• Marketing Mojo: Insights from Myomo CMO Cliff Conneighton

    Jesse Ciccone, VP and managing director at Matter recently spoke with Myomo CMO Cliff Conneighton to discuss B2B marketing, measurement and more. Check out the video from the interview and read below for the full conversation.

     

    Jesse Ciccone (JC): Tell us a little about yourself and about Myomo.

    Cliff Conneighton (CC): I’m Cliff Conneighton, I’m the Chief Marketing Officer for Myomo Inc. located in Cambridge since it was spun out of MIT about ten years ago. Myomo is a wearable medical robotics company. Our patient is someone who has their arm, but they’ve lost use of it due to stroke, nerve injury, brain injury or spinal cord injury. Turns out that is about 1% of the population.

    Personally, I started as a software engineer then moved into product management and finally into marketing where I have been for, pretty much, the rest of my career. Much of that has been in the software market for enterprise eCommerce systems. I was Chief Marketing Officer for four companies; three of which sold to larger companies and Myomo is the fourth.

     

    JC: Myomo obviously has a *very* specific target customer. How does this impact your marketing strategy? How is it different from your previous roles?

    CC: We have a portable, robotic brace that fits over your arm and reads the faint muscle signals that are not enough to move the arm, but are readable by the device. We then amplify those signals and use it to drive motors. It restores the mobility and a person’s ability to do daily activities like feeding and dressing themselves.

    Our go to market channel strategy is very complex, compared to what I’m used to. Our customer is orthotics and prosthetics (O&P) practices who fit patients for artificial limbs. The problem is that these people don’t generate business so we must get the patients to express the need for the brace. To do so, we market directly to patients as well as to physicians and therapists who will recommend or prescribe our product to patients. On top of that, the brace is paid for by insurance companies, and it’s not cheap. Therefore, we educate insurance companies about the benefits so they will cover it. The whole ecosystem of players working together is complex: the patient needs to want it., We then need to determine if the patient has sufficient signal for the product to work. Are they healthy enough otherwise for it to be a good fit? A physician needs to prescribe it.  Back to the O&P practice to fit and deliver it.  Finally, there needs to be a therapist lined up to teach the patient how to use the product.

     

    JC: What marketing initiatives and technology within Myomo will you invest more heavily in over the next year? What will become less of a priority and why?

    CC: Early this year we began a robust CRM system to track the players we work with. We invested in not only configuring the software but also enhancing the data we’re capturing. Not just the opportunity data, but the clinical data, meaning we need a system which is HIPAA compliant, patient privacy law compliant, and we needed to educate our salespeople and clinicians on how to use the system. In addition, we continue to invest more and more in direct to patient marketing. We’re finding social media and Google AdWords is a great way to reach patients.

     

    JC: How do you measure your social media?

    CC: When we advertise on social media, we drive all the clicks back to our own site, rather than an O&P. That way, we know who clicks through, and we can follow the patient through the qualification process. In some cases, if the patient went directly to an O&P, we could lose track of the patients and not know what ads are performing. We have a pre-qualification that we do on the phone. If somebody clicks through on the website from an ad, Facebook ad or a Google ad, we call that patient and do a brief pre-qualification on the phone to make sure they’ll be medically qualified.

     

    JC: Why is a genuine commitment to social responsibility an important aspect of marketing? Is Myomo doing any initiatives?

    CC: Our whole mission is to conquer upper limb paralysis. And that in itself is social good. This is the first company where I can actually see, one patient at a time, how the product changes people’s lives. We had a young woman, 26 years old, who suffered a stroke and couldn’t use her arm. She left a message on our website and said, “I watched your videos and I cried.” That is moving. Not just to her, but to us. We are doing our best to contribute to society by the very product that we sell.

     

    JC: What differentiates Boston as a tech hub and how do you see that evolving over the next five years?

    CC: Boston as a tech hub has pros and cons. On the downside, it’s hard to find good people as they’re in demand and we have to pay a lot more for good people. But on the plus side, there are many good people in Boston. How it will change depends on what companies like Amazon do. If Amazon really wants to hire thousands more engineers, it’s going to make it tougher for companies like Myomo to find people.

