Everybody Hates Pharma

Episode 21-Audio
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Pharma Sales and Tech Podcast. Join Artem, Stefan, Ruslan, and Chris as we explore the latest trends and developments in the pharmaceutical industry with a focus on sales and technology from cutting edge innovations To practical tips and strategies, our expert guests will provide valuable insights to help you stay ahead of the game.

[00:00:30] Tune in to stay informed, inspired, and connected with the world of pharma sales.

[00:00:39] Stefan Repin: Hello, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Stefan. I'm here with Platforce and I have a wonderful guest for whom I've been waiting for maybe around like two months actually. His name is Shawn Malloy. And I would really love to interview him about like his role as VP of marketing at Lindus Health.

[00:00:56] Stefan Repin: But I think Shawn will do his intro in the best, much [00:01:00] better way than I will. So Shawn, welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:03] Shawn Malloy: Yeah, thanks for having me, Stefan. Yeah, as you mentioned I'm VP of Marketing at Lindus Health. We like to call ourselves the Anti CRO for Life Science Pioneers. And for those of you familiar with the CRO industry, they're basically clinical research organizations that run clinical trials on behalf of, you know, your typical pharma, biotech digital health or, or med device company. So effectively what we do is we look to run clinical trials in much Faster, more efficient way using technology and new age techniques that your standard CRO you know, usually wouldn't be involved with and also with an incentivization structure based on the pricing that basically allows us all to win versus just you know, as studies ,typically go longer, CROs get paid more and we kind of take the opposite approach.

[00:01:50] Shawn Malloy: So yeah, I've been in sort of the CRO industry the past five years. And prior to that I actually worked in big pharma for about six years. I worked at companies like [00:02:00] AbbVie, Amgen and Biogen prior to that. So yeah, that's just a bit about myself.

[00:02:05] Stefan Repin: Awesome. Thank you, Shawn. So before actually starting this podcast we've discussed with Shawn, you know, topics that he's really passionate about, and he was saying that he's really passionate about marketing and like sales targeting and how that sort of fuels into sales activities. So let's start with that.

[00:02:24] Shawn Malloy: Yeah, definitely. So yeah, as you mentioned, Stefan, basically. You know, what I've found are the best types of sales that we do that have the highest level of velocity and also the highest win rate are typically really well aligned to the overall marketing strategies that we have. So, you know, if we're targeting if both sales and marketing are targeting and in synchrony.

[00:02:45] Shawn Malloy: A particular market segment, let's say, you know, we're going after dermatology small molecule trials or what have you, and there's, we have a thought leader, you know, that marketing is placed in the space, talked on a lot of conferences doing a lot of [00:03:00] promotion and what have you. There's a whole wealth of collateral that the sales team can then use in a lot of their conversations with these pharmaceutical companies to say, Hey, we have this great KOL that, you know, has been on the conference circuit for dermatology, can bring them into those conversations with the sales leads.

[00:03:16] Shawn Malloy: And, generally speaking, what you see is you just again, have a much higher velocity in the sales cycle, in addition to higher win rates when you just have a really good fit between the marketing and the sales strategy.

[00:03:29] Stefan Repin: Awesome. So I was thinking let's get a bit, a little bit more practical. I was thinking first question I would ask is like, do you have any examples of a successful like marketing slash sales strategy that you've implemented in the past and any of the companies you are willing to share?

[00:03:46] Stefan Repin: Maybe any of that.

[00:03:47] Shawn Malloy: Yeah, definitely. So kind of in a similar vein to what I described, basically I, I selected like a target market for our overall marketing strategy and where we thought we could have pretty good sales. That was, was a fit within our, our [00:04:00] ideal customer profile. And so this target market happened to be digital therapeutic.

[00:04:04] Shawn Malloy: So running studies for prescription, digital therapeutic studies, it's, it's a pretty unique space that not a lot of people have had experience in. And so. There's a lot of what I call, like, white space where you can help define you know, the approaches and the strategies where there isn't a lot of precedent. So basically what we did is we got involved with one of the industry consortiums, the Digital Therapeutics Alliance, and essentially. Worked with them to produce some of the guidance necessary on how you actually go about running studies. So we had a very specific thought leader that we had selected in the space. She worked with them to put together the industry paper that actually was a part of the FDA's process of putting through. Their own type of draft guidance to basically, like, set the stage for how these types of prescription digital therapeutic studies would need to be run in the future. And so what you're able to [00:05:00] do with that is not only contribute to you know, furthering a particular industry overall, but you've set yourself as sort of pioneers and thought leaders in the space that now instead of, you know, constantly going out and prospecting and hunting for leads and spaces that you might. You know, have a pretty significant uphill battle you now have a resource that you can lean on to say, Hey, you know any sort of sales prospect that is in the funnel can utilize this resource to help guide the potential prospect in how they would run their study. You know, what they're, they're potentially looking for in the pitfalls and what have you.

