How to Move Stakeholders from Awareness to Sustained Adoption Without Friction | Ep. 60

I think messaging is actually one of the biggest challenges people have because if you're not really clear in the problem you solve and people don't understand your message really, really quickly, all the money you put into the rest of your marketing activities is like sailing a ship with the anchor down. If I get a marketing email that is longer than a couple sentences, I'm not even going to open it. So again, when we're talking about messaging, you need to understand exactly who your end user is. What problem are we solving for that person? You're going to have a lot better success going for 100 great prospects instead of 10,000 potential maybe prospects. What's a good way of messaging without spreading the FUD? Always think about the end of what you want to say in your marketing. What's going to really differentiate you and give you the edge? And I think that needs to start early on. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Med Device Cyber Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about how you can make sure that you're getting your medical device out there and how we're making sure that it's going to be safe and secure. I'm your co-host, Trevor Slatterie, joined by Christian Espinosa, and we have a very special guest today, Claudia. I'll let you go ahead and introduce yourself. Hi, my name is Claudia. I'm the founder and CEO of Podymos. We're a dedicated medical device marketing agency. I've been in the industry for over two many years now. I started in Johnson & Johnson, then went through Debbard, through then to a startup called Spinal Modulation. I was then working with agencies and realized actually most agents we work with are great at what they do. They just don't understand medical devices. So there had to be a different way, and that's where Podymos comes from. So we're dedicated to medical device. It's all we do. Yeah, and we just work with this industry. Sounds like the marketing equivalent to what we do. We do cybersecurity just for medical devices. We don't try to touch anywhere else because we see that there are too many generalists that don't fully understand what's going on there. It's a unique space. You can't try to take a general approach to something like medicine. So true. And actually we've been asked to move into pharma, and each time we're like, no, we just understand med tech. Med tech is totally different. We love med tech. And where are you coming from? You're like right outside of London. Is that right? Yeah. So we're in Brentford. Our office is in Brentford in London. We're also in Boston, but I'm obviously in Brentford at the moment. So just outside of London, just by Heathrow. Cool. And I was just in London until a couple days ago, so I'm still a little bit jet lagged. I'm like perfectly jet lagged because before that I was in Dubai. Trevor doesn't travel that much anymore. So he used to be the one always jet lagged, but now he's pretty stationary in California. Yep. Feels especially this time of year, it feels really good not to leave California. Yeah. And it seems, you know, I've been talking to everyone on our team today and, oh, how's it going? Oh, I'm under two feet of snow and I just go, that's a bummer. Yeah. So where does the name Podymos? Did I say it right? Podymos. Yeah. Podymos. Podymos. Yeah. Podymos. Where does the name come from? It's a very unique name. Yeah. Everybody asks this question. So it actually, when I started Podymos, I was sitting with my dad, and we were trying to think about names, and he was reading a paper, and he came up with the word Podymos. And the reason he liked it and I liked it was because it means we can. So Podymos with an E in the middle means we can, and that's very much the ethos that I have of Podymos. So we changed the E for a Y, and yeah, because then we could trademark it and everything else, but that's where it comes from. So it means we can. I like it. People always ask about our name as well. Ours is a little bit different. Yours is really cool though, because I know the background of your name as well. Trevor, what is the background of our name? Do you know? I do. So I know that the source of it is due to your I should know. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think if I've been around for as long as I have, and I don't know why we're named what we are, that's a bad look. I was going to say, this could be a job limiting moment. Exactly. Yeah. This is, I found the glass ceiling. It's right here. Uh, it's part of from, you know, of course, obviously Christian, your passion for the outdoors, mountaineering and rock climbing, and then seeing all the goats up at the top of the mountain and how the goats are striving for the peak. They're climbing higher than any of us. And then of course, you know, blue representing the integrity and the safety and trust that we try to push forward so much in the industry. And of course there is the striking comparison of the white goat against the blue sky in the mountains, which is hard to not bring up when talking about the origin. Oh, good. That's actually, that's really cool. I've just learned more stuff about why Blue Goat is called Blue Goat. So I didn't, I knew much of that, but I didn't realize why the blue was blue. I thought it was more around the purple cow in the sense of from a marketing perspective, you want a purple cow. I thought Blue Goat came more from that. I didn't realize because you're also into marketing as well, Christian. You talk about like the goat purple cow. Is that what it is? Purple cow. Have you read that? Haven't you? I've read the book. It was not, it's not named at anything to do with a purple cow though, actually. No. No. Well, I, I didn't know if that was like because actually I was like, why blue? Because there's no blue goats. So obviously now I understand why that is. Interesting. So what are some of the biggest challenges, Claudia, that med tech innovators have with marketing? Because I know like that's what you focus on, and I think people in general have challenges with marketing, but I'm sure it's even more challenging with medical devices. I think there's, there's many things. So I think one, one of the biggest challenges we see, and I think this is a broad thing across many things, not just medical device. I think messaging is actually one of the biggest challenges people have because if you're not really clear in what you do or if you're not really clear in the problem you solve, and people don't understand your message really, really quickly, all the money you put into the rest of your marketing activities is like sailing a ship with the anchor down, you know, because people aren't remembering in any event. So I think that's a really big challenge, but also, you know, the marketing ecosystem is actually really large, you know, like, so what do I do to drive awareness? What are the best channels? How do I measure it? What CRM should I use? How do I report? You know, things like this. And then what content should I create? What's included? Like there's so many things to think about. And I think actually that's, that's a real challenge, not only the messaging at the front, but actually how do I really get my message across to the right audience at the right time? You know, I mean, you know, when we've spoken before, what we're trying to do in marketing is we're trying to get people to go from awareness all the way to sustained adoption. I say sustained adoption because you want somebody to be using your device and continually using your device with no friction. And so in order to do that, you need to make sure there's no issues, fears, and concerns all the way along that pathway for each stakeholder. And I think it's really challenging to map all that out, you know, companies who are, are launching have so much to deal with and then to have to map all of your stakeholders out and understand all the points where you can, you know, move them through their buyers journey. I think that's a bit, that's a huge challenge. I think it's the ecosystem and understanding how to break that down, but the number one thing is the messaging at the front because you can be as pretty as you want, but if your messaging is wrong, it will pull all your marketing down. I agree. Trevor's probably heard me talk about messaging 10,000 times. I think we have three meetings about messaging every week, basically. Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like this morning. Yeah, but you know, it's the hardest thing to do as well, because especially when people are in a company and you're working, you know, you know the ins and outs of this device like nobody else does, and then you have to come out and get a really simple story for your end user. You know, there's a huge problem which is a curse of knowledge, you know, and so you, you think you're explaining things simply, but actually it's nowhere near as simple as it needs to be. And actually there's a really good, and Christian, you'll probably know this. The curse of knowledge is a term that basically looks at, you know, if your knowledge is at a level 10, what level do you think you need to explain something at for people to buy? That's a tricky one. I'd have to say it's got to be two or three somewhere in there. Do you know that's exactly right, but most people say six or seven. So it is. So you're taking all your knowledge and you're taking it down to a level two or three, and that's where people make buying decisions. And that's how simple your messaging needs to be. At different stages, people need different information at different stages, but it needs to be so easy. People look at it and just go, Oh, yeah, I've got that problem. Yeah, I'm going to get in contact with them or I'm going to learn more. You know, it needs to be that simple. And it's really hard, really hard to do that. I think it's an especially difficult thing in the health care space because of how complicated some of these solutions are. And so trying to distill it down because even still if you're trying to make it as simple as possible, but your messaging is six paragraphs long. If I get, you know, a marketing email that is longer than a couple sentences, I'm not even going to open it. I just go, Ooh, that's too much. And so trying to distill such complicated difficult tasks and processes into something concise enough to catch the attention of, you know, someone who's super busy, just trying to go through their day, like a hospital IT admin or, you know, a hospital executive, trying to make a big purchasing decision. Capturing that much attention with that distilled information, I'm sure, is a really difficult challenge to solve there. And you know, I think you mentioned something really important there, which was these people are really busy, and so, you know, there is so much noise out there these days. Like, I mean, you know, you probably get, my inbox is flooded every day with people emailing me, my LinkedIn is flooded, social media is flooded, you know, everything is flooded. So how do you cut through the noise? And, you know, because, so, and it has to be really, really quick in order to do that. I totally agree. But that's where it's also important, important. You know, the other thing that I think is often really easy to do, but isn't the right thing to do is have general messages. You know, so again, when we're talking about messaging, you need to understand exactly who your end user is and actually say what problem are we solving for that person. Because that's who you're going to grab their attention. So, you know, one company, if they got one product and they have five stakeholders, they'll have five different messages for that product and then they'll have one that sits on top and pulls the whole product together. So it's a lot more complicated. And then that goes through all of your materials, all your social media, et cetera, et cetera. So it's, yeah, it's, it's a lot more involved probably than people think. Who was the president who said, if I had had more time, I would have written a a shorter letter. That was Mark Twain. Oh, was it? Okay. I don't think he was the president. He could the president may have said that too, but Mark Twain said that he, but it's true, isn't it? If I'd have more, had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. And it's like that's the whole thing with messaging. Like, you know, at the end, you should be like, oh, yeah, that's so simple, but it's like, it takes a long time to get it quite so simple. We spent a lot of time working on that, and I think I frustrate most people on my team because I'm like, we got to have had a better way to say this messaging because it's not resonating. It's not landing with people. And like you said, Claudia, there's for one company, there might be six, five or six stakeholders that need a little bit different message for all of them to land. Yeah. And, and, you know, if you're not going to go out and do really large market research on which message is resonating, and, you know, let's be real, most people can't afford that. So, actually, how are you then going to test your message? Well, you're going to test it through landing pages, paid ads, things like that. That's one way of testing it. But, so, you know, not only do you have your messages that you think are right, you'll probably end up tweaking them over time. And so, us at Podymos, you know, we're story, a story brand certified agency. So we have a very good process at creating, uh, messaging, you know, which is really efficient, but even then, you know, if you don't really understand the problem your customer solves, you could end up changing it over time because there's a lot that goes into it. But when it's right, it's like riding a speedboat over the water. You know, in the sense, everything cuts through the noise. Do you feel we have our messaging down, Trevor? I think Claudia was just saying, it's a constant refinement process, and I think we're somewhere in that process. But what you were saying earlier about you're going to have one product, one problem, and five different people with different opinions. I, it can't be more true. I mean, even thinking about if someone comes to me and they're saying, oh, we're going to reduce the time it takes to generate this technical report by 15%. I go, well, I'm not even sure how long it's taking right now. It might be taking 20 minutes. It might be taking six hours. I don't know. If someone says this is how you're going to reduce your team's spend and create, you know, better margins on any of your engagements, I'll go, great. That's what I wanted to hear. That's my concern. But if we bring this over to, you know, our testing team and say,