How To Transform Marketing WITH Your Company, Not TO Your Company

Erica Seidel: 00:00:03

Hi, you're listening to The Get, the podcast about finding and keeping

Erica Seidel: 00:00:07

great marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.

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I'm Erica Seidel, your host.

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Almost every CMO has the same grumble.

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"Everyone at my company thinks they're a marketer.

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Everyone has an opinion, even if they are not in marketing."

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But what if that's a good thing for everyone to have an opinion?

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Our guest today makes this case.

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What if you acknowledged that people across the company have an emotional

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investment in the brand, and what if you embraced it and actually harnessed it?

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Today, you'll hear from Justin Steinman.

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Justin is the CMO of Definitive Healthcare, the healthcare

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commercial intelligence company.

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Justin joined the company to help scale to the $500 million mark

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and went through an IPO already.

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You'll hear about what it's like to do a rebrand, a marketing

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transformation, and an IPO all at once.

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You'll hear why a CMO should never use the phrase 'my marketing budget.'

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You'll learn how to tell whether a company that has not traditionally

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invested in marketing is ready for it.

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You'll find out how to bring in best practices from big companies

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to companies that are scaling up without overpowering the business.

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And you'll hear one particularly revealing interview question that

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you will probably want to start asking all of your candidates.

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Justin, I am delighted to have you on the show.

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You are pretty fresh off of an IPO for Definitive Healthcare and I would love

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to jump right into this and just ask what are lessons for a CMO following in

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your footsteps and facing an IPO journey?

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Can you share a definite do and a definite don't?

Justin Steinman: 00:01:41

Sure.

Justin Steinman: 00:01:42

So first off, Erica, thanks for having me.

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I'm really happy to be here.

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Looking forward to a fun conversation today.

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I wouldn't say that anybody's going to follow in my footsteps, right?

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I mean, everybody goes on their own unique journey and does their own, and I

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wouldn't be so presumptuous as to say that I have anything figured out, much less the

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whole pathway to an IPO, let me tell you.

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There's no such thing as a definite do and a definite don't aside from

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probably one thing, which is definitely remember that you are part of a

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team and that no man or woman is an island that can do this on your own.

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There are a million and one t hat are part of an IPO and it's going to feel

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crazy and it's going to feel like it's a rollercoaster, but you've got to

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remember that you're on a team and there are people to help you along the way.

Erica Seidel: 00:02:27

Was there something surprising about the experience that

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sticks out to you when you think about going through that whole process?

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Like a moment that, you know, is just very iconic of that time?

Justin Steinman: 00:02:39

So, there are all sorts of things that

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are significant from the IPO.

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I mean, we went public on the NASDAQ, and probably for us, the most iconic

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moment was seeing our brand new brand, our logo, visual identity, and color

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scheme up on the advertisements in Times Square on the big NASDAQ Towers.

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Things that I would recommend that you never do is I'd never recommend that

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any CMO do what we did, which is do a complete visual identity - in fact, more

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or less complete rebrand of the company at the same time as you are doing an IPO.

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It's just too crazy.

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And, you know, we did everything from who our core foundation is, what's our

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core identity to voice and tone, to vision, mission, about us, wordmark,

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logo, color scheme, website, you name it, product naming hierarchy.

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And to try to rebrand that entire company and create - also we created

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a category, too, just for giggles, Healthcare Commercial Intelligence.

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Trying to do all of that at the same time as you are going through an IPO

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and writing an S1 with the bankers and meeting with potential investors and

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doing a road show video and everything.

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There were days when we would literally finish the product naming

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architecture, and then two hours later, I was on the phone with the bankers

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telling them, hey, put this name, put these new product names in the S1.

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Much less, we didn't have a couple hours for it to sit, much less the several weeks

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that you would need for it to kind of sit.

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But without a doubt, the most iconic moment of all was after we rang the

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bell, we went out into Times Square and we saw on those massive towers our new

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slogan "Discover Opportunity," logo, wordmark, everything in bright colors.

