Podcast
Introducing Ratio’s [Buyer Matrix Series]
John Farkas
Welcome to the debut episode of our exciting new monthly series on the Buyer Matrix, brought to you by goratio.com! In this episode, we unveil our innovative approach to understanding and engaging with key players in the healthcare technology sector through our newly launched Buyer Directory. Join us as we delve into the intricacies of the Buyer Matrix methodology, designed to provide invaluable insights into some of the most sought-after healthcare technology buyers. Whether you’re a seasoned industry professional or just starting out, this series promises to offer enlightening discussions and actionable strategies for engaging with the healthcare market. Hosted by John Farkas, alongside Jess Head, we’ll explore how the Buyer Matrix℠ empowers companies to navigate the market with precision, empathy, and trust.
Show Notes
(0:42) Introducing the New Monthly Series
(4:54) Defining the Buyer Matrix
(15:07) Effective Marketing Communication for Teams
(23:49) Highlighting the Core Challenges CIOs Face
(26:49) Closing Thoughts
Listen Now
Transcript
Introducing the New Monthly Series
John Farkas:
Hello and welcome everyone to the highly anticipated start of another exciting season of the Healthcare Market Matrix. I’m your host, John Farkas, and we are thrilled to be back and ready to dive deeper into the dynamic world of healthcare technology marketing. And to kick things off, we have something really special for you as we move into the 2024 season. Today, we are debuting a new monthly series, focused on new healthcare buyer directory we have launched on goratio.com. And this series revolves around a methodology we call The Buyer Matrix. It’s actually the inspiration for the name of our podcast in some ways. And The Buyer Matrix, we’re going to take some time in a little bit to start defining for you and show you just how it fits in all of what we do.
So we’re looking to use this series to provide some invaluable insights and discussions around some of the most sought after healthcare technology buyers that there are. And Jess is going to be joining me today as we explore how we utilize The Buyer Matrix in our work to help companies approach the market with the understanding and empathy that they need to really establish trust and to win the interest of the right decision makers the right way. So thanks for joining us today and welcome, Jess.
Jess Head:
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be a part of this new series and definitely shed some light on our new buyer persona directory. And for those loyal listeners who’ve maybe been following Ratio’s content on LinkedIn or our blog or hopefully have subscribed to our Insights newsletter, you’re likely familiar with Ratio’s tried and true Buyer Matrix, but for those who may be new to our Buyer Matrix methodology, John, I have a question for you. Do you know in the last, at this point, 12 years, right? Because we just had our anniversary, Ratio anniversary, was it last week or the week before, but how many Buyer Matrixes have we produced for clients over the years?
John Farkas:
Oh, gosh, Jess.
Jess Head:
Do you even know that number?
John Farkas:
It’s a whole bunch. I can say that. And the thing that’s been true about that work is that it is every time, probably now hundreds of times we’ve worked through that process, there’s never been one time where it’s, well, I’ll say it in a positive, every time it is proven extremely valuable and ends up promoting amazing unity and understanding within the organizations that we help through this process. And I’ll say it’s not something that you need an organization like Ratio to do, but it certainly helps to have an objective third party in the room because part of what happens here in this process is there’s a lot of assumptions that are questions, and there’s a lot of work that we do to help organizations understand some of the things that they’re kind of skipping over in the process of doing the work that it takes to truly connect with the market. And that’s what The Buyer Matrix is all about. And we’ll talk more about that.
Jess Head:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think we recently had a conversation with a client and they referred the exercise to therapy for their leadership team, and I was like, yeah, I mean, honestly, after experiencing several of these foundation workshops over the last year with our clients, I mean certainly it has an era of therapy to it and certainly becomes kind of the cornerstone of our client’s messaging platform. So we’re really excited about unveiling this in a more accessible way via our website for those that are trying to problem solve with some of their positioning and messaging challenges as healthcare is not an easy place to be when it comes to-
John Farkas:
You’ve noticed that, have you?
Defining the Buyer Matrix
Jess Head:
Yeah, just a bit. Yeah. John, I mean, for those that are maybe new to Ratio, new to The Buyer Matrix, talk to us a little bit about what this is. What is The Buyer Matrix?
John Farkas:
So at the end of the day, this is really simple, and Jess, I know you’ve heard me say this a lot of times, it’s not rocket science, and yet, the discipline that it represents is some of the most foundational basics that there are. Really what we do is take a look at who you are selling to, what are the verticals that you’re selling into? So in any healthcare technology company, there’s likely going to be, there may be one, maybe it’s just healthcare providers as a big deal, but even if you look at providers, you’re going to break that into subsets. There could be large health systems, there could be small health systems, there could be individual hospitals, there could be physician groups. You can break it down. You go into the payer space and you’ve got a similar breakdown there. You go into potentially the pharma space and you divide that up. And each one of those verticals, there are people that make decisions that are related to your solution, and those people are experiencing problems in their day-to-day workflow.