[00:05:35] Shawn Malloy: So now there's a lot more inbound and a lot again. I would say higher velocity and easier conversion of those types of leads. And so that's a that's a type of strategy I've seen work well, and I'd like to replicate in different market segments where you basically become an expert in a particular area, so that you can again provide the resources that you need downstream from marketing to sales.

[00:05:59] Stefan Repin: [00:06:00] That's where I was actually. Well, so when I first came into, into Platforce, I came from SaaS software as a service business, which is very much like very, very advanced. And we can, I worked before in pharma, but it was a different position. When I came as a, you know, head of marketing for Platforce, my first guess was like, why there is so little content, like subject matter expertise in the pharma space from pharma leaders. I mean, there are Reuters conferences, there are conferences, but you can't really find like opinion pieces, which is, you know, internet is full of SaaS opinion pieces from coming from, you know, from leaders. And my first move was start this podcast.

[00:06:39] Stefan Repin: Then I got our CEO on a lot of podcasts because he does have a lot of knowledge about the market and it's so bad that, you know, people don't know about it. So, leveraging subject matter expertise is very important. In fact I was in the Philippines in back in August and we went to a conference and I realized that [00:07:00] Well, I met, I met a company, it's called Medical Channel Asia.

[00:07:03] Stefan Repin: And what they do is they create content for pharma, pharma companies. And he mentioned the topic that he said, look, pharma companies do have a lot of subject matter expertise, but they have no idea how to distribute that.

[00:07:16] Shawn Malloy: Yep, absolutely.

[00:07:17] Stefan Repin: No idea at all. I'm like, yeah, but they have all this budget and stuff.

[00:07:20] Stefan Repin: He says, yes, but they all like, they're really bad with like modern distribution systems, you know, like social media and things like that. and I was like, okay, but like, don't they have, if they have money, you know, like how do they do that? And he says, well, as a typical pharma company would approach, let's say WebMD or they will create Mayan clinics or like, you know, someone who's in top of Google, of the Google search and ask them, Hey, can you feature us?

[00:07:47] Stefan Repin: And they'll say, no, hell no. We have our own subject matter experts. Like, you know, get out of here. So what they do is these guys medical channel Asia. So they actually create the distribution for pharma companies. And they've, [00:08:00] I think they're doing a very, very good job. I wish there was more of that in pharma.

[00:08:05] Shawn Malloy: Definitely. I mean, I speaking from someone that was work within pharma, you know I worked in a couple of different assets and we always had like a very strong key opinion leader like from medical affairs or what? Have you and sometimes they were like the leading expert in a particular disease space.

[00:08:20] Shawn Malloy: Like I remember working on the Spinraza asked that at Biogen and, you know, we had some of the most well renowned experts in spinal muscular atrophy across the globe, but there was just never, and to your point, any sort of like distribution of the message and, and really like teaching and, and, and, you know, those learnings, you know, through the traditional channels, certainly like, You know, talking with other KOLs on advisory boards and panels and what have you, but the more sort of like modern techniques of distributing thought leadership were just like pretty deficient at that point.

[00:08:52] Shawn Malloy: So I think there's a lot of potential there. It's not that the thought leaders don't exist within pharma, but they. To your point, need sort of like a, a kick to get [00:09:00] this sort of better distribution that, you know, they're, they're just not getting right now.

[00:09:04] Stefan Repin: yeah. Plus the, you know, I guess they're a bit scared because you get all this media attention and, you know, there is.

[00:09:11] Shawn Malloy: Yep.

[00:09:11] Stefan Repin: I've had a podcast guest, I don't know know who is that, but like, she literally, she was envied by their colleagues. She's, they're like, wow, we, like, we envy you that you got on the podcast.

