did some proof of concept with the Friends of Cancer Research showing about how we could use synthetic control arms to the FDA. They signed off on it on principle, even though there wasn’t an active trial involved. Since then, we’ve worked with companies such as, the one that comes to mind is Medicina, who works in glioblastoma, which is a drug that has no effective treatment. And in fact, the health authorities would suggest that if you have glioblastoma search out experimental treatment. So you can imagine if you want to run a clinical trial in glioblastoma, what you have to do is basically give half of them a control arm, the experimental treatment, and the other half, since there is no treatment, you’re basically giving them nothing.
Andreea Borcea:
Right.
David McKie:
And think about the ethics of that, right? Never mind the fact that trying to find the patients and, so now we use a control arm from previous clinical trials. You’ve just cut in half the number of patients you need to enroll, you can reach your enrollment targets that much more quickly, and then there’s also an ethical component that everybody’s getting the experimental treatment. And we’ve taken that and we’ve shown, definitely marketed the success of working with the regulators because that’s the big sticking point. That we did this work with Medicina, the regulators approved it, we’ve had success in this therapeutic area, and we’re now daisy-chaining from one therapeutic area to another, and we’re starting to look at things like non-small cell lung cancer. And then there’s also work we’re taking from our clinical trial data to help with CAR-T therapies.
Andreea Borcea:
Incredible. So when you’re actually developing out your marketing, there’s a lot of different touchpoints because, in essence, you’re marketing to the regulators to get in the buy-in, and then you also have to figure out the marketing that your customers are going to need to use. Do you help them figure out how to message to get their patients for these clinical trials as well?
David McKie:
No, we don’t typically go down that path. We very much focus on the technology that we have and the benefit that we can provide in terms of the process efficiency. We had, one of our co-founders, Glen De Vries, he actually went up to space with William Shatner.
Andreea Borcea:
Funny.
David McKie:
He used to talk about the question of, are we going to make clinical trials run better, or are we going to make better clinical trials, right?
Andreea Borcea:
That’s a much better question.
David McKie:
And we do both, actually. But the way to think about it is are we improving the operational effectiveness of the way you run clinical trials today, or are we thinking of a new paradigm for how you can run clinical trials completely differently?
Andreea Borcea:
Right.
David McKie:
And we do both.
Andreea Borcea:
I love that. So basically thinking through what’s the purpose of a clinical trial and going back to the innovation stage of, we know the purpose, how do we get there? And that, does that become part of your marketing as well? Is that we are focused on better clinical trials, not just running existing clinical trials better.
David McKie:
We come at it from a couple of different levels, right? So when we do our marketing, we will market at the brand level and we’ve created this brand campaign, Solve the Impossible, right? And that talks about the aspirational aspect and it’s very, it evokes emotions, that we’re helping to do things that were not possible before, right? So think about running a clinical trial in a year versus ten. How do you make that possible? That’s an example where at the high level, at the brand, what do we want to be known for? But then as you go down deeper, you start thinking about clinical, let’s say clinical operations as a function or a persona, and what are all the things that you as a clinical operations professional need to be focused on, right? So we talk about next-generation clinical data management, and then you have to take it down a level deeper and you start talking about individual products and what the products themselves do. So it’s definitely like a multi-tiered marketing approach where you have brand, you have campaigns, and then you have products down at the bottom. So you’ve got to balance all different layers.
Andreea Borcea:
That’s, I love that it comes back to the core fundamentals of marketing, regardless of what industry you’re in. It’s like these tiered systems. Well, David, are there any last thoughts that you’d like to share to recommend if anyone wants to target pharmaceuticals, life sciences companies in this B2B space, in the medical and life sciences?
David McKie:
Yeah, I think the thing I would emphasize is patience and persistence. You know, a lot of the messages that we’re putting in the market we’ve been doing for a number of years, and actually, we’re taking a lot of learnings from other industries. I would say life sciences is one of those industries that just takes a little bit longer to adopt than you might see and say retail, even financial services, and so you just have to be patient and persistent and over time you start to see those gains being made and the messages start to come through.
Andreea Borcea:
Very nice. Well, how can anyone learn more about you and the company and just kind of get to know?
David McKie:
Yeah, I think the best place to start would be our website. We still maintain our www.medidata.com website, and you can learn more about how we support clinical research and clinical development. And if you want to learn a little bit more about me and the path that I’ve taken, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I think it is www.LinkedIn.com/DavidMcKie.
Andreea Borcea:
Perfect, well, thank you so much for joining us once again. I am your host of Marketing Mondays, Andreea Borcea, CMO at Dia Creative, and please join us again for some great conversations on marketing in the health and wellness space.
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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