InsightsOut_MattTucker: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

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Natanya Wachtel:
Brands that can connect with their audiences more viscerally and more authentically will always be successful. With the Insights Out podcast, you will get access to deep and detailed conversations with the heads of leading organizations to understand how they are making their customer relationships work best and how we can all become more aligned to deliver strong value exchanges and better realize the benefits. I’m your host, Dr. Natalia Wachtel. Welcome.

Natanya Wachtel:
Hello! Welcome to Insights Out where we shine a spotlight on modern solutions to put customer data to work. We unearth game-changing intelligence, predict customer needs, and seamlessly connect insights into measurable action everywhere your brand touches your customer. My guest today is Matt Tucker. Matt Tucker is a MedTech commercialization expert who has held leadership positions at multinational companies like Baxter and Mylan. In addition to startups funded by angel investors through Series C. He’s currently the Chief Commercial Officer and board member at NightWare, which offers a prescription digital therapeutic for the treatment of nightmare disorder. He actively consults on behalf of VCs to qualify investment opportunities and advise small companies working to get off the ground. Welcome, Matt.

Matt Tucker:
Thanks for having me.

Natanya Wachtel:
Thanks for joining. So, Matt and I actually met a few years back when he was the VP of marketing at Mylan, which included many products, Epipen being one of them, and we learned a lot working together, and I thought Matt would be an amazing guest for us to kind of share his experience across different kinds of markets and verticals within the life sciences industry and shine a light on also some of the unique differences between those kinds of groups, whether we talk about MedTech, traditional pharmaceutical marketing and devices and how they approach customers and customer insights. So if you want to start maybe letting us know a little bit about your background in you, and then we can get into some of the great gems you’re going to drop with us today.

Matt Tucker:
Sure, one of the things that’s been a little bit maybe different about my career versus a lot of people has been the broad variety of different product categories and different spaces from a specialty perspective. So I started out in sales at Baxter Health Care and then moved into a traditional marketing role, product manager and med device or surgical medical devices, worked as hard as I could to accumulate a larger portfolio within that business, ended up leaving, and had the startup bug. So started working with a number of startups, doing more of a traditional marketing role, but starting to really develop my commercialization expertise outside of just marketing. Somewhere along the way stood up a medical device distributorship where I brought a couple of people along and we created a portfolio where we literally went out and sold it as a 10-99 to trauma and cosmetic surgeons, a variety of small, innovative medical devices that were going to help their practice, either on that trauma side or on the cosmetic side. That was a fascinating experience because you really got to live and have ownership of that sales cycle and understanding how what you are doing as a marketer and someone who was doing product development and commercialization ends up in the sales force hands and puts them in a position either in a positive way or a negative way to sell something, right?

Natanya Wachtel:
Right.

Matt Tucker:
Then moved it to the role of Mylan, where, where we met, spent three or four years there, wanted a change, and moved into an innovation role at a very large Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurer, where I did innovation and then as well enterprise strategy and then decided after working with NightWare over the course of about a year and a half on a consulting basis to jump on board there. At a certain point when we had enough investment to bring me on as the chief commercial officer, also as a board member across all this time, 15 years, I guess, but when I look back at it, I’ve been consulting with smaller, very early stage companies and very early stage VCs that do seed funding of really small companies to get them off the ground. So I do a lot of commercial assessments with my consulting team and then as well do a lot of work trying to help these companies just understand how to make a plan that is going to lead them to success. Sometimes that looks like commercial or commercialization plans, other times it looks like more launch planning, and then a lot of the time it’s giving them education on how to pitch their company in a positive light to investors and really think through what they’re building, so when they get questions from investors, they’re able to answer them. And you’d be surprised at how many people at the very, very early stage haven’t thought far enough, get in front of an investor at the investor community, and have a great idea but don’t have a plan to get past the idea and product development phase.

Natanya Wachtel:
Yeah, and I think there’s a lot in there that’s different, but also shades of one another, especially around articulating the value story for both, for all parties, right? So what’s in it for me from the customer patient-provider perspective and what’s in it for me from the services or solutions partner side? And so that everyone makes an easy choice where it’s not a sale per se, it’s the beginning of a relationship, and I think you’re really one of those few people who are able to see that it’s important to understand both sides of the coin there.