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And to think that was on a drawing board, you know, six months ago, I

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guess my laptop monitor, six months ago, as we are debating the finer

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points of it with our advertising agency and our branding agency.

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And so that was a pretty crazy experience.

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It was very surreal, if you will.

Erica Seidel: 00:04:43

That sounds awesome.

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It's quite a moment.

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So, a lot of what you've done at Definitive Healthcare is

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a marketing transformation.

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And this is kind of your signature sauce because you and I have

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known each other for a while.

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We've talked through various jobs that you've had.

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And you seem really good at getting an organization to appreciate marketing,

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both from a budget standpoint and a reputational standpoint internally.

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Can you talk about steering that shift and that part of the

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transformation and how you unlock and evolve others' view of marketing?

Erica Seidel: 00:05:17

I'm very curious to get very specific here.

Justin Steinman: 00:05:21

Yeah.

Justin Steinman: 00:05:21

So there's a lot to unpack in there.

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You know, I'm going to date us both here, Erica, and say that I've known

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you probably for a decade at this point, and I will never forget having

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lunch with you when you said, "Jus, you need to work on your LinkedIn profile.

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And I think you should put that you're a senior executive with a

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flair for business transformation."

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And I think that flair for business transformation is actually on my

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LinkedIn profile still to this day.

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So kudos to you for that.

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So, I do love a good transformation, if you will.

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Looks, it's good to love a good transformation.

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And so one of the things that I was brought into Definitive Healthcare to

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do was really to up level the marketing.

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It was - marketing, historically, had not been an area that

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Jason, our CEO had invested in.

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He's a very, very great product guy, and we have one hell of a sales engine here.

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And Jason really built this company on product and sales.

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And having taken private equity from admin back in 2019, and then going through an

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IPO, basically the feedback was, what got you to $160 million in revenue,

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isn't going to get you to 500 million.

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And one of the things that you need to do is really up level marketing.

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And so I had met Jason through a serendipitous introduction, actually, my

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nextdoor neighbor introduced me to him.

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And, you know, things went pretty quickly and I wound up, it's been

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a little over a year at this point.

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And so when I walked in the door, Jason gave me a lot of rein.

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He said, hey, look, we don't really know a lot about marketing here at Definitive.

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We've just done a lot of inbound, a lot of website, we've got a hunch that

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there's a lot more, but we need you to help us frame that out and teach us.

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And the thing that I've always thought about marketing, it's a

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really interesting job in any company.

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Because every single person is a marketer at some level and thinks

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they know about marketing, right?

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We all watch TV.

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We all see advertisements.

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We all surf the web.

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How many ads do you see on a given day?

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You're being marketed to.

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And at the same point in time, marketing represents the ethos

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of the company out to the world.

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So everybody in the company is emotionally invested in marketing.

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And, you know, we really felt this acutely in our brand.

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Whether we pick Microsoft, Azure, or the Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services, I'm

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not emotionally invested in that, right?

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That is a decision that our CTO and his team of engineers make and

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whatever they go [with], I go great, you guys are the experts, I trust you.

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Conversely, those folks are emotionally invested in what our brand is and

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what our tagline is, and what we stand for, and how we look and

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present ourselves to the market.

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And you know what?

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They have every right to be emotionally invested in that.

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And they have every right to weigh in on that.

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And so, to be a good CMO and get people to appreciate the value, you have to

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not only acknowledge that emotional investment, but you have to embrace it.

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And you have to bring people on the journey.

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And you have to hear people out.

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And you have to not let it get personal when you put, you know, the

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new brand out there and somebody from sales who's been here maybe two years

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says, "I really don't like that.

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It's not who I think we are."

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Well, you gotta hear that person out.

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Now, the trick in all this because if you listen to everybody, you're going

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to wind up with a brand of mish-mash and you're not going to stand for anything,

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which is the worst thing of all.

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Because if you make everybody happy, you're going to make nobody happy.

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So the real trick here is to do pattern recognition and to synthesize a bunch of

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data points that may at first seem random into a comprehensive view where you can

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get a real true brand architecture and message and story to the marketplace.