[00:09:21] Stefan Repin: And podcast is not a big thing. It's just to get you get here and just like, you know, say something. And I assume a lot of, again, it's a hypothesis of mine that family leaders do get that sort of like attention from other. People in the company and they're just, you know, they're just not comfortable because of so much envy and it's just so unusual for pharma.

[00:09:44] Shawn Malloy: Yeah,

[00:09:45] Shawn Malloy: I mean, there's, there's certainly a lot of inertia of this is just how things have always been and just is a little bit uncomfortable, but yeah, hopefully, like, there'll be a few innovators that can kind of break into it and just set the precedent for everyone else.

[00:09:58] Stefan Repin: yeah, I hope [00:10:00] that's already happening. So I've met a few of these people on conferences, but it's not going as fast. One would want that, but again, we are in a good stable sort of like curve. I wanted to ask you like, so you work with, so you're in marketing and you have like, you work with sales very closely, right?

[00:10:18] Stefan Repin: Like how do you guys use data analytics to like inform each other's decisions? You know, funnel the right, maybe use MQLs, SQLs. I don't know what was sort of like funnel to use. Like, can you explain more about that?

[00:10:30] Shawn Malloy: Yeah, definitely. I'd say, you know, the most important thing is looking at the entire funnel end to end, like the, the first life cycle stage. So, as you mentioned, you know, like, where marketing is qualifying leads all the way through to, you know, sales closing business. So the key for us is to really just say, when we look at the different. Stages of conversion within the funnel what are those conversion rates look like? And, and maybe tease out some of the reasons why conversion rates might not be as, as high as they could be. And that generally [00:11:00] tells you a couple of things, like whether or not you're hitting the right target audience, or there are problems with the product that you're actually delivering, or there are differences between. You know, what a client is expecting versus what you're actually proposing. So, you know, for example if we start with MQLs and how we convert them to sales engaged leads, like generally, like when you look at the, the total conversion rate between what marketing is engaging with you know, a particular prospect with and to what they eventually.

[00:11:30] Shawn Malloy: are talking with, with sales leads you know, the type of substance and subject matter that needs to be consistent. And if you see they are readily converting down to after an SQL stage to a proposal stage, then that tells you that the marketing work that you've been doing up front is pretty well aligned with warming up the lead and that they're in a position that. They want to buy something that you're actually offering. So the discovery call has happened. And if the conversion rate is very high from that SQL to a proposal, [00:12:00] then you can say, okay, there is, there is a lot of alignment with where basically like that prospects head is with all the marketing material that's been, been filled in it. And with what their expectations are that the sales rep has basically delivered that, hey, this is what we sell. And then they're going to say, yes, we want a proposal. And you can see differences in the data between the channels that you're using and how effective they are at. Translating those conversion rates.

[00:12:28] Shawn Malloy: So, you know, I can give some examples about just basically like search intent when you're doing SEO or any sort of I'd say, yeah, like really downstream marketing where someone says Google best CRO in the, the dermatology space. Those are people that are clearly looking for a solution.

[00:12:48] Shawn Malloy: Like they already know that they want to buy something that a CRO offers and in a particular area. So we would see extremely high conversion rates from MQL to SQL to eventually a [00:13:00] proposal delivered because you're in the psychology of the search intent of that particular person saying. I want to buy something at this moment. So therefore this channel is getting a lot of those types of people versus maybe we're just running some, some LinkedIn ads and you know, they have like a general guide on how to set up a study in a particular space. And then what happens there is maybe the conversion rate is, is not as high to delivering a proposal because they're more in just like the discovery mindset of just kind of figuring out what they want to do, but they're not sure exactly what they need at that point.

[00:13:35] Stefan Repin: Oh, Shawn, you've discovered the the Americas for me. I knew that. I mean, look I guess maybe for me and you, it's quite obvious, but like looking into pharma companies, even pharma companies who sell like B2B to pharma, they don't really know they're very much, so let's say that the pharma space is very much focused on like HCP engagement.

[00:13:56] Stefan Repin: So like you have an HCP and you sort of like try to engage them through [00:14:00] multi channel or omni channel. Right. And when you talk to them about like MQLs, SQLs, different stages of decision making intent and so on, they sort of like get lost. Believe me, I've interviewed a lot of like pharma and like a lot of marketing and sales leaders in pharma. And, you know, my discussion stops where we discuss about like omnichannel. That's maximum where it gets, we don't get to decision making. We don't get to SQLs. We don't get to any of that. So thank you so much for bringing this subject matter expertise here.