Matt Tucker:
Well, it’s fascinating what you’re saying because you’re right. That’s a blind spot for a lot of people where they will hone in on one customer set and they’ll develop their messaging for that one customer set. And they’re not really thinking how that messaging might apply to other audiences, or they’re not thinking how they can take similar messaging and tweak it just a little bit to where it resonates with those audiences. And maybe some of this has come from the fact that I’ve seen at least three different angles of audiences, like I’ve been on the device side and the pharmaceutical side and the marketing side, where predominantly a clinician has been the customer, occasionally a patient, right, but the clinician really driving the decisions. So I would attenuate those messages to that customer, but then when I moved over into the back story for a long period of time, I did acquisitions and portfolio development. So then I was working with VCs and working with startups who were coming in and pitching a product that they had that they wanted Baxter to acquire. So now you’re I’m a different type of audience, right? So the audience, rather than giving message to another audience, now on the audience, so seeing how people would position it and then moving into high market and insurance role where I have literally hundreds of innovative companies coming and telling me how our insurance plan, huge number of lives we insured, right, because we were Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia lots of people, that was a such an interesting experience. Having previously been positioning to a large insurer as a customer, and then being that customer was like, Whoa, wait a minute. They’re way off on the story they’re telling, and I always felt empathy around that because I’d made those mistakes before.

Natanya Wachtel:
Yeah, well, speaking of mistakes or learning life lessons or however we want to spin the vernacular to be a resilience mindset, can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges that you’ve seen across the sort of different kinds of businesses in terms of branding and those customer relationships strengthening? It’d be really interesting if you had any examples to share in terms of either moments where you said there were those lessons and/or breakthroughs within whether you or your teams brought them within the organizations that you felt were really successful.

Matt Tucker:
Sure, I think when you’re talking about brand building, you’re talking about the messaging that you’re trying to deliver to customers. I think the common theme is that in every circumstance, you have to build it foundationally, right? And if you don’t have a methodology or some framework that you use, you can end up in a position where I feel like it’s throwing paint at the wall, right, and just trying to see what to throw spaghetti at the wall, trying to see what is going to stick. There are a lot of different frameworks that you can use. I don’t think any of them are right or wrong. I have my own favorite framework, but the common theme is that there needs to be a framework, right? And there’s a foundation you need to build for yourself as you’re doing this. Then the second piece of the puzzle is who is that audience? And are you really attenuating what your brand, what your product, what your service is to that particular audience, as we spoke about before, and really identifying and understanding and giving that customer information around what it is about your product, brand, or service that is going to make their lives better or easier or faster or cheaper or whatever it is they’re trying to, whatever their end goal is, really what your brand has to convey that you’re helping them do. So that’s the, thematically, whether you’re a device or you’re a drug or an insurance company, or whether you’re a VC and you’re trying to offer your assistance to a new startup, you have to really articulate what’s in it for that other person you’re going to be working with, right? And coming at it from a service mindset rather than a selling-the-product mindset is something that’s really valuable when.

Natanya Wachtel:
Oh no, no, I was just about to say that that one point it’s so basic. It’s actually probably in anyone who’s taken a marketing course, or communications course, branding, right? That’s the 101, the what’s in it for me has to be about the customer. And people say they’re doing that, but obviously, we’ve all seen, I’m sure many of the listeners, as well as people, our colleagues and ourselves, have seen that actually doing that in action and taking ego off the table, and ego could be from president level, leadership level, from even advertising agency partner level, where they’re trying to just be like, We’re the best, we’re the best. I mean, that is just, that’s more the norm. And then you see sort of these folks that here and there breakthrough with their campaigns, with their messaging and positioning, let’s say, with the awards, if you will, where we see, though, consistently, one of the variables that seems to be the same regardless of whether it’s an execution that has cartoons or is poignant in an emotional way, you know, uplifting, whatever it is. The ones that seem to break through are the ones where they have actually connected with something authentic with their customer in some way and less about what the thing does if you will.