The thing that we’re looking for, and the first step is, so first thing we do is say, okay, who are you going after? The next thing is what are the positions? If you’re going after large health systems, who are the people in large health systems that have problems, that have some bearing or some connection to your solution? And so you map those out, you list them out, and then of those people that have problems related to your solution, this is the tricky part. What are those specific problems? And this is the part that takes the most time, effort, and energy, because the quick thing is I need an X, Y, Z to do A, B, C. Well, we hear that very often when we say what’s their problem? They’ll say, “I need X, Y, Z to do A, B, C.” That’s not a problem.
It has to go upstream from that. You have to go, what is the thing that is going on in their business that’s keeping them up, that’s causing friction? What’s the anatomy? What are the people involved? What does it cost? How do you talk about that in real world terms that the actual person that you hope will be buying from you or interested in your product, how would they articulate it? Now there’s a lot of ways we can get out that. Usually we’re working with clients and they’re taking a first pass at it, and sometimes after that, we’ll do some validation and do some interviewing of the actual people in those seats to get an idea, is this accurate? But it’s super critical that we identify what those real problems are in a voice that the actual buyers would use. And so we’ll spend a lot of time pushing into that, getting those answers.
A lot of times when we workshop this with our clients, they’ll bring actual buyers into the process with them and we’ll talk to them and say, “Okay, how would you articulate this? How are you looking at this before you knew about the solution, and what was your perspective?” And we mine that deeply. And then we go all the way through their problem [inaudible 00:08:55]. There’s several things most likely that are related for this one persona. That’s one position in an org chart. And then we’ll look at another position in the org charts that might be adjacent to it, and we’ll do the same thing because those problems for that different buyer are slightly nuanced and different, and they have a different priority order in how they’re set up. And then we’ll keep going down the org chart until we’ve addressed all the primary elements related to the buyer set in that vertical.
And then once we have that mapped out, then we will look to the team that we’re working with and say, “Okay, how do you solve for that problem specifically?” And then we do this in a mind map framework, and then we’ll connect the node to the problem that says, “Here’s how we solve for it.” And you may have two or three ways you solve for that particular problem, but we tie each of those to the problem itself and we have it all mapped out there. And then we work, once we have all of that information, we go all the way through the vertical, all the personas, all the problems and all the solutions for those problems, and then we put them in rank order. What’s the most important problem? And we put that on the top. What’s the most important persona? We put that to the top. What’s their most important problem? We put that on the top and we work through the whole ranking and prioritize that really carefully recognizing that it always moves and always changes. This isn’t a one and done. This is a dynamic process and a discipline.
But when we’re done with that, what a company has is a pretty top to bottom narrative of the shape of their business, and it’s a really amazing narrative when you sit and look at it and when you can put that together with your team, the amount of alignment and understanding that happens between the product leads and the market leads and the sales leads and the executive team and how people are talking about it builds tremendous alignment and understanding because there might be part of your group that sees the top, I mean, we’ve seen it transform product roadmaps in the past, because they’ll confront a fact that, okay, our primary buyer has a problem that we have a 50% solution for, and right now our product team is working on this problem that’s way down the list of priorities, and we’re spending half of our development cycles right now to solve a problem that we should be spending that time finishing our complete solution for their number one problem because we can, and we just haven’t allocated those resources.
Jess Head:
Yeah. Well, and I think too, I know if you navigate for our listeners, if you navigate to the buyer persona directory on our website under insights, you can kind of see an infographic that gives you a taste of what that structure looks like as John’s speaking to this, but it certainly does not showcase how big that map is, especially we have infographics that kind of showcase the depth of that, that kind of allude to how many subsets of challenges are we addressing and how many solution statements are we coming up. But John, do you know an average for a client, is there even an average of how many we typically will be creating per-
John Farkas:
It is really hard to know, but what I can tell you is we’ve got Buyer Matrix for our clients that if you were to print them out on eight and a half by 11, remember eight and a half by 11 sheets of paper that used to be a thing.
Jess Head:
Yeah.
John Farkas:
If you were to print them out, it’d probably be like five pages deep as far as how much information gets put-
Jess Head:
In like 10 font.
John Farkas:
… into that document. Yeah, 10 or 12 point type. It’s a lot of information. It really is. But the alignment it creates and the insight that comes from it is so valuable. And so often organizations will build what I call traditional buyer personas. Who is this person? Where does their kid play soccer? How old are they and where do they go to school and all that fun stuff. At the end of the day, for a B2B buyer, most of that information doesn’t matter, at the end of the day it’s about the problems that they’re living with day-to-day, and you better have a really sharp point on what those are, and if you kind of play a little bit of lip service to what they need, which is very often what the buyer personas that I’ve seen put together by people taking traditional approaches for it, they’ll just put, “I need this, I need that, I need that.” Well, that’s not a problem.
That is speaking to the very tip of the iceberg, the stuff that creates empathy, the stuff that you can build campaigns around is that deeper understanding of the anatomy of the real felt need that is in the trenches that people are living with and tearing their hair out because they can’t figure out a good way to solve right now, and it’s leading to financial crisis in certain segments of a health system or whatever that looks like. And so you’ve got to have that real world perspective and understanding to be able to effectively engage, and that’s a lot of what this process is designed to help bring out.