     

    JC: What content works best for you when marketing your product?

    CC: The content that works for us is patient stories. So, videos, case studies, when we do PR, it’s all about telling a patient story. We’ve had very good luck getting patients’ videos on local news channels here in Boston, we’ve had WBZ, Chronicle , NBC Boston, we’ve been on TV in Cleveland and Kansas City, and it’s all about patients. That’s our content.

     

    JC: What KPIs are most critical to your executive team and board? How are you being asked to measure the effectiveness of your marketing and PR programs?

    CC: The KPIs that are critical to us in marketing are the same as they are in sales. We have a tight relationship between marketing and sales. What we measure sales and marketing on is how many patients are moved into the insurance reimbursement process. So, it’s actually not revenue that we’re measured on directly in sales and marketing, because revenue comes later in the process when the insurance company actually accepts the claim and pays for it. But in terms of sales and marketing, we’re measured on what we call an “add to insurance”. That means finding patients who are medically qualified and want the device, an O&P that wants to deliver it, and we just need insurance to pay for it. So, putting them into that process is our primary KPI for sales and marketing.

    Jesse Ciccone

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  • Marketing Mojo: Insights from Buildium VP of Marketing, Michelle Burtchell

    Marketing Mojo: Insights from Buildium VP of Marketing, Michelle Burtchell

    Jesse Ciccone, VP at Matter recently spoke with Buildium VP of Marketing, Michelle Burtchell to discuss B2B marketing, measurement and more. Check out the video from the interview and read below for the full conversation.

     

    Jesse Ciccone (JC): Michelle, tell us a little about yourself and Buildium.

    Michelle Burtchell (MB): I am the Vice President of Marketing at Buildium, a property management software company. I was lucky enough to fall into this field coming out of college, in a small arena in upstate New York, and fell in love with the idea that depending on what a different audience needs at a certain point in time, you can find a way to reach them and help make their life a little better.

    At Buildium, we focus on making sure small business property managers in the United States are more efficient, can get their day-to-day done and can grow their business, all supported by one single platform. Buildium is a 14-year-old startup, founded in 2004 by Michael Monteiro and Dimitris Georgakopoulos, both of who are still at the company.

    A few years ago, Buildium decided to live into the vision of being the next 100-year company in Boston. We want to be that stable company that helps Boston continue to be the startup culture that it is today. To do that, we wanted to make sure we had enough funds and were investing in sales and marketing in a way that we hadn’t before.

     

    JC: What marketing initiatives are you planning to invest in more heavily over the next year?

    MB: We have a stable foundation in demand capture, also known as our ability to find people who need software and fulfill those needs. We haven’t invested in much marketing outside of that so the world is our oyster. I couldn’t tell you one thing that we’re going to invest in, except for experimentation.

    We think that there is a big opportunity in the market, and with the customers we serve, to help educate them on market trends. There is also an opportunity to show our customers how much we appreciate them. It’s not something that a lot of companies invest in, and for us, our customers are our number one priority.

    We are also building a podcast to help educate the more than 14,000 of our customers all working through the same challenges. These small businesses all have stories from the trenches that can help somebody else get better and we are excited to uncover those.

     

    JC: What marketing initiatives do you think will become less of a priority?

    MB: I don’t know the answer to that yet. I think the reason for that is what we are doing right now is working, and as we continue to experiment, we’re building out a culture of test and learn. I’m sure there are going to be many things that we will invest less in. I just don’t know what they are yet.

     

    JC: In an increasingly customer-obsessed world, how do you ensure the customer is the top priority?

    MB: I think companies talk about ensuring the customer is top priority, but the second a customer comes in, they forget about them. They kind of set them and forget them, right?

    For us, understanding why our customers leave us is sometimes even more important than understanding how we get new customers in through the front door. We have an entire swim lane in our product team, in our development side, where we listen to what our customers ask for and then go build those out.