Matt Tucker:
Yeah, and so that’s fascinating on a few fronts. And let me deconstruct that a little bit. So, Natanya, you know that one of the initiatives that I have going on with a couple co-founders is the site called MedTech and Mindset. And every day I put out a MedTech and Mindset moment, and some of the comments have been exactly like what you just said. Whereas like, hey, these are really great foundational, fundamental, little thirty-second reminders about things that people often forget about, right? And what happens is, they think they’re more advanced than they are. Sometimes they get confused by a lot of distractions that are out there and they forget to do the basics, the blocking, and tackling. And I joke with people all the time that, like, I’m probably not the most advanced marketer out there. Like, I don’t I’m not the most advanced commercialization person out there. There are people who in different areas have technical companies and competencies and skill sets are way above mine, but the thing that I’ve been really good at that has brought a lot of value to businesses across a variety of different categories is making sure that blocking and tackling gets done and is done as effectively as you as you can get it. Because what will happen is, is that to the second point, a lot of people, when they don’t do that, they’ll advance past it. They’ll create things that are very shiny, right? That they’ve got these shiny, sexy, whether it’s campaigns or whether it’s collateral materials or sometimes even their product that, it has an appearance that will attract an initial set of customers, but when they use it doesn’t work out how they thought, right? And they’re not articulating that clear value proposition. And I agree with you, when you look at the things that are really working and you back it out, what you find is you find a very simple, clear message from that company, from that campaign, from that product that is telling you very easily, specifically and clearly the value that that customer is going to get, and a lot of people just forget it, right, and they don’t spend enough.

Natanya Wachtel:
From there, from their lens, you know, and that’s sort of that nuanced thing like the end benefit with them in mind, not the benefit of the sale or even the product attributes. And it just it’s just interesting, right? Like we can come so far forward and also seem to have to go so far backwards.

Matt Tucker:
Well, there was a moment, a MedTech moment that I recorded not long ago and released, and the whole question, a lot of them are questions, right? I’m asking thought-provoking questions and asking if you’re open-minded enough to do it, right? And one of the questions was when you’re in front of a patient and they’re telling you about all the great things that your product helped them with, are you comfortable enough to ask them what’s not going right or what could be better? And it’s a that is the ego right there, right? If you’re able to put that aside and ask these questions and then just listen, right and not feel the urge, not feel the need to defend it, not feel the need to try to explain why it’s that way, right? We all start mansplaining everything, right? And it’s the time where you’re supposed to just be listening and discovering and thanking them for the feedback and then going back and working with your team to figure out if it’s a messaging problem and that needs to be changed or if it’s a real product problem or a service problem around the product that needs to be changed or modified.

Natanya Wachtel:
Awesome, that’s really cool. I had a question that’s maybe a little unusual, but I don’t think so. I was curious about if we could focus maybe on traditional pharma marketing for a moment, and I’d love to see if you could fantasize for a moment and say to me, thinking about if you had like a magic wand that you could wave, you know, around and change things for the better, you know, what would you do there? What would you try to do to really empower some of the traditional companies in terms of their approach to connecting with customers?

Matt Tucker:
Yeah, I think that that’s a really interesting question. I think that pharma because the sales staff, the marketing staff is a little more removed from the day-to-day thought process of decision making with a customer. They have a tendency to do more research that is really formal that they have, they have the staffing for it and the ecosystem built around brands to be able to do it. There were a huge number of things that when I moved into pharmaceuticals I had access to that weren’t even an option in device, right, and … worked for some sort of small run-of-the-mill device company. I work for Baxter Health Care, I mean, it’s like 60,000 people worldwide. The thing was huge, but the approach to marketing, the approach to customer research was, was probably the most divergent that, then, it was much more divergent than you would expect. And I think that there is a tendency in device to think that, you know, your product sells itself a little bit more, right? Because it’s maybe a device that’s more hands-on, it’s more technical.

Natanya Wachtel:
Maybe in a more specialized way. There’s no direct competitor.

Matt Tucker:
100%, right, and what ends up happening is that the whole industry starts thinking that it’s just groupthink, right? Where, well, if you create a good enough device that’s going to sell itself and I found that not to be true, right? So one of the.