Effective Marketing Communication for Teams
Jess Head:
Yeah, I mean the empathy factor is huge, I think. And to that point, so we’re speaking to how this creates a foundation for your company to reference, but what is the power of that? I know oftentimes we will see leadership teams, the CEO knows exactly how to sell, what the offering is, but oftentimes that doesn’t necessarily trickle down to the business development team or even the revenue department or there isn’t that through line of understanding on what the true challenge is that’s being solved. So maybe if you could speak to a little bit of our experience in that. I mean, I know it’s a common challenge for, you have a really passionate founding team or a passionate leadership team, team that’s ready to share this story, but it isn’t communicated in a way with the larger team to really execute against the scalability of the company, right?
John Farkas:
Yeah. As you said, the CEO knows exactly how to sell. I was in the seat of several of the marketing people that are listening to this right now, and they’re laughing, right? Because they’re going, “Uh, uh. That’s not true.” The CEO thinks they know exactly how to sell, and that’s part of our premise that we’re coming at this with. This isn’t about what the company thinks, it’s about what the market is, and that’s what we’re trying to get at the end of the day, and there’s a pretty well-known axiom in marketing circles for those who are students of the pragmatic method, which is a marketing methodology that if you don’t know it, you should probably just Google pragmatic marketing. But there’s kind of a famous maxim that comes out of pragmatic marketing that says, “Your opinion while interesting is irrelevant.” And that’s one of the first admissions that we have to make in this process is that this isn’t about what we think is a company.
This is about what is truly happening in the market. This is about what the real pulse is and the people that we are trying to communicate and connect with. That’s where empathy becomes so important. If you don’t know, you need to. If you don’t know where they are, you need to know. We’ve talked to, at this point, a lot of CIOs for major health systems, and the thing we hear over and over again is some consternation with how ignorant people selling them into them are. I mean, it’s just a consistent thread that we hear over and over again. Don’t come to me thinking you know what’s going on here, know what’s going on here, and then come talk to us, because I don’t have time to educate you on this. You can figure it out. You can figure out what’s going on here. There’s enough signal flow in the market right now to let you know at least at a fairly responsible level what’s going on inside our walls.
Come with some of that understanding because I don’t have time to sit you down and educate you. There’s too much going on, and if you’re having to do that as a solution provider right now in healthcare, nobody’s going to have time for you. It’s just the reality. There’s too many people, first of all, you’ve got too much competition for what you’re doing, and that competition is really determined to win. And if you aren’t doing your homework and understanding your market and being willing to have these conversations and do the diligent work of putting together an informed buyer matrix, you’re at a significant disadvantage. One, because your competition is likely to be doing some of that work, and two, because the people you’re trying to sell into don’t have patience. They’re the most inundated, sought after targets right now by bunches of companies. And so you thinking that you have God’s gift to healthcare technology is not going to do you any good. You can’t make those assumptions.
Jess Head:
For sure, for sure.
John Farkas:
There’s my soapbox.
Jess Head:
Yeah. There’s the soapbox for anybody who’s wondering.
John Farkas:
Anybody who wonders what John thinks, now you know. It’s such a frequent trap that we see, and it’s hard to avoid, because the people who are developing smart technology are passionate about smart technology, and it is easy to get enamored with what you can do. That’s an easy trap to fall into as an organization. Look at this cool thing that we just developed. Well, the world, as you all know right now, it’s developing really fast and there’s a lot going on, and healthcare systems are on the ropes, providers are on the ropes. There’s a whole lot of crisis and change going on right now in the market that’s very dynamic, and you have to be doing the work of empathetically understanding what’s going on out there so that you can come into the conversation in a way that makes meaning. And so that’s what The Buyer Matrix at the end of the day is designed to do.
It’s a tool designed to help equip you to make meaning and have the kind of conversation that will get a healthcare executive to raise an eyebrow and say, “I think these guys might have something to say. Because if they know that about me, they probably have solution that can help me actually get at some of this quagmire that I’m trying to untangle.” And that’s a big part of the opportunity right there, and that’s what The Buyer Matrix is designed to do. It’s designed to prioritize the insight that you need to then develop into meaningful assertions for the market, that when it comes across, when you figure out the channel to kind of get the little bit of 10-second attention that a healthcare executive can spare, they read a lead line of an article or of a paper that you’ve published and their eyebrow goes up, and they double click, and then you begin the process of building trust, and you do that because you know, and you have done the work of developing the empathy and you’ve mapped that out responsibly. It is a discipline. It takes work, and that’s what we’re here to help promote.
Jess Head:
For sure.
John Farkas:
Your technology and what your product does is only a part of your solution, or at least it better be only a part of your solution. How you deliver that, how you make it happen. It better be in the solution part of how you speak about what you do, because if it’s just about the tech and there’s not much patience for shallow deployment right now.
Jess Head:
Yeah, exactly.
John Farkas:
There’s got to be some elbow-to-elbow. There’s got to be a willingness to get in there and get dirty and a deep concern for understanding context and knitting it in extremely well, because it is complicated, and any assumptions that it’s just easy plug and play any assumptions that this is going to be a simple integration or whatever, that’s going to lose in a big hurry because they’ve lived, every one of these executives that we talked to has lived some horror stories where they’ve taken a jump and pushed a deployment and seen a train wreck as a result. I think I heard a train whistle in your background.