Justin Steinman: 00:09:18

That's a little bit about how you start to get everybody in, and you've got to

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bring people on the journey and never let it get personal for you because

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it's personal for everybody else.

Justin Steinman: 00:09:31

And that's really important, I think.

Erica Seidel: 00:09:33

That's so great.

Erica Seidel: 00:09:34

I love this idea of acknowledging and embracing the emotional investment

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that the rest of the company has in marketing because I think a

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lot of people run away from it.

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They're like, oh, everybody's going to have an opinion.

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And like I interviewed somebody recently who said, "Other people come to me

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and tell me they have a background in marketing, and I tell them, 'Well,

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I have a foreground in marketing.'"

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And so it's a little bit of this fight back and forth.

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But you're, it's like a jujitsu move or, like, going with it as

Erica Seidel: 00:10:01

opposed to, you know, pushing against the opinions of other people.

Justin Steinman: 00:10:05

You really have to embrace it because people care.

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And you've got to accept and appreciate that people care.

Justin Steinman: 00:10:13

Honestly, the worst thing in the world that you could do would be to

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launch a new brand and have people say, "Eh, I don't really care."

Justin Steinman: 00:10:20

Right?

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That's terrible.

Justin Steinman: 00:10:22

I got - not to pat my team on the back here - but I got like love notes from

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various people across the organization, saying, you know, Justin, you and

Justin Steinman: 00:10:31

your team have managed to put what I've always felt about this company

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into our website and into our story.

Justin Steinman: 00:10:38

One person was like, I honestly got choked up reading the new vision

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and mission cause it's really who I think Definitive Healthcare is.

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When you get those messages, like I started to get choked up.

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I'm like, oh my god, these people care so deeply about this company.

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Cause they come in and they put their heart and soul in every day.

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If I can pivot a bit, it's not just about brand.

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One of the things that I know you and I have always joked about over

Justin Steinman: 00:11:00

the year when I talk about marketing budgets, I never ever, ever use

Justin Steinman: 00:11:05

the phrase "My marketing budget."

Justin Steinman: 00:11:07

Never.

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It is our marketing budget.

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It's my job as the CMO to be the best spender, best investor, best

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utilizer, use that budget in the most efficient way to generate the best

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return on investment for the company.

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But it is never my money.

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It is ours and it's collective.

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And I really view myself as the steward for spending that.

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And then, in order to generate the trust that you need to spend that money, you

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need to have, again, radical transparency.

Justin Steinman: 00:11:45

I publish, for anybody who wants to see it as an Excel file on our

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SharePoint that has no permissions on it, our entire marketing funnel.

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And you can see by segment, we have six segments we compete in, how many NQLs

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we've generated, what their conversion is to a marketing sales qualified

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leader, MSQL, to wins, to dollars of pipeline generated, to cost per MQL,

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cost per SQL, so that everybody in the organization, if they're curious,

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can see how we are performing.

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And then once a month, as part of our monthly KPIs, I walk our senior

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leadership team through all of our metrics in marketing and say,

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hey, we decided we're going to go and double down on a specialized

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campaign doing upsell for biopharma.

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This is how it worked.

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This is what we learned.

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We crushed it over here, and over here, that campaign really didn't resonate.

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And let me tell you why, and here's what we're going to do differently.

Justin Steinman: 00:12:40

And I don't know, because I don't work in a lot of other companies, how many

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CMOs come in and really give that radical transparency so everybody feels like ok,

Justin Steinman: 00:12:50

I know where Justin's spending this money.

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Because if you're not in marketing, it feels like a lot of money coming out.

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Your CFO's like, oh my god, I'm just giving this check to marketing.

Justin Steinman: 00:12:58

What am I getting again from them?

Justin Steinman: 00:13:00

I don't really know.

Justin Steinman: 00:13:01

You gotta really, we're a very, very data-driven company.

Justin Steinman: 00:13:04

So giving that data and that transparency, I think gets people comfortable with how

Justin Steinman: 00:13:09

they work with marketing and that they are getting a good return on that investment.