Natanya Wachtel:
Or only to a point, you know, you get to sort of stage A, and then that’s it. You sort of you tap out because you’re …

Matt Tucker:
Yeah, I don’t fundamentally think that you can get wide adoption unless you can effectively articulate the value of your product and the benefit that somebody is going to get out of it. Sure, there’s always experimenters who will go and who will adopt it. I’ve found that without the reinforcement of that messaging that you create for a new customer, the people who will jump on the bandwagon early on, they usually don’t mean, they don’t have a longevity as a customer, right?

Natanya Wachtel:
The power to shift the whole marketplace with them.

Matt Tucker:
Yeah, well, they jump in right and they’ll like it. But what will happen is because the messaging and the value proposition has never been clearly articulated, those second guess whether they need it, right? So what will happen is, they’ll use it, but they’re not committed customers, right? There’s a difference between a committed customer or an advocate customer and a garden variety dabbler customer who the next time a company develops a product that looks similar enough, a rep can come in there and replace it because you’ve never articulated the value well enough. In fact, that first point about messaging and really curating that message specifically for the customer that you’re in front of and their own particular and specific needs and giving them the benefits that are really going to resonate. So, I mean, I think that to the heart of your question, it’s really about the approach to understanding the customer or not. Now you’ll find a lot of people who are technical experts, they’re experts about the device. There are a lot of them out there who I’m not sure are marketers, and they definitely don’t have an expertise in commercialization, and that’s because, very often in the departments they work in, they’re not given the resources to be anything more than that. So they’re technical experts. They can do a great job of articulating how you use a device, maybe even why you use the device, but they’re not great at some of that fundamental marketing expertise, and they’re not converting that into initiatives that are broadly telling the story. So one of the, I’ll compare and contrast this and try to bring in what we’ve been doing at NightWare, and it really is blending the two, right? So we have a great device. It is for the treatment of nightmares associated with PTSD or traumatic events. It is a, it’s nonpharmaceutical, it’s not invasive, it literally uses artificial intelligence to monitor biometrics while you’re sleeping. It can essentially sense when you’re having a nightmare and it interrupts that nightmare by buzzing the watch without arousing you to a point of waking up, right? So now this has no competition. It’s the only indicated product for this condition, which is a severe and urgent condition. Untreated nightmares lead to suicide at a rate of 2 to 5 times more than treated nightmares. So it’s filled with patients who need help.

Natanya Wachtel:
And all the other things in terms of not getting your rest, you know, and depression as well as maybe absenteeism. I know you work with the Department of Defense in terms of active duties, soldiers, you know, there’s a lot of risk for not getting a proper sleep.

Matt Tucker:
So we did a deeper brand exploration than most device companies do, and I remember the conversation with our CEO. I remember the conversation with some of our advisors and investors because the amount of money that we invested in developing our brand, articulating our brand was for a startup at our phase. I mean, people were confused, right? But you don’t need this, why are you spending so much money on this? And really, it came down to a conversation around who we were trying to be. Are we trying to be a customer-focused, customer experience-oriented company, or are we out there just trying to sell another device? And even if a device is unique, what are our plans for the company? What are our aspirations for the company, and our aspirations for the company? You know, it’s truly to leave no patient with nightmare disorder behind. That’s what it is, and sure, without the brand articulation, which it really is establishing those fundamental and foundational beliefs in and what your product value is, we could penetrate the DOD and help some military people, but we’d never get outside of that. That’s not our aspiration. So we needed to invest in that, those building blocks that really allowed us to do that. Now in pharma, like it’s just assumed you would do that, right? You would never not do that. It’s just such a divergence. And a lot of it is the thinking that, well, you know, our device is special, it’s unique, everybody, you’ll see it. And I’ll tell you, I can’t. You’d be surprised and shocked at how many companies I see, mainly through my work with VCs who, the founders just believe, we don’t need all that this product is going to fly off the shelves, and they’ll invest millions and they’ll get nothing out of it because they’re letting their ego get in the way. They’re not being open-minded that you have to tell your story, and if you don’t work through that process, then you’re not going to reach the aspirations and goals that you have for yourself and your company.