[00:14:29] Stefan Repin: It's very rare.

[00:14:29] Shawn Malloy: Yeah, yeah, it's unfortunate that it is like that in the industry. What I've found is there's sort of like you know, broader business based disciplines are just not applied in an industry where it's just sort of like niche scientifically focused. And I think just like, you know, I'm an engineer by training and I worked on developing a lot of these types of drugs.

[00:14:49] Shawn Malloy: And I think. The marrying of those two worlds is really important for us to just sort of like have the business realize its full potential.

[00:14:58] Stefan Repin: yeah, I agree. There [00:15:00] is money in pharma, there is very smart people in pharma, extremely smart. I think they, you know, we just, what we're doing with the podcast as well, like I'm trying to educate the market about all the possibilities, all the great content you guys can get out. All the opportunities, all the engaging stuff you can, you can teach your HCPs on or like, you know, pharma better be better.

[00:15:22] Stefan Repin: I'm trying to get our list listeners to get better at doing business in pharma.

[00:15:28] Shawn Malloy: Yeah,

[00:15:28] Stefan Repin: Hmm. How do you, like, I have a question. So how do you guys, so if marketing and sales are sort of like talking to the customers. How do you make sure that there is one channel and you guys don't have ambiguity in the messages you send to your customers or potential customers maybe?

[00:15:45] Stefan Repin: How do you sort of manage that?

[00:15:48] Shawn Malloy: yeah, definitely. So whenever marketing launches a campaign, generally what we try to do is we set forward the voice of customer motivations before we even like create any kind of content, right? So [00:16:00] we say, you know, who exactly are we going after? What are their particular characteristics? What are their motivations?

[00:16:07] Shawn Malloy: Are they interested in? You know Are they interested in cost? Are they interested in experience? You know, what are their challenges that they're facing? And so doing that exercise with sales helps kind of set like the buying motivations and how we create content across the entire continuum.

[00:16:24] Shawn Malloy: And what I mean by that is, you know, you have Your top of funnel content that marketing is pretty much only doing. Like maybe let's say you write some blogs on a particular topic, or, you know, you're going to host a webinar or what have you on, you know, the the subject in that space. And then you want to make sure that aligns as you articulated with the message that's downstream. So that even gets into like the sales collateral on the sales deck. So what, what we'll do is we'll basically take a content strategy as sort of ubiquitously across commercial and make sure it aligns to that initial voice of customer and go to market [00:17:00] strategy and say, within the sales deck, are we saying, you know, that we're offering the same things that we're, that we're offering, you know, like on the website and what have you. But more importantly, like, are those motivations aligned? So if. Let's, we're going to take one particular market segment. Let's say it is medical devices and, you know, running studies in medical devices. What are the most important things to this particular segment? Let's say for them, it is you know, speed of patient recruitment.

[00:17:29] Shawn Malloy: So is the recruitment element being reflected in both the upfront marketing materials, as well as those pitch decks that the sales team is using to say, you know, these are some of the biggest challenges in. Medical device you know, studies, and these are the ways that we're handling it with these certain patient recruitment techniques and medical devices.

[00:17:49] Shawn Malloy: So that way, that prospect is hearing the same message over and over and over again, from the time that they have first heard about your company to the time that they are getting a proposal delivered to them from a [00:18:00] sales lead. Yeah.

[00:18:02] Stefan Repin: That's a nice way to actually approach this. Thinking about, do you have a pre-sales team, who's on your pre-sales team and do you have anything like that? And who's on the pre-sales team? How do you guys work with your pre-sales?

[00:18:14] Shawn Malloy: So basically a couple of things. Before sales is essentially, you know, you're like traditional marketing organization that, that does content generation promotions, whether that's like advertising events, et cetera, et cetera. But then you also have what I would call your development team or your like internal sales team, which are more if you're like you're, you're outbounding sort of resources.

[00:18:36] Shawn Malloy: And so what they do from a pre sales perspective is, is they're actually actively going out there. And they're finding prospects that, you know, are within the certain accounts that you have said, Hey, you know, this is our market space that we want to target. And they're proactively reaching out to them with the same type of messaging that you might be doing for inbound campaigns.