Erica Seidel: 00:13:13

You know, you said that Definitive was very focused

Erica Seidel: 00:13:16

on product and sales initially and had grown quite nicely with that.

Erica Seidel: 00:13:21

How do you know, as a CMO, whether a company that has traditionally

Erica Seidel: 00:13:26

not focused on marketing is really ready for that transformation and

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is something worthy of your time?

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Like good putty in your hands to shape versus, oh god, stay clear

Erica Seidel: 00:13:36

of this because they say they want marketing, but they might not.

Erica Seidel: 00:13:39

What are those signals?

Justin Steinman: 00:13:41

Well, so at the end of the day, it's

Justin Steinman: 00:13:43

people more than anything else.

Justin Steinman: 00:13:45

You could have the most talented marketer in the world, and I am not that person,

Justin Steinman: 00:13:50

you could put the most talented marketer in the world in a company where the CEO

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didn't give them room to operate and was micromanaging them and thought that they

Justin Steinman: 00:13:57

knew more than that super-talented CMO.

Justin Steinman: 00:14:01

They wouldn't be successful.

Justin Steinman: 00:14:02

And so, you know, when I was looking at Definitive, it really

Justin Steinman: 00:14:07

came down to conversations.

Justin Steinman: 00:14:09

I spent a ton of time talking with Jason, and I really understood.

Justin Steinman: 00:14:13

I mean, Jason's a founder and CEO who started this company in his spare

Justin Steinman: 00:14:16

bedroom in Holliston a decade ago.

Justin Steinman: 00:14:19

And he's still here and he's that rare CEO who's been able to scale with his company

Justin Steinman: 00:14:23

from $0, literally, all the way up to our standpoint we're 160 million in AAR today.

Justin Steinman: 00:14:29

He's still here and working eighty hours a week.

Justin Steinman: 00:14:32

And so I spent a ton of time with Jason, really understanding why

Justin Steinman: 00:14:36

he was ready to do this, what had changed, what his plans were.

Justin Steinman: 00:14:40

True story, Jason told me that we were planning to go, he was

Justin Steinman: 00:14:43

planning, if everything went well, to go public in the fall of 2023.

Justin Steinman: 00:14:47

And I said, Jason, you know, based on my understanding of your market, you need

Justin Steinman: 00:14:50

to build a demand generation engine, you need to fix your brand, we need to

Justin Steinman: 00:14:53

- he had one product marketing manager.

Justin Steinman: 00:14:55

We gotta build up product marketing.

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And Jason's like, Justin, dude, you're going to have two years to come and

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build this thing, plenty of time.

Justin Steinman: 00:15:03

I trust you.

Justin Steinman: 00:15:03

Go and do it.

Justin Steinman: 00:15:04

And, you know, I've been here for forty days and the board calls us up and our

Justin Steinman: 00:15:09

first, literally, my first board meeting, and they're like, all right, so we're

Justin Steinman: 00:15:13

going to target going public next summer.

Justin Steinman: 00:15:16

And I'm like, huh, what do you mean?

Justin Steinman: 00:15:18

And Jason was like, hey, we'll figure it out, man.

Justin Steinman: 00:15:21

So we figured it out.

Justin Steinman: 00:15:22

But I spent a ton of time with Jason.

Justin Steinman: 00:15:24

I spent a ton of time with Joe, our head of sales, really understanding

Justin Steinman: 00:15:28

if Joe's team had the appetite to work with marketing and what they needed,

Justin Steinman: 00:15:32

and if they were ready for that.

Justin Steinman: 00:15:33

They wanted next generation marketing tools if they were going to be good

Justin Steinman: 00:15:36

partners and, you know, tell us what marketing collateral they needed if we

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were going to generate leads with it, were they prepared to follow up, and did

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they have a nice ISR motion to catch them?

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The answer to all of that was, obviously, yes.

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And we have a tremendously tight partnership.

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I talk to Joe, like, five times a day.