    Customer obsession only works if it’s in your DNA and if everybody is trying to understand who the person that you are marketing to. What are their needs? If you’re not staying in touch and going out on those customer visits every quarter with the person who is using your product, you’re going to miss. We not only do that to understand and learn, but we dedicate resources to making sure that we are making the changes that’ll benefit our customers most.

    We also recently had our first customer event, which sold out in less than 24 hours of announcing it. We ended up opening the rooms and having double the population come in that we thought we would have. Our goal for the event was retention over time, as well as building a community within our customer base.

     

    JC: What differentiates Boston as a tech hub and how do you see that evolving over the next 5 years?

    MB: I think a couple of years ago, I wasn’t sure where Boston would be as a tech hub. I didn’t think it was on the map nearly as much as it should be. I had a pretty unique opportunity to go out and meet with several CEOs and venture capitalists to understand what was happening in the market. Five or six years ago there was this buzz to want to make Boston something bigger than it was.

    I think we are starting to see that now, where you see more and more companies coming into the Boston market. The level of opportunity and competition in the Boston market is amazing to see.

    What makes us unique, and what will continue to make us unique, we are a culture that needs to really focus on inclusion and diversity. Boston has an opportunity to become the leader in that space, and there is not a leader in that space today. We need to keep pushing, we need to keep working, and that needs to become part of our DNA. When you have inclusion, you build the best products. You build something better than anyone else can have.

     

    JC: What marketing technology investments is Buildium making in 2018?

    MB: From a marketing technology investment perspective, we have a pretty decent tech stack right now. It is one of the things that we focus on.

    One of the things we just implemented that we are geekishly excited about is HEAP Analytics. It’s a tracking tool that allows us to understand how people engage with our website, all the way down through the product. We can make sure that, based off what somebody’s needs are, we can deliver the right experience to meet those needs and help them accomplish their objectives.

     

    JC: What KPIs are most critical to your executive team and board? How are you being asked to measure the effectiveness of your marketing and PR programs?

    MB: I would say there are three that we look at, that are pretty much tattooed on my arm. The first one is churn. We have great churn numbers, something that we’re proud of. If your churn numbers go up, it means that you weren’t serving the customer. And so again, that’s part of our DNA, but it is something that we watch all the time to make sure that we are in a good spot and we are serving our customers the best that we can.

    The other metric is the number of new customers that we’re bringing in. We make sure we have the right balance of serving the market that we have and continuing to bring new customers in, and making sure that we’re meeting the demands of both along the way.

    Our third is a core strategic objective for employee pride. We believe that it’s important for us as a company to build an experience for everyone that works here that makes them proud. We want them to look back and say this is the best place that they have ever worked. As an executive team and as a board, we focus a lot on making sure that we are doing the things and making the right decisions that would make people say, “I was proud to be at Buildium,” when they look back on their career here.

     

    JC: You mention customer churn, how can marketing help with customer churn?

    MB: It depends on what the reasons are, and sometimes it’s something that we need to work on and decide to work on in product. The places where marketing can help is we can help listen. We need to listen to what’s happening from a product perspective, but also to what’s happening in the market, and to see if there’s another, better solution out there, and help the product team get a better understanding of what that looks like.

    A lot of times, our customers aren’t aware of some of the investments we’ve made in the product. We’ve built out something called Buildium Academy to educate about things such as benefits of the products and how to use them.

     

    JC: How are you being asked to measure the success of your marketing and PR initiatives?

    MB: From a marketing perspective, when we look at new customer adoption, we have a very traditional funnel. We have leads to MQLs, MQLs to SQLs, SQLs to customers. We funnel our campaigns and initiatives down to that customer level. That being said, it’s something that we’re willing to blow up at any point in time and make sure that we’re looking at things the fresh, new way.

    From a customer perspective, we make sure that the programs in place have a positive impact on customer retention. We want to make sure our customers are engaged with both the brand, the company and the product, within certain amounts of time.