[00:18:57] Shawn Malloy: Whereas in the inbound campaigns, you're mostly relying on [00:19:00] the traffic to come to you. So it's kind of like a mixed approach with outbound and inbound channels in order to basically like. Not only solicit actively, you know, potential leads into, you know, convertible sales leads, but then also just more passively allowing people to, you know, come to you based on where they found your message across various channels, whether that's, you know, search or conferences and what have you.

[00:19:28] Stefan Repin: Awesome. So like, actually what we do at Platforce is that whenever we run a web event, I asked my actually all my, like all the C level execs plus sales to connect with all the webinar participants on LinkedIn. So they stay in touch because I think the level, I think the level of like, you got to have a lot of relationships and especially in pharma, if you want to close that lead.

[00:19:51] Stefan Repin: So relationships are twice as important as maybe other industries, because it's also very conservative, right? And I would say, I would say that the [00:20:00] only fact that we connect with all these people who went to the webinar and we asked them about, well, how would you guys feel about the webinar?

[00:20:05] Stefan Repin: Like, did you guys, are there any hand raisers? Are there any like comments? Maybe there are other topics you want to hear us, you want to hear about, right? So we can bring in the right influencers, the right subject matter experts so we can talk about all that stuff. I think that the only fact that we sort of try to connect with all those people and try to sort of create this, I would say community, right, community, because that's my final goal to create a community of people who want to like develop pharma and and have a better way of doing business.

[00:20:34] Stefan Repin: So I think it lends very well into like, sort of like where you flip the inbound for outbound and where, you know, you don't have sort of like a borderline between inbound and outbound. It's like all in one.

[00:20:46] Shawn Malloy: yeah, yeah. Definitely having them work in tandem is super important to your point. Yeah. In this particular industry, especially, we can't rely on a lot of the you know, what you would see more in B2C markets where, you know, effectively, you just put out a ton of [00:21:00] marketing materials and the consumers are really just the ones driving the entire sales process from, you know, interest to checkout. But here, you know, in a very B2B, more white glove sort of you know, sales process, you want to make sure that are we engaging these people at an individual level and that inbound and outbound are sort of working in tandem in order to make sure that there's a more seamless transition from that sort of just like Interest that's being expressed on their own accord to you kind of help actively helping them along the journey and showing that, you know, you are taking an active interest in what they're trying to learn and then that feathers them into the deeper, you know, funnel of the sales process.

[00:21:45] Stefan Repin: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. I totally agree with you. So a question is like, how do you sort of, sort of keep on innovating and experimenting within, with your sales team, like within marketing and sales

[00:21:57] Shawn Malloy: I'd say, you know, what's important to do [00:22:00] is I, I take the approach as I think it's part of my engineering background is, is just to try a lot of different things and then let the data sort of sort it out. So what I basically do is that we start with, you know, omni channel approaches and any kind of campaign that we'd run.

[00:22:14] Shawn Malloy: And again, across inbound and outbound with different techniques. You know, there are a lot of established channels that, you know, I've, I've already mentioned here, but essentially, you know, what we need to do is constantly look to innovate. And what I, when I look for innovation, I'm looking for, how do we automate the things that we don't need to spend a lot of, like, Critical thinking time on like really where are like gray matter capacity should be geared towards and So that frees up more of our our creative thinking and where we can try different techniques and what have you So i'm a big fan of automation wherever possible, you know, like there are i'm especially on the outbound side I'm always looking for new techniques of about how we You know, we personalize but also automate at the same time.

[00:22:59] Shawn Malloy: [00:23:00] So where can we, you know, deliver appropriate LinkedIn messaging or emails to individual prospects that show that there is some level of, of catering to the individual, like maybe they're working on these, these kidney studies and they're at a particular phase. And I want to make sure that like some of that messaging reflects that we actually. understand what they're, they're looking to do. And, but at the same time, maybe there are 500 of those prospects and you, you want to make sure that you're not like wasting your time, spending you know, hours and hours sending 500 individual messages. So basically a lot of AI tools have been coming out recently that I think are, are really cool and, and sort of help with, you know, putting the messaging together to the right audience, but then also automating. The tasks that don't require a lot of critical thinking for us to, you know, actually deliver the messages.