Justin Steinman: 00:15:52

I talked to him three times today and it's only 1:30 or 2:00 here.

Justin Steinman: 00:15:55

And I talked to Kate, our head of product, quite extensively to

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understand her attitude and her desire to work with product marketing.

Justin Steinman: 00:16:03

And she listed a whole bunch of things that she needed from marketing,

Justin Steinman: 00:16:06

couldn't wait for us to get in the door here, like MRDs, market sizing,

Justin Steinman: 00:16:10

competitive intelligence, strong product marketing collateral, and

Justin Steinman: 00:16:13

all the good stuff that you would want your head of product to say.

Justin Steinman: 00:16:16

And then I spent some time with the board.

Justin Steinman: 00:16:18

I think I met with four board members one-on-one each for an hour plus,

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really to understand if they were ready to invest in marketing and grow.

Justin Steinman: 00:16:27

And to a person they all were like, yes, and here's where we see the opportunities.

Justin Steinman: 00:16:31

These were all people from, you know, Spectrum Equity, 22C, and Advent who'd

Justin Steinman: 00:16:35

invested in the company, and so they put their money where their proverbial

Justin Steinman: 00:16:39

mouth is to invest in the company.

Justin Steinman: 00:16:40

So if I didn't have that level of board support, I wouldn't have been able to come

Justin Steinman: 00:16:46

in here and do what we needed to get done.

Justin Steinman: 00:16:48

So it really comes down to making sure that your CEO, your board,

Justin Steinman: 00:16:52

your head of sales, and your head of product are all aligned and

Justin Steinman: 00:16:55

ready to make that transformation.

Erica Seidel: 00:16:57

I like how you were asking particular questions and getting

Erica Seidel: 00:17:00

a sense of, you know, is what they want meaty or does it need a shift?

Erica Seidel: 00:17:05

And sometimes the CMO has to kind of educate on what they can bring to an

Erica Seidel: 00:17:08

organization, and I guess it's like some roles have more education than others.

Justin Steinman: 00:17:12

One of the big changes that we've made here

Justin Steinman: 00:17:15

was this was a company that was built on the back of free trials.

Justin Steinman: 00:17:19

And it was basically organic search results driving people to our

Justin Steinman: 00:17:23

website, where you'd give us your contact information, and then we'd

Justin Steinman: 00:17:27

get you on the phone for a free trial and/or a Zoom call or anything.

Justin Steinman: 00:17:31

And because the product is so freaking compelling, the number of people who

Justin Steinman: 00:17:35

closed deals, it was ridiculously high.

Justin Steinman: 00:17:39

But at some point you peter out in terms of where you top off in terms of

Justin Steinman: 00:17:43

where it gets hits from organic search.

Justin Steinman: 00:17:45

We had never done an outbound marketing campaign.

Justin Steinman: 00:17:49

The company had an occasional webinar here and they'd had a ton of people show up

Justin Steinman: 00:17:52

and none of them had ever been qualified.

Justin Steinman: 00:17:54

Well, you know, every marketer listening to this podcast knows, tell me how

Justin Steinman: 00:17:57

many people you want on the webinar and if you don't care if they're

Justin Steinman: 00:18:00

qualified or not, I can get them.

Justin Steinman: 00:18:02

It's getting the qualified people on the webinar and we didn't

Justin Steinman: 00:18:06

have any lead nurtured, right?

Justin Steinman: 00:18:08

So we were basically, historically, before I got here, only capturing

Justin Steinman: 00:18:12

people who were in the buying cycle and we were converting them.

Justin Steinman: 00:18:16

The trick in marketing, particularly as we wanted to increase our average deal size

Justin Steinman: 00:18:20

and go after more enterprise accounts, was we wanted to get people who were

Justin Steinman: 00:18:23

not in the buying cycle into the buying cycle and then nurturing them throughout.

Justin Steinman: 00:18:29

Frankly, that's more expensive than just doing organic search and

Justin Steinman: 00:18:32

having free trials come in, right?