Jess Head:
Yes. No, there’s totally a train in the background. It’s the ambiance for the conversation.
John Farkas:
That’s right. Yeah. We’re wanting to avoid those train wrecks, and so making sure that you’re set up as an organization, not only in what it is you’re bringing across as a solution, but your understanding of the sophisticated nature of knitting it into an already vastly complicated ecosystem and your readiness to stand with them in that process and you showing them how you are ready to jump into that, that better be a part of your solution matrix in today’s world, because it doesn’t just stop at your tech.
Highlighting the Core Challenges CIOs Face
Jess Head:
Yeah, very, very true. Well, and I’m very excited about exploring this Healthcare Market Matrix, no pun intended, by diving into these specific roles. I know we’ve interviewed many CIOs on the show this last year, and so if you go to our website now, you’ll see that we have launched the first installment of The Buyer Matrix series. And really what this informs is those core challenges that they are experiencing and the various facets of business that they’re engaged with and mapping them to solution attributes for consideration, things that tech companies should be evaluating as they refine and elevate their positioning and messaging in the market. So definitely check that out. John, is there anything that you want to touch on in realms of that highlight?
John Farkas:
Well, what I just say, we’re going to start with the CIO, because the CIO is certainly one of the top personas that many technology companies need to at least show up for, and so if not directly sell to, and so we’re starting there because they have one of the most challenging positions in the ecosystem. They are one of the most inundated, hard to reach targets in the ecosystem. And so the importance of your approach shot being really well-informed for that group is more important than any. If CIO’s on your primary buyer list, you better have your pencil sharpened. And a pencil is a writing instrument the people used to use back in the day.
Jess Head:
Like the paper.
John Farkas:
And when you say pencil sharpen, that means you got to have your stuff together. I’m talking to technologists. So just keep that in mind. And so when we dive into that, I’m excited to start there in our series because it’s going to be some of the more challenging conversations, and we’ve done a lot of homework around who those folks are and what they’re looking for, and so that’ll be some interesting insight we’ll have the opportunity to dive into.
Jess Head:
Yeah, absolutely. And if there are specific things that you want us to focus on, audience, no, for those listening. If there are specific roles that you are interested in learning more about and you think that we should explore on the show, be sure to reach out to us.
John Farkas:
Let us know.
Jess Head:
Yeah, let us know. We’re open to any priorities that you would like us to cover as we explore the healthcare market matrix together.
John Farkas:
Yep. We are looking forward to it. It’s going to be a lot of fun this season, and really we do invite you to interact with us. Let us know what would be helpful. We want to hear from you, so like Jess said, don’t be a stranger. Jump in and let us know.
Closing Thoughts
Jess Head:
Awesome. Well, I know by the time this episode airs, we will have just returned from Vive, so I’m sure in the subsequent episodes we’ll have quite a recap on that. Our experience, and I know many will be headed to HIMSS in a couple of weeks as well, so it’s an exciting spring time. It’s upon us.
John Farkas:
It is the Health Tech Spring, and it is a dynamic market out there. We’ve already talked about that last season. We spent some time with Chris McCord, talking about the crazy nature of health tech funding right now. I know that many of you listening to this right now are dealing with constrained budgets and challenges pertaining to market penetration and the opportunity to trying to do a lot of work and cover a lot of ground with limited resources. We can talk about that. There’s a lot going on. It is going to be an interesting, that dynamic combined with all that generative AI is in the midst of pushing around and changing right now has a lot of us on our toes, and so I’m looking forward to the conference season and seeing some of how things are positioned. I know I’ve already got a number of those sessions kind of targeted that I’m going to be front row in because I want to hear what some of the pundits have to say about the horizon, but we’re going to be staying tuned to that. We’ll be sure to be keeping you abreast of all of what we see unfolding on the horizon there as we get back from some of these events, and be eager to talk about it here on the healthcare market matrix.
Jess Head:
Absolutely. I’m looking forward to it. All right. Well, until next time. thanks for letting me join, John. It’s been fun.
John Farkas:
You bet. Thanks for joining us. Make sure you check it out, goratio.com. We’ve got lots of great resources for you there, and we look forward to seeing you next time on Healthcare Market Matrix.
Outro:
Healthcare Market Matrix is a Ratio original podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, then jump over to healthcaremarketmatrix.com and subscribe, and we’d really appreciate your support in the form of a five star rating on your favorite podcast platform. It does make a difference. Also, while you’re there, you can become a part of the healthcare Market Matrix community and get access to courses and content that’s created just for you by signing up for Insights Squared, a monthly newsletter dedicated to bringing you the latest health tech marketing insights right to your inbox. Ratio is an award-winning marketing agency headquartered in the Nashville, Tennessee. We operate at the intersection of brand and growth marketing to equip companies with strategies to create meaningful connections with the healthcare market and ultimately drive growth. Want to know more? Go to goratio.com. That’s G-O-R-A-T-I-O.com, and we’ll see you at noon Central next week for an all new episode From our team at Ratio Studios. Stay healthy.