[00:23:52] Stefan Repin: about the, yeah, that's the question I was going to ask next. Okay. So how do you guys look at, how do you personally look at [00:24:00] chatGPT and AI you know, the spark and AI throughout the last year. And do you use that for your, you know, in your daily job? Like, do you recommend people?

[00:24:10] Stefan Repin: How do you use it? Most interestingly, I would like to hear that.

[00:24:14] Shawn Malloy: Yeah, definitely. So, there are kind of two areas where there are like AI applications in my world. So, basically, like, the first is in the products that we actually deliver. So, as I mentioned before, you know, we are taking the approach of a CRO and trying to optimize it as much as possible so that, you know, you can run studies faster and more efficiently. And one of those areas that we do that with is, is protocol development. So we've developed a, you know, like a machine learning algorithm and AI tool where basically you can. Speed up the protocol process by taking a load of data that's just on clinicaltrials. gov and being able to say, hey, these are the inputs that you know, I'm saying the study, it needs to be [00:25:00] within these parameters and it can take that data and generate a protocol for you.

[00:25:05] Shawn Malloy: That fits those parameters. And so this is normally a process that takes a really long time and a lot of individuals just, you know, writing and rewriting over and over again. And you can get, you know, within 95 percent of a finished product by just. Putting in a couple of simple inputs in a few minutes and, and that's just one example of how we're using AI to basically speed up the clinical trial process. Now, interestingly, like, because, you know, I'm a, I'm a marketer and I'm involved in sales, like where we want to use AI tools and marketing and sales is kind of cool as again, like how we can take complex messaging that's necessary for this industry, you know, like. People, especially in pharmaceuticals and biotech, don't like being, getting just like blanketed by this sort of thing and just expect a shotgun approach like we were talking about before.

[00:25:55] Shawn Malloy: It needs to be very personalized and tailored. And so where you see a lot of [00:26:00] those applications for AI is being able to learn as much as it can about a company, you know, where it's at for us, you know, let's say like the stage of the company you know, what sort of, you know, different products they have in the pipeline. So you can create the messaging with AI to say, Hey, well, this would resonate with this type of company most about you know, delivering for phase three studies in the kidney space. And these are the types of things that you need to look out for. And so we can use these AI tools in order to create that more customized creative messaging. To those prospects when we're doing it, especially the outbound campaigns, as I mentioned,

[00:26:41] Stefan Repin: Yeah. I also use like ChairGPT for outbound campaigns for basically messaging. Helps me sort of come up with the right messaging. It helps, it comes with like creative ideas that I can use further on, but I wouldn't say, I still feel pretty much that it's like, it's very robotized, [00:27:00] right?

[00:27:01] Stefan Repin: Like

[00:27:02] Stefan Repin: I wouldn't, the exact message that it spills out, I wouldn't go to a customer or to an

[00:27:06] Shawn Malloy: no. no. Yeah. You have to do some modification for sure. And oh, sorry, I, and I was going to say, you know, another area where it works in a very similar fashion to the way that you mentioned is when you're, you know, optimizing for your search engine rankings and whatnot SEO is, has proven like a pretty significant area where, where AI is useful.

[00:27:25] Shawn Malloy: Like, if you give you know, just for example, like chatGPT, keep it very simple a bunch of inputs of certain keywords that you want to rank for. And coming up with a coherent topic and, you know, a narrative that incorporates as many of those words and optimizing for SEO as possible, you'll get, get a pretty good sort of like 95 percent of the way their product that optimizes for those SEO components, but then to your point, you know, you can do some final refinement and glossing over where essentially like. You can put it in such a position that it is ready to post, but you're [00:28:00] getting the bulk of the work sort of done with the AI tools that you need.

[00:28:05] Stefan Repin: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Yeah, in Pharma, like whoever I've asked, like people don't on the personal level, a lot of people use AI, but on a company level, there's so much fear and the fear is based on basically nothing, you know, it's like, Oh, they're going to take our jobs. Well, not really because the AI does not have your subject matter expertise, which is in your head, right?

[00:28:31] Stefan Repin: It's not like online

[00:28:33] Shawn Malloy: Yeah, that's why, you know, like I say with AI and generally just like my interest in tools in general is to where can we take the tasks that don't require like an enormous amount of critical thinking and, and use AI to automate as much as possible and, and to your point, yeah, it will lead to some people having this fear that they're going to like lose their job, but that's generally In [00:29:00] the spaces where those processes, can be streamlined and highly automated with AI, but you know, I think it also frees up the sort of like critical thinking resources where you can apply them in areas where we can be more creative and what have you and leave those other tasks to the AI to, to automate it out, so to speak.