Justin Steinman: 00:18:34

And so there was a lot of, yeah, we know we need to do this, but we're

Justin Steinman: 00:18:39

not really sure it's going to work because this is where we got it.

Justin Steinman: 00:18:42

Justin, we're gonna hold our breath and jump off the cliff with you here,

Justin Steinman: 00:18:45

but I'm going to bring a parachute cause I'm really not sure that I

Justin Steinman: 00:18:47

trust this is actually going to work, but can you please prove it to me?

Justin Steinman: 00:18:51

And so we jumped off the cliff together this year with that, and I put together

Justin Steinman: 00:18:55

our first real outbound campaigns and they've delivered tremendous results.

Justin Steinman: 00:19:00

But there was a lot of healthy skepticism because we'd never done that here before.

Erica Seidel: 00:19:04

Let's talk about the team that's behind you.

Erica Seidel: 00:19:06

Can you talk about - well, first, is leading a marketing team for a

Erica Seidel: 00:19:10

newly public company significantly different than for a private company?

Erica Seidel: 00:19:15

Like, how you switched the organization post IPO?

Justin Steinman: 00:19:18

I'm happy to say that there's been absolutely no change

Justin Steinman: 00:19:21

to the marketing team after the IPO.

Justin Steinman: 00:19:24

If anything, it's refreshing.

Justin Steinman: 00:19:26

So I've got a tremendous team that works with me, just tremendous.

Justin Steinman: 00:19:29

And I really had to disappear for large chunks of last year, working with our

Justin Steinman: 00:19:36

CFO or general counsel, the bankers, to get all of the stuff ready for the IPO.

Justin Steinman: 00:19:42

And so my leadership team really ran marketing day-to-day, kept the business,

Justin Steinman: 00:19:48

not only running, but frankly, growing, even knowing that I was gone for days

Justin Steinman: 00:19:52

or not as engaged as I would like to be.

Justin Steinman: 00:19:55

The best part about being done with the IPO is I'm back in my job and

Justin Steinman: 00:20:00

I love my job and I put my hard hat on and you know, it's all right.

Justin Steinman: 00:20:05

We're back to building our next generation of demand generation campaigns.

Justin Steinman: 00:20:09

We're updating our messaging.

Justin Steinman: 00:20:11

We're going deeper down in.

Justin Steinman: 00:20:12

We're putting in new ROI calculators.

Justin Steinman: 00:20:15

I've got a list of improvements a mile long we want to do on our website.

Justin Steinman: 00:20:19

We're launching our own podcast called Definitively Speaking.

Justin Steinman: 00:20:22

We're doing all sorts of stuff.

Justin Steinman: 00:20:23

Really just kind of good old marketing.

Justin Steinman: 00:20:26

And it's fun to go back and do that.

Justin Steinman: 00:20:29

About the only change that's really impacted me, and it hasn't

Justin Steinman: 00:20:34

impacted really the rest of my team, is I share responsibility for

Justin Steinman: 00:20:37

investor relations with our CFO.

Justin Steinman: 00:20:39

We outsource investor relations to a third party, and I handle the

Justin Steinman: 00:20:43

marketing part of investor relations.

Justin Steinman: 00:20:46

Our CFO, obviously, handles all the financial part of it.

Justin Steinman: 00:20:48

And so I've had to take on that additional responsibility.

Justin Steinman: 00:20:51

And, you know, that's like working on earnings call scripts,

Justin Steinman: 00:20:54

keeping the IR website up to date.

Justin Steinman: 00:20:56

All of that type of stuff has been added to my plate, but that's been a great

Justin Steinman: 00:21:00

learning experience and a lot of fun.

Justin Steinman: 00:21:01

But the rest of us just kind of going off and, doing good marketing

Justin Steinman: 00:21:04

and helping the company grow.

Erica Seidel: 00:21:05

That's great.

Erica Seidel: 00:21:06

Good old marketing.

Erica Seidel: 00:21:07

I like it.