    From a PR perspective, we look a lot at perception in market. We look to understand overall brand awareness and brand perception. How can we help make sure that it is the perception that we want people to have because we’ve earned it?

    Jesse Ciccone

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  • Marketing Mojo: Insights from Evergage CMO Andy Zimmerman

    Marketing Mojo: Insights from Evergage CMO Andy Zimmerman

    Tim Hurley, EVP at Matter recently spoke with Evergage CMO Andy Zimmerman to discuss B2B marketing, measurement and more. Check out the video from the interview and read below for the full conversation.

     

    Tim Hurley (TH): Andy, tell us a little about yourself and a little about Evergage.

    Andy Zimmerman (AZ): I’m the CMO here at Evergage. I’ve been here about three and a half years but previously in B2B marketing at various software companies, mostly Boston-based software companies such as Brainshark, edocs and Virtusa and Kenan Systems. I joined Evergage because I was a client before coming aboard and got to know the product and the vision of the CEO well.

    Evergage provides the leading real-time personalization platform. We enable marketers to deliver personalized digital experiences to their audiences, prospects and customers. All the way down to the one-to-one level. They do that by defining rules or using machine learning to provide experiences such as website experiences, in-app messages, or even personalized content within emails.

    It’s all based on who the person is and what they’re doing and interpreting this information to deliver a relevant call to action, image, headline, or recommendation. By delivering these personalized experiences, customers see better engagement, retention and loyalty.

     

    TH: As we approach 2018, what are the major marketing initiatives or campaigns that you’re prioritizing at Evergage?

    AZ: The first one is around thought leadership. We put a lot of investment into our content, it’s not just veiled collateral. We really pride ourselves in delivering high-quality, educational, engaging content.

    We have eBooks, whitepapers, webinars, blog posts, case studies, and customer videos. We do The Personalization Summit each year, which is geared toward high-quality content and a great experience for our guests.

    We just published a book called One-to-One Personal Engaging in the Age of Machine Learning. It’s a helpful guide for marketers trying to navigate the path forward and employ machine learning and personalization.

    One of the key things we’re doing with the book, and other thought leadership content, is un-gating it. Our book is available for purchase on Amazon but you can also download it for free right from our website. We don’t ask for any information, you can just download it.

    One of the challenges for B2B marketers is around just standing out and getting good brand recognition and exposure. What we’ve decided is, why put up barriers? Why annoy people with forms? Our solution is all about delivering great customer experiences and we want to adhere to that same philosophy by making it easy for people to consume and share our content.

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    Our website is the second big marketing focus for us. We have a strong website with high traffic. We pay a lot of attention to our ranking on Google and put a lot of effort into SEO and optimizing our pages. Of course, we put a lot into personalizing the experience so when people come to our site, they get content recommendations, even a home page experience based on their industry, where they came from or what content they’ve consumed in the past.

    The third area is ABM or account based marketing, which marketers have been doing for a long time but now has more technology and thinking behind how to go after target accounts. We’re relatively early with this but have seen positive results in terms of visitors from our target accounts, meetings booked and opportunities created.

    It’s the traditional tactics like email and events, but also, newer tactics such as more targeted advertising and personalization. You want to show your audience the white glove treatment by providing relevant content and information.

    Fourth, we invest in sponsoring and speaking at key trade shows and industry events such as the Sirius Decisions Annual Summit, Martech, and Shoptalk, which are important lead sources for us.

    Lastly, email is a critical means of communicating with our prospect and customer base. We see a correlation between opportunities created and customers retained from those who are engaging with the content and the nurture emails that we continue to send out.

     

    TH: You mentioned account based marketing. It seems like it’s coming back into vogue but with a lot of new techniques like content marketing and inbound marketing, how are those techniques playing into your approach to ABM?

    AZ: As I mentioned, ABM is not really a new concept but what is new is figuring out your target market. Identifying key accounts to go after and then putting resources behind those efforts is just smart marketing. But through ABM we are seeing a close collaboration with sales which is critical. One of the great things about ABM is you’re forced to collaborate on the outreach, program, and content strategy, as well as the messaging and content.

