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[Colin Miller]

Hello, you're tuned in to SNiPs, a reoccurring special segment from our ongoing series, Fractals, Life Science Conversations. Bracken is the professional services firm for life sciences and digital health organizations. Our intelligence ecosystem fulfils consulting, regulatory, marketing and analytics, in an integrated and strategic approach. You're an engineer that now gets into marketing and I'm just intrigued on your thoughts these days of how marketing plays a role in the expansion, getting the name out, but also your sales and how the two are linked.

[Jeff Sorenson]

Well, it's critical, and part of my previous story was I ended up in marketing because I had to figure out what we could do with this scanner to sell it. And it was very good at cardiac imaging and not very good at other things. It could do like, but it was low dose.

So we figured out how to do low dose whole body scanning. We figured out how to really lean into the perfusion capabilities because it could do that and CT couldn't. And of course it had a lot of published work in calcium scoring and the validity of that, which sadly took another 20 years to become standard of care, but it did.

And so all of those things are marketing, right? Really, there's two kinds of marketing. There's the marketing communications, which is really important to put out a confident, clean brand, to have a personality.

Like, I like to look at a brand as being a relationship with customers. It's trust, it's that they know what to expect, right? So in our case, we really value having a really clean user experience and we don't allow bad data on our platform.

There's no place for unstructured data on our platform and there never will be because that's our brand. What you know is if there's data on our platform, then if customers ask us to do something that isn't consistent, then we need to say no and make sure that we're true to our brand. That's one.

The other thing when it comes to sales, half of all customers purchasing decisions are made before they pick up the phone. And so that's a pretty daunting thing to think about, but that means, and that doesn't mean you'll lose half of all the business if you don't have good marketing. You'll lose far more than that because you need the marketing to grab the attention of the people who will pick up the phone and you need the marketing to convince the half of people who won't pick up the phone until they're convinced.

Even in our company in its youngest stages, we spent a lot of time on the naming, the branding, the marketing, the messaging, the website. One advice to those life sciences folks who are interested in starting their own companies is do your marketing in-house. I mean, the reality is that marketing agencies can help you amplify your messages and they can help you find the right markets.

You have to be able to know your product and know your market and know your leads and know your destiny well enough. And there's people who can help you along the way, but what I've done is really focused my company's marketing resources on marcoms, on marketing communications, like how do the leads get inbounded? What does your website look like?

What do your materials look like? And funny enough, if you're really technically adept in your company, then their job is simplify, simplify, simplify, simplify, right? Take the gearhead stuff and make it translatable and make it actionable.

But I think a lot of startups, if you ask investors, they'll all say that most startups under-invest in marketing. Really, if you're a small company, your marketing department should be as big as your sales department because it's that important. And I also think, too, part of marketing is product marketing, which is what I mentioned at Imatron, but you just figure out what you have and what your strengths are and then go sell to your strengths, and that requires domain expertise. It is a high bar for a small company, isn't it? I mean, you have to swing for the fences and do everything the big companies do, but with a small number of people.

[Colin Miller]

Fractals: SNiPs is brought to you by Bracken and available wherever you get your podcasts. Visit us at brackengroup.com or reach out directly on LinkedIn. We'll be delighted to speak with you.

I'm Colin Miller, wishing you sound business and good health. Thanks for listening.