[00:29:21] Stefan Repin: Yeah, that's for sure. I was going to ask you how do you like, how do you manage, do you, how do you manage your like MQ, like sort of. MQLs and SQLs, right? Like how do you nurture them and how do you help sales with, with this sort of like, with your material, with the materials you create in marketing, let's focus on this

[00:29:44] Shawn Malloy: Yeah, so generally speaking, you know, when an MQL comes in, let's say it's like a totally naive MQL that they've just downloaded a case study, they've attended a webinar for the first time, something like that. And now the goal to your point is to, how do I get them? [00:30:00] Into a first sales calling and qualified and, and using, using marketing techniques, we can nurture them to that point.

[00:30:08] Shawn Malloy: So what's important I do is really like segmenting, you know, what the MQL characteristics are. So basically like, there are a couple of different things, you know, what industry are they coming from? What title do they have? And then, you know, what type of content have they engaged with? And you can, you know, so I, I use like HubSpot for example, and can segregate based on those different characteristics of the profile what nurture stream they should go into.

[00:30:34] Shawn Malloy: So. Let's say, for example, you know, they're from a big pharmaceutical company and they're focused on like diabetes. So I have a lot of content in this you know, pharma diabetes nurture that it will automatically send based on their profiles to an email marketing nurture where. They'll get a consistent cadence of content that starts with more top of funnel and says, Hey, you know here's, [00:31:00] here's some additional resources.

[00:31:01] Shawn Malloy: Maybe like, thanks for attending the webinar or whatever it was before. Here's some additional resources in the diabetes space. Maybe we have like a guide on how to set up a diabetes study. Maybe we have some interesting article about, you know, what are different modalities of drugs being tested in the diabetes space and then, you know, set up that sort of like a drip campaign where you'll maybe within a couple of the days. Touch back with them and provide them with another additional interesting nugget, but always have a call to action where they can you know, book a time immediately with the sales team. What I like to do is basically shortening the amount of clicks and actions it takes for someone to get on a call with the sales lead.

[00:31:42] Shawn Malloy: Because basically if they are in the headspace where they are ready to talk you want to make sure that you you know, Take advantage of that momentum and, and pull them through. So basically like what I'd always do is make sure within those nurtures, you're giving people the opportunity to immediately convert.

[00:31:58] Shawn Malloy: And that's what having those [00:32:00] well placed CTAs to say, if you, if you want to like talk more, if you have a study design in mind, you can click this button and then you can directly book on, you know, one of our sales leads calendars and what have you. And so the important thing is to just constantly during that nurture period, keep, keep yourself top of mind because. They may not be ready to buy immediately, but maybe like, and especially because clinical trials, it just takes so long, maybe they'll be ready to buy in a couple months, but having them in your you know, like your listserv or on your newsletter distribution or what have you. Eventually that is sort of like a way in the background to just keep your brand constantly top of mind for them.

[00:32:38] Shawn Malloy: And again, just having the ability for them, if they are ready at any given point to click the right CTA and be able to you know, book time with your, your sales lead. If again, they're, they're ready to do so.

[00:32:53] Stefan Repin: That's the right strategy to do it, right? Hopefully our listeners are listening, and actually trying to practice that and [00:33:00] implement because implementation, you know, execution is the hardest part. So if you guys want to learn more than you can, you know, I guess you can DM Shawn here.

[00:33:08] Stefan Repin: And he'll teach you how to do that.

[00:33:10] Shawn Malloy: Absolutely.

[00:33:11] Stefan Repin: Awesome. I have my last actually two questions for you, Shawn, and basically how do you stay up to date to like latest sales and marketing, like tools, technologies, sort of tactics?

[00:33:24] Shawn Malloy: Yeah, it's a good question because, you know, it's not the type of thing where you can just attend classes or anything like that. And you know, what I've generally found is I have a network of people that are on the ground, you know, my, my sales development reps and, you know, my marketing you know, content generators and what have you. That I basically tell them, you know, always look for how to do something differently as opposed to just, you know, sometimes we get, we get in the regimen of just doing things the same way over and over again. So I, I do encourage them to, to go out into the market and just kind of see, like. How other [00:34:00] people are doing things, whether that's like trying to observe some of our competitors or even, even in interviews, what I like to do, interestingly enough, is I always ask whenever I'm interviewing a candidate for a sales and marketing position, I always say, like, you know, what do you think is, is a tool that I've never heard of?