Natanya Wachtel:
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s something a little nuanced point in there that of course appeals to me intellectually and from my other life around the research approach. And we talked about I mean, you talked about it from a spin perspective, but I want to unpack that one layer down because I’ve worked with you before and I know you appreciate this nuanced difference here. It’s not so much the spend per se, but it’s about the approach and the partnership that sometimes because it’s specialized, requires a bit of investment, but you can still spend the same and get nowhere if you’re working with sort of the old school confirmation bias, market research tools. And so, you’re smiling. And so I think that’s another nuance that’s really important. So if you even get someone who wants to do it, traditionally and we see this, especially in Big Pharma, you have people essentially creating surveys, if you will, market research, primary research in person, very expensive or even in mobile, where they’re asking people questions directly that give you an answer and then they make a cognitive jump to say that’s a predictive question. For example, you know, they’ll ask Dr. Matthew Tucker, you know, do you like blue? I like blue. Oh, great. Matt says he likes blue. We’re going to email him some blue stuff, like and that’s going to make him buy our product. Like it’s that bad, and I see it quite a bit and I know you have too, and we saw this in our time together around what motivates people to take action. And also that disconnect, that cognitive dissonance that we all share between what we say would be our ideal self and our ideal behaviors and what we really do. And understanding that is a discipline in and of itself. And that’s sort of a more indirect, a more, a less an alchemy and a science approach. And I think it’s a little scary for some of the traditional marketers and marketing teams and research teams to deviate from the sort of A plus B equals C only, that model, and this is more transitive property, right? So it’s really interesting to hear you say that, and there’s definitely a lot of skepticism and pushback on the value of marketing outside of producing and executing a lot of stuff. That’s where the spend goes or the media portion of the execution, and I think what you brought up is exactly that. That’s one of the things that if I could get on a platform soapbox and really beg for people to listen, it would be to be a little more discerning into the methodology in terms of how you go about doing it, as well as the why you need to do it.

Matt Tucker:
And I’m hoping this is not, I’m hoping this isn’t non-sequitur, I’m hoping this isn’t distracting the conversation, but there are, I know you love to talk about incentives, right? So what has been fascinating to me and one of the reasons why from a career perspective, I just don’t want to work anywhere other than startups where I can build this stuff the way I know it should be built, not that I’m the expert on every single thing, but at least I’ve made enough mistakes to know what my own cognitive biases are, right? What are the incentives that marketers and product leaders and commercial leaders are getting at their companies? A lot of the incentives are to not do those things that you’re talking about, right? What will happen is, because it’s a risk.

Natanya Wachtel:
Right.

Matt Tucker:
It’s a, it becomes a personal.

Natanya Wachtel:
It’s not the quick answer sometimes, and it may or may not be the answer that you were hoping for. And you may need to adjust your resources accordingly based on these new answers, and you may even shift your target, right, and your PNL, and everything is tied to that.

Matt Tucker:
So you’ve got those things. You’ve also got more, let’s call them human-to-human interactive risks, right? And that’s where you’ve got salespeople who literally just want more stuff, right? And they don’t, they’re not valuing that other stuff because they’ve not seen what that looks like when it’s good.

Natanya Wachtel:
Right.

Matt Tucker:
So, because of that, they don’t have an experience.

Natanya Wachtel:
And there’s no training. That kind of mindset, also that’s another thing, right? Like it doesn’t trickle through all the departments with the same valuation. So maybe one group sees the light, but the other groups don’t, and so then there’s a disconnect within the system, within the ecosystem of just the structure of the operations, and so you have an imbalance there, absolutely.

Matt Tucker:
If you look at an organization like, like I’m in at NightWare and I control all those things.

Natanya Wachtel:
Right, it’s easier to connect the dots.

