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Saul Marquez:
Hey everybody, and welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket. I want to welcome you to another episode. I am privileged to have Shawn Malloy with us. Shawn is an executive marketing and sales that’s been playing a role in those verticals within biotech, pharma, and med device. He has done the gamut from running clinical trials to helping companies get in front of their ideal buyers. I’m privileged to have him here today to talk about the two main things that every healthcare marketing organization needs to be thinking about. And so, Shawn, I want to welcome you to the podcast today. Thanks for joining.
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, pleasure. Thanks for having me, Saul.
Saul Marquez:
It’s my pleasure. It’s my pleasure. So, look, before we get into the main topic of what people could take out of marketing for their organizations and businesses, tell us a little bit about you and your background.
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, definitely. So, a bit of an interesting sort of twist and turns throughout my career, but I started, as you had mentioned, in engineering, grew up through middle school, high school as that math science kid, and always knew that I wanted to do something in that field, didn’t know exactly where to apply it. I remember at one point, I thought it was going to be an astronomer. One of my biggest achievements in high school was I wound up the international science fair, and I created some formula for measuring the distance to the moon, a neat little fun fact. But I started to think once I got accepted into college, I didn’t have a major selected, and I really wanted to think about how do I apply this aptitude towards something that can actually advance, I’d say, human betterment and whatnot. And so I started focusing on bioengineering and drug development, and that’s where I did a lot of my early lab work, my internships with pharmaceutical companies, and that sort of thing, and where I started my first job focused on protein engineering, medical device delivery, drug delivery systems, all that sort of thing. And one thing that I noticed as I was doing that technical work is that matching really the needs of patients to the actual engineering work that was being done, there was like a pretty significant critical gap, I would say, and the marketers were the people that were bridging that gap, interestingly enough. So a lot of these marketers would come to us, and they’d say, We’re speaking to patients, we’re speaking to physicians. What you guys are developing, there’s a mismatch with what they are telling us on the ground. And I always thought that was very interesting. I have a very fond memory of being involved in what’s called a contextual inquiry research study with some of my marketing team at one of the pharmaceutical companies I worked at. And essentially, you know, seeing a patient handling a drug delivery system for the first time and your intuition would tell you, oh, they would be able to press this button really easily, figure out exactly how to do this. And you would be amazed with just how confused someone would be if they’re not constantly being exposed to this sort of stuff. So it really made me think that I want to be in that role, to be that voice for the patients, for the ultimate buyers and end users of healthcare products, to make sure that we are really developing the right things and serving those needs properly. Fast forward, I got my MBA in healthcare marketing, and ever since then, I’ve been really just advocating for voice of customer, voice of patient, and making sure that the products and services that we’re developing are serving those demographics appropriately.
Saul Marquez:
Thanks for that background, Shawn. And look, a lot of healthcare marketing that is done is B2B, just the nature of how things get purchased and transacted in healthcare. It’s not really the individual buying things. It’s organizations buying things on behalf of individuals, whether it’s employers, the government paying for it, or the payers wanting to do stuff with it. Now there’s also a B2C element as well. We’ll cover both. So on this idea of two things that people can take away with, what would you say the first one, let’s do one that’s B2B and one that’s B2C. On the B2B front, what’s the one thing people need to be thinking about as it relates to marketing in their organization?
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, definitely. I would say when it comes to B2B marketing, again, healthcare is very complex, as you articulated in that the marketing isn’t just your marketing to one person. As you mentioned there, the buyer and the user are separate, and that is very unique to healthcare. So when you’re thinking about who the buyers are, whether it’s the government, Medicare, Medicaid, the insurance companies, the employers, etc., etc., you need to think about what value is being rendered. You take the same mindset that you do for any consumer segment and think about, what am I incentivized to do based on this? And you have to tie the incentives to the end user as well. So, when it comes to the B2B marketing, I need to think about who influences those buyers. So let’s say it’s the insurance companies or something like that, those that influence the buyers might be the legislatures, it may be the physicians, and, of course, again, the end users, the patients, especially patient advocacy groups. So it’s important to really map out the complex network of who are the stakeholders that wind up being the influencers to the people that carry the pocketbook that wind up paying for the product that you’re talking about and how are they appropriately incentivized into buying this? Again, just because there is that disparity that they are not the end user. So the same sort of values and value propositions are not going to resonate with them as well as saying, for example, my product is going to save X amount of dollars in healthcare costs over the lifetime of its use. You may have to pay this upfront, but ultimately, the end benefit to the patient is that they’re not going to be continually hospitalized, they’re not going to be in and out of different healthcare situations. So there is a payoff, and dollars and cents are the type of language that you need to speak with these B2B buyers.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, for sure. And when you think about this mapping out exercise, walk us through that. Like what could people be doing to map it out, and what do you do?