[00:34:17] Shawn Malloy: And that, you know, you have tried and think that there's a lot of utility in. And so I've. I have these sort of like subtle ways of discovering things. I wish that almost like as a marketer, there was a lot more marketing for these types of tools that it was easier to discover. But I've generally found like using some, some of just like your network and just like self motivation with your team that to constantly go out and explore and seek better ways of doing things.

[00:34:42] Shawn Malloy: Like you eventually stumble upon good solutions.

[00:34:46] Stefan Repin: Yeah, it came to my mind. Albert Einstein said that doing things the same way and expecting a different outcome is his basically explanation of insanity. So we have to do things differently if you want to stay safe, right? [00:35:00] If you want to stay sane. Cool. Okay. Last question. So what would be your advice to like pharma companies?

[00:35:08] Shawn Malloy: Generally speaking, I think, you know, one of the big takeaways that I've had being both within pharma as well as like outside and selling into pharma is just like, think about the practical implications of anything that you're doing you know, we all sort of, again, if you have like a scientific engineering background, as I do myself, I like to think about the theoretical possibilities of just like, if I were to have the most perfect protocol and the cleanest data, like this is what it would look like, but the real world is a lot messier than people think.

[00:35:40] Shawn Malloy: And so what I've generally seen being on the other side of the fence is that those, those idealistic thoughts about just like how a product should work in the market is just like, not the reality of how people interact with it or the reality of. of the populations that you're trying to serve. So as a very specific example, just like you know, I [00:36:00] remember, basically developing some drugs where the characteristics, like of the particular individuals that we would study in the protocol this was like for a Parkinson's disease drug. We're just like. We're not aligned with actual Parkinson's disease patients, like the specific characteristics that they wanted, it refined it down to such a tiny, tiny population that they almost just did not exist. within reality. It led to a great scientific experiment where all the variables were controlled.

[00:36:29] Shawn Malloy: But the reality is, is that a lot of these disease populations are not homogenic or genetic. And then basically like you need to account for the fact that there's just a lot of variants within these populations. And so you want to make. Your products robust enough so that they can serve a lot of different needs versus just like the needs of a very select few that fit within your, your scientific profile.

[00:36:53] Stefan Repin: Yeah. In marketing, we have, that's something I've learned a long time ago. There is such a thing called growth marketing, [00:37:00] where, which is sort of a scientist way to organize marketing, where you have scores for different experiments that you want to run. And then you interview everyone and you try to get an unbiased answer for like, what's the success rate you think is certain experiment will like how successful you think is going to be, what's the resources involved and so on.

[00:37:20] Stefan Repin: So actually there is a place for science in marketing as well. And that's, that's how we rank the experiments. I want to rank for Platforce. Let's say we want to test a certain channel and then I gather everyone's opinion on. Like, what do you think is going to, how do you think it's going to work?

[00:37:37] Stefan Repin: Like, you just have to give like a number. Do you think how many, how much resources you'll need and, you know stuff like that. And basically you get, at the end you get a number so you can look at it with an unbiased view, like a scientist say, okay, actually I like this experiment, but it turns out this one would work, might work better.

[00:37:57] Stefan Repin: So you go with your best hypothesis, right?

[00:37:59] Stefan Repin: [00:38:00] That's something from, from science that we've gotten here. Thank you, Shawn. This is like fantastic. I, I don't know, I guess you're in my top five guests that I've had so far. I'm really looking for, like, I'm sorry that it doesn't, I can't record sessions longer than 40 minutes because people will just like leave.

[00:38:16] Stefan Repin: So I tried to keep them engaged with shorter sessions, but I really want to interview you like maybe in a half a year time, in a year time, maybe we could discuss like some other topics if you're open.

[00:38:26] Shawn Malloy: Cool. Yeah, absolutely. Anytime.

[00:38:28] Stefan Repin: Shawn, thank you so much and I'll see you maybe half a year from now.

[00:38:32] Shawn Malloy: All right. Take care, Stefan.

[00:38:34] Shawn Malloy: Thanks.

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