Matt Tucker:
Exactly, so I control the branding. I control the marketing messages, I control the sales messages. I control the sales training, right? And when you’re the one who is able to see all of those things and you’re trying to carry it through the, to the branding, to messages we’re doing when we meet with key opinion leaders. Like all of it, there’s a theme, there’s a stream, there’s a thread that runs between it so you can execute it, you get an amplification of your efforts when it is all connected. But if, you know, if all the salespeople report to me so I collect the feedback directly and they can’t go to anybody else with thoughts or complaints. But if they reported to some other person, right, very often they would, they’d have a conversation with a doctor who maybe didn’t respond to the messages or maybe they had their own take on it, or they did the, you know how you should really sell this. You should really sell it by talking about these things. And it’s like, okay, well, one person said that and it’s great that one person can have their opinion and it’s valid from their perspective, but that doesn’t mean that because of that one person, we need to change our messaging because.

Natanya Wachtel:
Right, if you really think that they’re onto something that you didn’t articulate, maybe you can go at least get a small quorum and see if that’s a real trend, or is that an individual opinion? Absolutely. So this has been amazing, we’re kind of coming up on time now. Is there anything you’d like to share with our audience in closing around sort of your I don’t want to say your tenets, but your basic foundational things that you sort of keep in mind? I know you’re really good at sort of boiling things down to a couple, couple main points that you use as your driving factors. Do you have any of those? And if I put you on the spot for this, apologies right now.

Matt Tucker:
Well, that’s okay. I’m trying to get it down from a list of ten to maybe a list of three.

Natanya Wachtel:
Okay.

Matt Tucker:
I think that for anybody who is thinking about customer insights and how it relates to marketing and commercialization and product growth and really most importantly, customer satisfaction and experience, there are probably three really important things. So one is, I think, tailoring your message to be very specific and customized to the audience you’re in front of. So not using a one size fits all messaging, right? That’s probably the first one. The second one is open-mindedness and curiosity. So being able to go into any situation and asking yourself if you’re, am I being truly open-minded when I’m sitting and I’m talking and not coming at it from listening to react or respond, but listening truly to understand that, right? So that kind of curiosity and seeking to understand is critically important. You’ll hear things that you’ve missed over and over and over when you approach it that way. And then I think the third is, is challenging yourself to not do a rinse, wash and repeat type of process throughout your career.

Natanya Wachtel:
Right, with the same partners, with the same structure, with the same I mean, it’s crazy how in one way people are talking about evolution. Evolve or die, evolve or die, the evolution of marketing, and yet you peek under the covers and it’s still the same old, same old.

Matt Tucker:
Yeah, and going back to incentives, the question is like, what are the incentives? Are you aware of the incentives affecting you, right? And if you’re more aware of the incentives affecting you, it at least then becomes a choice.

Natanya Wachtel:
Yeah.

Matt Tucker:
It becomes a choice. It becomes it rather than just passively doing it. Because there are times where it’s like, Hey, I need to go to my old partner because I know they can accelerate me really fast, but they’re going to have blind spots. I’m going to have blind spots. Do, how do we get a third opinion? What is it we can build in to open our minds to things that maybe we haven’t seen before that amplifies sort of the fast tracking you can do with partners, you know well, that also gives you some new ideas that you would not have previously explored?

Natanya Wachtel:
That’s awesome, thank you so much. So would you take a moment and just let our listeners know where they can find and connect with you? Because I’m sure this has spurred a lot of interest in Insights Out.

Matt Tucker:
Yeah, yeah, I mean, of course, you can find me on LinkedIn just by, I would look for Matthew Tucker NightWare, you’ll probably find me pop up. The best thing to do, I think, is, however, to go to www.medtechandmindset.com. We have a free weekly newsletter that has great insights. There are insights from a number of people, Natanya included, and it is a fabulous resource. Additionally, on my LinkedIn, every day you find a MedTech and Mindset moment and what we’re trying to do is raise awareness of the combination of technical skill sets and personal development skill sets, because what we know is that at least 50%, probably more of our success is not hinged on the technical part, it’s what’s right here between your ears, and it creates the greatest restrictions and creates the greatest opportunities in your life, and that’s what we talk about every week and every day.

Natanya Wachtel:
Awesome, thank you so much, Matthew. It’s been really a pleasure and wishing you all good things.

Matt Tucker:
Awesome, thanks.

Natanya Wachtel:
Thank you for listening to Insights Out. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you have a specific topic in mind and you want us to discuss, please reach out to us by visiting NewSolutionsNetwork.com. See you next time!

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