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah. So I, take your typical five P’s of marketing approach, your identification of the people, the product, the positioning, etc., etc., and you start with, you know who those people are. Like, who is going to ultimately influence the end decision? So I think through exactly in the minds of the personas that you map out. So let’s say there are individual people that can be considered the decision makers, there are individual people that can be considered consultants, and then there are influencers that they might not be the ultimate decision maker, but they’re going to have some level of, I would say, sway with who the decision maker is. So it’s like your typical Raci matrix that you would lay out exactly who the responsible, accountable people, and consult people are, a very just standard, methodical exercise. And some people would say you just got to go straight for the jugular and just think about what the payers want, but again, in healthcare, it’s very complex. We need to really identify who all of the people are that have different types of power within the decision-making process. And so when you do that, it’s always important to speak to the individuals that reflect those personas, right, and gain their insight. I talk about voice of customer a lot, and voice of customer is also not just the end user, as I mentioned, the voice of customer really just relates to all the stakeholders. So it’s important to actually go do the market research to the individuals that you’ve mapped out and ask what are their motivations. What are the things that are causing them to make decisions one way or the other? What gaps do they see? What challenges do they see? And it’s also important to tease out what type of relationships they have between the other stakeholders. Never take anything for granted. It’s always best to hear from the horse’s mouth. And I’m, as my engineering background tells me, I’m a very data-driven person. And so I always want to hear exactly what it is that influences people and not make assumptions based on it because things always surprise you. Like I mentioned in my first story, is like how patients interact with devices. You just, you can never assume, and it’s important for us to really just make data-driven decisions.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, no, that’s great. And folks, I think Shawn’s advice here is, just map it out. You might have an idea, and you think you have it mapped out in your brain, but you’d be surprised when you put it on a piece of paper, or if you’re mind mapping, or we like to use Kaggle, we go into Kaggle and do a map of a particular framework. You be surprised and how much more organized you can get if you lay it all out and then go ask the questions to the influencers, the buyers, and the people involved in the decision. So a great point to take home there. And so, let’s shift to B2C, Shawn, the end user, because the end user is the consumer, not necessarily the purchaser. Talk to us about the B2C approach.
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, this is actually one of the most interesting areas for me personally. I’ve seen, in the healthcare industry, the power dynamics really evolve from being all about the self-informed user. So the patient today versus 20, 50 years ago is much more well aware of their healthcare options than they would have otherwise been. They, think about anyone going into a doctor’s office maybe 50 years ago, the only way that they would know a particular treatment or exactly what they should do with their healthcare decisions and where all the trust is within that direct physician-to-patient relationship. Now, that doesn’t mean to say that it is negated at this point. The studies show that the patient-physician relationship is still strong. However, patients do a lot more research now, and there’s a lot more data available to them. As marketers, we really need to cater to that appetite. We need to go out there and make sure that the information that patients are seeking, that we’re able to provide to them. For example, patients, especially in rare disease, rare conditions, we hear these stories all the time about how they’re doctor shopping, or they’re hospital shopping, and they’re figuring out new cutting-edge treatments, also looking up clinical trials that could potentially help them because the options aren’t very expansive, and at the same time, the consequences of choosing the wrong option are really dire. So in those types of situations, you want to make sure as a marketer that my products have the highest level of transparency in the open market in a digestible fashion for consumers to read the information, take it in, digest it, and be able to come up with significant conclusions along with their own physicians, obviously, in consultation. So you always want to make sure that, as again, this idea of the self-informed buyer or self-informed consumer continues to emerge. I would say we’re only heading towards a trend of continued self-education, self-informed buyer, and self-empowered buyer. It’s definitely not slowing down anytime soon, that it’s our responsibility as healthcare marketers to provide the right, accurate type of information that patients can understand and use in that decision-making process in consultation with their physician. Because the last thing we want to do is, in the absence of information, there is always speculation and non-credible sources and whatnot. There’s the whole idea of fake news and a lot of the stuff that has transpired during the pandemic. It’s our fiduciary duty to really make sure that accurate information is out there if it is being sought, because in the absence of it, we’re going to have situations where patients are making decisions that might not be right for their healthcare.
Saul Marquez:
Well said, Shawn. Thank you for that. And then the other nuance here, there’s the consumer, which is the patient. There’s also the consumer, which is the customer-user within an account. That’s also one that we have to think about. What are the user buyers wanting to have, and what’s important to them? So, the same things that Shawn said, we want to be thinking about user-buyers within organizations as well. So, Shawn, you’re super insightful talking points here. Look, I really appreciate having you on the podcast and talking about some of these opportunities. If you wanted to share a closing thought with our listeners on anything, they should be thinking about healthcare marketing, what would it be? And what’s the best place that they can get in touch with you?
Shawn Malloy:
Yeah, definitely. I would say the most important thing again is keeping an open mind. Never make assumptions, this is my theme. And then, in addition to that, just really making sure that you understand your customers and how complex they are. I use the voice of customer analysis a lot and also just segmenting between your not all of your customers are this uniform, amorphous blob that you can just say, Oh, all of what my talking points are going to resonate with this just general group of people. There are very specific segments within any market that might seem homogeneous, but it’s important to actually collect the data from those individual market segments, truly understand what are the motivations of these people, how do I best serve them in a capacity that is as specific as possible to what they’re looking for? I think your last question, if you want to get in touch with me, feel free to shoot me a message on LinkedIn. I’m happy to talk more about just healthcare marketing strategies and whatnot.
Saul Marquez:
I love that. Well, listen, Shawn, this has been really helpful. Folks, hope you got a lot of value out of today’s podcast with Shawn Malloy. And think about your marketing. There’s ways you could fine-tune it. There’s ways you could get in front of your ideal buyer and the people that ultimately use the product. So keep all these things in mind. Check out the show notes to get in touch with Shawn. Shawn, such a pleasure to be with you today.
Shawn Malloy:
Thanks for having me, Saul.
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