Transcript (custom)
Introducing the New Monthly Series
John Farkas:
Hello and welcome everyone to the highly anticipated start of another exciting season of the Healthcare Market Matrix. I’m your host, John Farkas, and we are thrilled to be back and ready to dive deeper into the dynamic world of healthcare technology marketing. And to kick things off, we have something really special for you as we move into the 2024 season. Today, we are debuting a new monthly series, focused on new healthcare buyer directory we have launched on goratio.com. And this series revolves around a methodology we call The Buyer Matrix. It’s actually the inspiration for the name of our podcast in some ways. And The Buyer Matrix, we’re going to take some time in a little bit to start defining for you and show you just how it fits in all of what we do.
So we’re looking to use this series to provide some invaluable insights and discussions around some of the most sought after healthcare technology buyers that there are. And Jess is going to be joining me today as we explore how we utilize The Buyer Matrix in our work to help companies approach the market with the understanding and empathy that they need to really establish trust and to win the interest of the right decision makers the right way. So thanks for joining us today and welcome, Jess.
Jess Head:
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be a part of this new series and definitely shed some light on our new buyer persona directory. And for those loyal listeners who’ve maybe been following Ratio’s content on LinkedIn or our blog or hopefully have subscribed to our Insights newsletter, you’re likely familiar with Ratio’s tried and true Buyer Matrix, but for those who may be new to our Buyer Matrix methodology, John, I have a question for you. Do you know in the last, at this point, 12 years, right? Because we just had our anniversary, Ratio anniversary, was it last week or the week before, but how many Buyer Matrixes have we produced for clients over the years?
John Farkas:
Oh, gosh, Jess.
Jess Head:
Do you even know that number?
John Farkas:
It’s a whole bunch. I can say that. And the thing that’s been true about that work is that it is every time, probably now hundreds of times we’ve worked through that process, there’s never been one time where it’s, well, I’ll say it in a positive, every time it is proven extremely valuable and ends up promoting amazing unity and understanding within the organizations that we help through this process. And I’ll say it’s not something that you need an organization like Ratio to do, but it certainly helps to have an objective third party in the room because part of what happens here in this process is there’s a lot of assumptions that are questions, and there’s a lot of work that we do to help organizations understand some of the things that they’re kind of skipping over in the process of doing the work that it takes to truly connect with the market. And that’s what The Buyer Matrix is all about. And we’ll talk more about that.
Jess Head:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think we recently had a conversation with a client and they referred the exercise to therapy for their leadership team, and I was like, yeah, I mean, honestly, after experiencing several of these foundation workshops over the last year with our clients, I mean certainly it has an era of therapy to it and certainly becomes kind of the cornerstone of our client’s messaging platform. So we’re really excited about unveiling this in a more accessible way via our website for those that are trying to problem solve with some of their positioning and messaging challenges as healthcare is not an easy place to be when it comes to-
John Farkas:
You’ve noticed that, have you?
Defining the Buyer Matrix
Jess Head:
Yeah, just a bit. Yeah. John, I mean, for those that are maybe new to Ratio, new to The Buyer Matrix, talk to us a little bit about what this is. What is The Buyer Matrix?
John Farkas:
So at the end of the day, this is really simple, and Jess, I know you’ve heard me say this a lot of times, it’s not rocket science, and yet, the discipline that it represents is some of the most foundational basics that there are. Really what we do is take a look at who you are selling to, what are the verticals that you’re selling into? So in any healthcare technology company, there’s likely going to be, there may be one, maybe it’s just healthcare providers as a big deal, but even if you look at providers, you’re going to break that into subsets. There could be large health systems, there could be small health systems, there could be individual hospitals, there could be physician groups. You can break it down. You go into the payer space and you’ve got a similar breakdown there. You go into potentially the pharma space and you divide that up. And each one of those verticals, there are people that make decisions that are related to your solution, and those people are experiencing problems in their day-to-day workflow.
The thing that we’re looking for, and the first step is, so first thing we do is say, okay, who are you going after? The next thing is what are the positions? If you’re going after large health systems, who are the people in large health systems that have problems, that have some bearing or some connection to your solution? And so you map those out, you list them out, and then of those people that have problems related to your solution, this is the tricky part. What are those specific problems? And this is the part that takes the most time, effort, and energy, because the quick thing is I need an X, Y, Z to do A, B, C. Well, we hear that very often when we say what’s their problem? They’ll say, “I need X, Y, Z to do A, B, C.” That’s not a problem.
It has to go upstream from that. You have to go, what is the thing that is going on in their business that’s keeping them up, that’s causing friction? What’s the anatomy? What are the people involved? What does it cost? How do you talk about that in real world terms that the actual person that you hope will be buying from you or interested in your product, how would they articulate it? Now there’s a lot of ways we can get out that. Usually we’re working with clients and they’re taking a first pass at it, and sometimes after that, we’ll do some validation and do some interviewing of the actual people in those seats to get an idea, is this accurate? But it’s super critical that we identify what those real problems are in a voice that the actual buyers would use. And so we’ll spend a lot of time pushing into that, getting those answers.