Erica Seidel: 00:21:08

And you made, as you were saying, like a transformation of marketing

Erica Seidel: 00:21:12

and the view of marketing within the organization, was there any particular

Erica Seidel: 00:21:16

organizational decision that you made that turned out well, or not well,

Erica Seidel: 00:21:21

to support the business for scale?

Justin Steinman: 00:21:24

You know, it's funny, I like to joke that everything I learned

Justin Steinman: 00:21:27

about marketing, I learned from John Dragoon ten years ago when I was working

Justin Steinman: 00:21:30

at Novell, or even longer than that, god.

Justin Steinman: 00:21:33

John Dragoon was the chief marketing officer at Novell when I worked there.

Justin Steinman: 00:21:36

If John were to walk in the door this afternoon and ask me for an org chart

Justin Steinman: 00:21:40

of what Definitive Healthcare marketing looks like, it would look exactly

Justin Steinman: 00:21:44

like what he was running a decade ago.

Justin Steinman: 00:21:46

All right.

Justin Steinman: 00:21:46

I got three teams.

Justin Steinman: 00:21:48

I've got a product marketing team, a demand gen and marketing ops team,

Justin Steinman: 00:21:51

and a corporate marketing team.

Justin Steinman: 00:21:53

It ain't innovative.

Justin Steinman: 00:21:54

It doesn't need to be innovative.

Justin Steinman: 00:21:56

The structure works.

Justin Steinman: 00:21:58

It's all about getting the right people in the structure.

Justin Steinman: 00:22:00

And so none of this existed when I got here.

Justin Steinman: 00:22:04

When I joined Definitive, there was like a digital team and then

Justin Steinman: 00:22:07

there was like a content team.

Justin Steinman: 00:22:09

And the people on the digital team were doing content and some of the

Justin Steinman: 00:22:14

content team were doing digital.

Justin Steinman: 00:22:16

And no one was really thinking about like demand gen cause

Justin Steinman: 00:22:19

everybody and nobody owned it.

Justin Steinman: 00:22:21

There was one person here doing product marketing.

Justin Steinman: 00:22:24

There was someone, a former consultant, who was sort of, kind of doing

Justin Steinman: 00:22:27

competitive intelligence, but not really.

Justin Steinman: 00:22:29

And so what we did was we put that, almost immediately, put that structure in place.

Justin Steinman: 00:22:34

And I brought in three VPs to run that each, one of those, and then

Justin Steinman: 00:22:39

built out the teams underneath them.

Justin Steinman: 00:22:41

Of the roughly twenty-five people that we have in marketing here, twenty

Justin Steinman: 00:22:45

have been hired in the past year.

Erica Seidel: 00:22:46

So, one thing that sometimes makes search hard for me, as

Erica Seidel: 00:22:49

you know, a client is saying like, okay, we're at, whatever, a hundred million

Erica Seidel: 00:22:53

and we want to get to 200 million, bring us people who have done that

Erica Seidel: 00:22:56

arc before, who have done that climb, and people who want to do it again.

Erica Seidel: 00:23:01

And that can be challenging.

Erica Seidel: 00:23:02

And then you find yourself in these inane conversations, not inane, but you know,

Erica Seidel: 00:23:06

these like, oh, how far have you scaled?

Erica Seidel: 00:23:08

Oh, why wasn't it higher?

Erica Seidel: 00:23:09

Well, oh, okay.

Erica Seidel: 00:23:10

The company got bought on the way up.

Erica Seidel: 00:23:12

Or, oh, okay, that's impressive.

Erica Seidel: 00:23:14

Or, you know, oh, the company grew through acquisition.

Erica Seidel: 00:23:16

Is that better than organically?

Erica Seidel: 00:23:18

And so I've been thinking a lot lately about the difference between hiring

Erica Seidel: 00:23:22

somebody who has scaled versus hiring somebody who has worked at scale.

Erica Seidel: 00:23:27

And I think of you as somebody, from your previous experiences,

Erica Seidel: 00:23:30

you've worked at scale, but you haven't done this exact climb that

Erica Seidel: 00:23:34

you've done a Definitive Healthcare.

Erica Seidel: 00:23:35

You haven't done that before.