    From a content marketing perspective, we produce a lot of good content for different audiences. We’re using personalized recommendations for certain accounts when they come to our site which helps bolster the benefits and the ROI of our investments in content.

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    TH: Let’s talk about measurement. What KPIs are you or your executive team or your board looking at as the most important in terms of measuring the effectiveness of your program?

    AZ: At the executive and board level, it’s all about ARR (annual recurring revenue) and CAC (customer acquisition costs). Recurring revenue is king, and, of course, keeping control on the costs to acquire customers which includes sales, marketing and other related items. From an ARR perspective, new bookings and retention are the key metrics we pay attention to from an executive level for the health of the business.

    Dipping down a little bit more into the marketing metrics, CAC is relatively fixed. We monitor costs however we need to measure top of the funnel metrics to drive growth such as website, traffic and unique visitors. It’s conversions and conversion rates and getting people into the lead flow.

    We have a scoring system for engagement, so we’re measuring people based on what they’re doing on the site or with our content in order to prioritize follow up by our BDR team. One of the most critical metrics we look at is how many of the leads are turning into an initial meeting with a sales rep which flows into the sales metrics and process.

     

    TH: There’s a lot of talk among CMOs these days about being customer obsessed. Is Evergage a customer obsessed company?

    AZ: Yes, we are. I think in any SaaS business, if you aren’t, you’re at an extreme disadvantage. The customer has the control so if they’re dissatisfied, they can shut off the service and find an alternative. Therefore, you must go above and beyond to make sure customers get the value they expect when they invest in your solution.

    One of the things that we pride ourselves on is giving personalized service. It’s not just personalization through digital channels, but it’s personalized service when they call, when they’re having face-to-face meetings or during on boarding. We’re doing frequent business reviews and assessing the health of the implementation. Are you getting the results you expected? How do they match up against your goals? All that needs to be paid close attention to.

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    Interestingly, marketing is playing more and more of a role in that. Marketing traditionally has a lot of the skills and project management is around making sure things are happening programmatically. We want to make sure we are serving customers on a regular basis, driving customer reviews on public websites, enlisting customers to become advocates and speak at events, provide testimonials and do videos. All these activities benefit from a lot of marketing attention as well for execution.

     

    TH: The notion of un-gating your content seems pretty unique. What prompted that at Evergage?

    AZ: We drew inspiration from our own experiences on the web, where we’ve been to sites that have ungated content. Our brand promise is about delivering great customer experiences, shouldn’t we deliver a great experience to our prospects?

    It’s challenging because there’s so much competition. How do you make your brand known and stand out? When people think personalization, I want them to think Evergage. We don’t want to put up barriers so our content can get out to as many people that are interested.

    I want to be one step ahead which allows us to differentiate not only from a product and capabilities perspective, but also from a marketing perspective. We have a platform that helps marketers be better marketers, so we need to lead the way with innovation.

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    We started with the un-gated landing page for our beforementioned book. We’ve already seen the landing page become the second most popular page on our site already, after our home page. Given this success, we’ll be rolling out this process of un-gating our other content such as eBooks, whitepapers, and webinars. We want maximum reach and minimum barriers to adoption.

     

    TH: The Martech industry segment is so dynamic, it’s changing, seemingly every day. What type of investments is Evergage making in terms of its Martech spending?

    AZ: We’re investing in a variety of tools. We’ll continue to invest in marketing automation. We have Act-On which we’ll continue using for our email marketing programs. Salesforce of course, is kind of the core, as it is for a lot of B2B companies. We also invest in funnel metrics tools like FunnelWise, and Google Analytics. We use Evergage for A/B testing and analyzing personalization campaign effectiveness and other digital marketing analytics.

    We also are investing in ABM tools. We’re starting to use ListenLoop to do targeted ads across social and other websites. We’ll probably also look at predictive scoring tools  which goes along with our ABM program. Those are some of the tools that we’re investing in going forward.

     

    Tim Hurley

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