A lot of times when we workshop this with our clients, they’ll bring actual buyers into the process with them and we’ll talk to them and say, “Okay, how would you articulate this? How are you looking at this before you knew about the solution, and what was your perspective?” And we mine that deeply. And then we go all the way through their problem [inaudible 00:08:55]. There’s several things most likely that are related for this one persona. That’s one position in an org chart. And then we’ll look at another position in the org charts that might be adjacent to it, and we’ll do the same thing because those problems for that different buyer are slightly nuanced and different, and they have a different priority order in how they’re set up. And then we’ll keep going down the org chart until we’ve addressed all the primary elements related to the buyer set in that vertical.
And then once we have that mapped out, then we will look to the team that we’re working with and say, “Okay, how do you solve for that problem specifically?” And then we do this in a mind map framework, and then we’ll connect the node to the problem that says, “Here’s how we solve for it.” And you may have two or three ways you solve for that particular problem, but we tie each of those to the problem itself and we have it all mapped out there. And then we work, once we have all of that information, we go all the way through the vertical, all the personas, all the problems and all the solutions for those problems, and then we put them in rank order. What’s the most important problem? And we put that on the top. What’s the most important persona? We put that to the top. What’s their most important problem? We put that on the top and we work through the whole ranking and prioritize that really carefully recognizing that it always moves and always changes. This isn’t a one and done. This is a dynamic process and a discipline.
But when we’re done with that, what a company has is a pretty top to bottom narrative of the shape of their business, and it’s a really amazing narrative when you sit and look at it and when you can put that together with your team, the amount of alignment and understanding that happens between the product leads and the market leads and the sales leads and the executive team and how people are talking about it builds tremendous alignment and understanding because there might be part of your group that sees the top, I mean, we’ve seen it transform product roadmaps in the past, because they’ll confront a fact that, okay, our primary buyer has a problem that we have a 50% solution for, and right now our product team is working on this problem that’s way down the list of priorities, and we’re spending half of our development cycles right now to solve a problem that we should be spending that time finishing our complete solution for their number one problem because we can, and we just haven’t allocated those resources.
Jess Head:
Yeah. Well, and I think too, I know if you navigate for our listeners, if you navigate to the buyer persona directory on our website under insights, you can kind of see an infographic that gives you a taste of what that structure looks like as John’s speaking to this, but it certainly does not showcase how big that map is, especially we have infographics that kind of showcase the depth of that, that kind of allude to how many subsets of challenges are we addressing and how many solution statements are we coming up. But John, do you know an average for a client, is there even an average of how many we typically will be creating per-
John Farkas:
It is really hard to know, but what I can tell you is we’ve got Buyer Matrix for our clients that if you were to print them out on eight and a half by 11, remember eight and a half by 11 sheets of paper that used to be a thing.
Jess Head:
Yeah.
John Farkas:
If you were to print them out, it’d probably be like five pages deep as far as how much information gets put-
Jess Head:
In like 10 font.
John Farkas:
… into that document. Yeah, 10 or 12 point type. It’s a lot of information. It really is. But the alignment it creates and the insight that comes from it is so valuable. And so often organizations will build what I call traditional buyer personas. Who is this person? Where does their kid play soccer? How old are they and where do they go to school and all that fun stuff. At the end of the day, for a B2B buyer, most of that information doesn’t matter, at the end of the day it’s about the problems that they’re living with day-to-day, and you better have a really sharp point on what those are, and if you kind of play a little bit of lip service to what they need, which is very often what the buyer personas that I’ve seen put together by people taking traditional approaches for it, they’ll just put, “I need this, I need that, I need that.” Well, that’s not a problem.
That is speaking to the very tip of the iceberg, the stuff that creates empathy, the stuff that you can build campaigns around is that deeper understanding of the anatomy of the real felt need that is in the trenches that people are living with and tearing their hair out because they can’t figure out a good way to solve right now, and it’s leading to financial crisis in certain segments of a health system or whatever that looks like. And so you’ve got to have that real world perspective and understanding to be able to effectively engage, and that’s a lot of what this process is designed to help bring out.
Effective Marketing Communication for Teams
Jess Head:
Yeah, I mean the empathy factor is huge, I think. And to that point, so we’re speaking to how this creates a foundation for your company to reference, but what is the power of that? I know oftentimes we will see leadership teams, the CEO knows exactly how to sell, what the offering is, but oftentimes that doesn’t necessarily trickle down to the business development team or even the revenue department or there isn’t that through line of understanding on what the true challenge is that’s being solved. So maybe if you could speak to a little bit of our experience in that. I mean, I know it’s a common challenge for, you have a really passionate founding team or a passionate leadership team, team that’s ready to share this story, but it isn’t communicated in a way with the larger team to really execute against the scalability of the company, right?
John Farkas:
Yeah. As you said, the CEO knows exactly how to sell. I was in the seat of several of the marketing people that are listening to this right now, and they’re laughing, right? Because they’re going, “Uh, uh. That’s not true.” The CEO thinks they know exactly how to sell, and that’s part of our premise that we’re coming at this with. This isn’t about what the company thinks, it’s about what the market is, and that’s what we’re trying to get at the end of the day, and there’s a pretty well-known axiom in marketing circles for those who are students of the pragmatic method, which is a marketing methodology that if you don’t know it, you should probably just Google pragmatic marketing. But there’s kind of a famous maxim that comes out of pragmatic marketing that says, “Your opinion while interesting is irrelevant.” And that’s one of the first admissions that we have to make in this process is that this isn’t about what we think is a company.
This is about what is truly happening in the market. This is about what the real pulse is and the people that we are trying to communicate and connect with. That’s where empathy becomes so important. If you don’t know, you need to. If you don’t know where they are, you need to know. We’ve talked to, at this point, a lot of CIOs for major health systems, and the thing we hear over and over again is some consternation with how ignorant people selling them into them are. I mean, it’s just a consistent thread that we hear over and over again. Don’t come to me thinking you know what’s going on here, know what’s going on here, and then come talk to us, because I don’t have time to educate you on this. You can figure it out. You can figure out what’s going on here. There’s enough signal flow in the market right now to let you know at least at a fairly responsible level what’s going on inside our walls.
Come with some of that understanding because I don’t have time to sit you down and educate you. There’s too much going on, and if you’re having to do that as a solution provider right now in healthcare, nobody’s going to have time for you. It’s just the reality. There’s too many people, first of all, you’ve got too much competition for what you’re doing, and that competition is really determined to win. And if you aren’t doing your homework and understanding your market and being willing to have these conversations and do the diligent work of putting together an informed buyer matrix, you’re at a significant disadvantage. One, because your competition is likely to be doing some of that work, and two, because the people you’re trying to sell into don’t have patience. They’re the most inundated, sought after targets right now by bunches of companies. And so you thinking that you have God’s gift to healthcare technology is not going to do you any good. You can’t make those assumptions.
Jess Head:
For sure, for sure.
John Farkas:
There’s my soapbox.
Jess Head:
Yeah. There’s the soapbox for anybody who’s wondering.
John Farkas:
Anybody who wonders what John thinks, now you know. It’s such a frequent trap that we see, and it’s hard to avoid, because the people who are developing smart technology are passionate about smart technology, and it is easy to get enamored with what you can do. That’s an easy trap to fall into as an organization. Look at this cool thing that we just developed. Well, the world, as you all know right now, it’s developing really fast and there’s a lot going on, and healthcare systems are on the ropes, providers are on the ropes. There’s a whole lot of crisis and change going on right now in the market that’s very dynamic, and you have to be doing the work of empathetically understanding what’s going on out there so that you can come into the conversation in a way that makes meaning. And so that’s what The Buyer Matrix at the end of the day is designed to do.
It’s a tool designed to help equip you to make meaning and have the kind of conversation that will get a healthcare executive to raise an eyebrow and say, “I think these guys might have something to say. Because if they know that about me, they probably have solution that can help me actually get at some of this quagmire that I’m trying to untangle.” And that’s a big part of the opportunity right there, and that’s what The Buyer Matrix is designed to do. It’s designed to prioritize the insight that you need to then develop into meaningful assertions for the market, that when it comes across, when you figure out the channel to kind of get the little bit of 10-second attention that a healthcare executive can spare, they read a lead line of an article or of a paper that you’ve published and their eyebrow goes up, and they double click, and then you begin the process of building trust, and you do that because you know, and you have done the work of developing the empathy and you’ve mapped that out responsibly. It is a discipline. It takes work, and that’s what we’re here to help promote.
Jess Head:
For sure.
John Farkas:
Your technology and what your product does is only a part of your solution, or at least it better be only a part of your solution. How you deliver that, how you make it happen. It better be in the solution part of how you speak about what you do, because if it’s just about the tech and there’s not much patience for shallow deployment right now.
Jess Head:
Yeah, exactly.
John Farkas:
There’s got to be some elbow-to-elbow. There’s got to be a willingness to get in there and get dirty and a deep concern for understanding context and knitting it in extremely well, because it is complicated, and any assumptions that it’s just easy plug and play any assumptions that this is going to be a simple integration or whatever, that’s going to lose in a big hurry because they’ve lived, every one of these executives that we talked to has lived some horror stories where they’ve taken a jump and pushed a deployment and seen a train wreck as a result. I think I heard a train whistle in your background.
Jess Head:
Yes. No, there’s totally a train in the background. It’s the ambiance for the conversation.
John Farkas:
That’s right. Yeah. We’re wanting to avoid those train wrecks, and so making sure that you’re set up as an organization, not only in what it is you’re bringing across as a solution, but your understanding of the sophisticated nature of knitting it into an already vastly complicated ecosystem and your readiness to stand with them in that process and you showing them how you are ready to jump into that, that better be a part of your solution matrix in today’s world, because it doesn’t just stop at your tech.
Highlighting the Core Challenges CIOs Face
Jess Head:
Yeah, very, very true. Well, and I’m very excited about exploring this Healthcare Market Matrix, no pun intended, by diving into these specific roles. I know we’ve interviewed many CIOs on the show this last year, and so if you go to our website now, you’ll see that we have launched the first installment of The Buyer Matrix series. And really what this informs is those core challenges that they are experiencing and the various facets of business that they’re engaged with and mapping them to solution attributes for consideration, things that tech companies should be evaluating as they refine and elevate their positioning and messaging in the market. So definitely check that out. John, is there anything that you want to touch on in realms of that highlight?
John Farkas:
Well, what I just say, we’re going to start with the CIO, because the CIO is certainly one of the top personas that many technology companies need to at least show up for, and so if not directly sell to, and so we’re starting there because they have one of the most challenging positions in the ecosystem. They are one of the most inundated, hard to reach targets in the ecosystem. And so the importance of your approach shot being really well-informed for that group is more important than any. If CIO’s on your primary buyer list, you better have your pencil sharpened. And a pencil is a writing instrument the people used to use back in the day.
Jess Head:
Like the paper.
John Farkas:
And when you say pencil sharpen, that means you got to have your stuff together. I’m talking to technologists. So just keep that in mind. And so when we dive into that, I’m excited to start there in our series because it’s going to be some of the more challenging conversations, and we’ve done a lot of homework around who those folks are and what they’re looking for, and so that’ll be some interesting insight we’ll have the opportunity to dive into.
Jess Head:
Yeah, absolutely. And if there are specific things that you want us to focus on, audience, no, for those listening. If there are specific roles that you are interested in learning more about and you think that we should explore on the show, be sure to reach out to us.
John Farkas:
Let us know.
Jess Head:
Yeah, let us know. We’re open to any priorities that you would like us to cover as we explore the healthcare market matrix together.
John Farkas:
Yep. We are looking forward to it. It’s going to be a lot of fun this season, and really we do invite you to interact with us. Let us know what would be helpful. We want to hear from you, so like Jess said, don’t be a stranger. Jump in and let us know.
Closing Thoughts
Jess Head:
Awesome. Well, I know by the time this episode airs, we will have just returned from Vive, so I’m sure in the subsequent episodes we’ll have quite a recap on that. Our experience, and I know many will be headed to HIMSS in a couple of weeks as well, so it’s an exciting spring time. It’s upon us.
John Farkas:
It is the Health Tech Spring, and it is a dynamic market out there. We’ve already talked about that last season. We spent some time with Chris McCord, talking about the crazy nature of health tech funding right now. I know that many of you listening to this right now are dealing with constrained budgets and challenges pertaining to market penetration and the opportunity to trying to do a lot of work and cover a lot of ground with limited resources. We can talk about that. There’s a lot going on. It is going to be an interesting, that dynamic combined with all that generative AI is in the midst of pushing around and changing right now has a lot of us on our toes, and so I’m looking forward to the conference season and seeing some of how things are positioned. I know I’ve already got a number of those sessions kind of targeted that I’m going to be front row in because I want to hear what some of the pundits have to say about the horizon, but we’re going to be staying tuned to that. We’ll be sure to be keeping you abreast of all of what we see unfolding on the horizon there as we get back from some of these events, and be eager to talk about it here on the healthcare market matrix.
Jess Head:
Absolutely. I’m looking forward to it. All right. Well, until next time. thanks for letting me join, John. It’s been fun.
John Farkas:
You bet. Thanks for joining us. Make sure you check it out, goratio.com. We’ve got lots of great resources for you there, and we look forward to seeing you next time on Healthcare Market Matrix.
Outro:
Healthcare Market Matrix is a Ratio original podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, then jump over to healthcaremarketmatrix.com and subscribe, and we’d really appreciate your support in the form of a five star rating on your favorite podcast platform. It does make a difference. Also, while you’re there, you can become a part of the healthcare Market Matrix community and get access to courses and content that’s created just for you by signing up for Insights Squared, a monthly newsletter dedicated to bringing you the latest health tech marketing insights right to your inbox. Ratio is an award-winning marketing agency headquartered in the Nashville, Tennessee. We operate at the intersection of brand and growth marketing to equip companies with strategies to create meaningful connections with the healthcare market and ultimately drive growth. Want to know more? Go to goratio.com. That’s G-O-R-A-T-I-O.com, and we’ll see you at noon Central next week for an all new episode From our team at Ratio Studios. Stay healthy.
About John Farkas
John is the Founder and CEO of Ratio, a growth marketing consultancy that helps B2B healthcare technology companies realize their market potential. With over 14 years of experience in the industry, John has led his team to create and implement strategies that bring complex, innovative products to market in a meaningful way for their clients. John is also the Host of Healthcare Market Matrix, a podcast that helps B2b healthtech marketing leaders gain insight into the problems healthcare leaders face that technology can help them solve.
John’s expertise lies in founder/CEO/CMO advisory, brand strategy, content strategy, growth and performance marketing, and event engagement strategy. He is passionate about empowering B2B tech leaders to connect with their prospects and customers in profound and impactful ways. John frequently contributes to tech publications, industry blogs, and podcasts, sharing his insights and best practices on B2B tech marketing.