Erica Seidel: 00:23:37

So how do you think about that?

Erica Seidel: 00:23:38

That scaling versus working at scale and how does it come across in the blend

Erica Seidel: 00:23:44

of people that you hire on your team?

Justin Steinman: 00:23:45

You're right, I'd never done the scale journey.

Justin Steinman: 00:23:47

I've operated at scale.

Justin Steinman: 00:23:48

I mean, Novell was this, before coming to Definitive Healthcare, Novell was

Justin Steinman: 00:23:52

the smallest company I'd worked at.

Justin Steinman: 00:23:53

You know, we were about $850 million in revenue.

Justin Steinman: 00:23:57

Then I was at GE then Aetna, and then Aetna got bought by CVS.

Justin Steinman: 00:24:00

I've lived at scale, some of the largest, most successful companies

Justin Steinman: 00:24:04

in the world where I've just been a tiny cog in those organizations.

Justin Steinman: 00:24:08

So I've seen what good looks like.

Justin Steinman: 00:24:10

I've also, because of those organizations, seen what bad looks like, right?

Justin Steinman: 00:24:13

Those, I wouldn't say those organizations are perfect, no organization is.

Justin Steinman: 00:24:17

And so what you've got to find is you've got to find the people who

Justin Steinman: 00:24:22

know what scaling looks like, but want to go on the journey to get there.

Justin Steinman: 00:24:27

And the biggest trick in all of that is knowing what to let slide.

Justin Steinman: 00:24:34

I could come in here on day one and, let's be honest, GE had some

Justin Steinman: 00:24:38

of the best marketing operations reporting I've ever seen in the world.

Justin Steinman: 00:24:42

It was marketing reporting like you wouldn't believe.

Justin Steinman: 00:24:45

Amazing doesn't begin to cover it, okay?

Justin Steinman: 00:24:48

I could come in here and say, I want marketing reporting at

Justin Steinman: 00:24:51

Definitive Healthcare just like GE cause that's best in class.

Justin Steinman: 00:24:54

And I could need, I'd need twenty people just to do that.

Justin Steinman: 00:24:58

That doesn't make a lot of sense.

Justin Steinman: 00:24:59

So what did I do instead?

Justin Steinman: 00:25:02

I literally built out an Excel spreadsheet that dealt a demand generation funnel,

Justin Steinman: 00:25:07

taking kind of what I saw, the best of what I saw at GE, and scaled it down, if

Justin Steinman: 00:25:12

you will, to work at a company of the size of Definitive and said, all right, here's

Justin Steinman: 00:25:17

what I want our funnel to look like.

Justin Steinman: 00:25:18

Here's how we're going to calculate it.

Justin Steinman: 00:25:20

And we're going to report on it weekly, and we're going to roll in, we're moving

Justin Steinman: 00:25:24

off of HubSpot and onto Marketo, and we just moved on to Acquia for our

Justin Steinman: 00:25:29

website, and we're using Salesforce.

Justin Steinman: 00:25:30

And so we're putting the systems in place to start that reporting.

Justin Steinman: 00:25:34

I know what a scaled product marketing organization looks like.

Justin Steinman: 00:25:38

You should have MRDs, competitive battle cards, market sizing,

Justin Steinman: 00:25:43

positioning documents, decks for every single segment, customer facing

Justin Steinman: 00:25:47

decks for every single segment.

Justin Steinman: 00:25:49

You know what?

Justin Steinman: 00:25:50

When I got here, we didn't have a single positioning document.

Justin Steinman: 00:25:52

We didn't have a single MRD.

Justin Steinman: 00:25:54

We had no competitive intelligence.

Justin Steinman: 00:25:56

We couldn't do all of that.

Justin Steinman: 00:25:58

We didn't have a team.

Justin Steinman: 00:25:59

We had one person.

Justin Steinman: 00:26:00

So we built out a team and then we said, okay, what's the most important thing?

Justin Steinman: 00:26:05

We need positioning documents.

Justin Steinman: 00:26:06

That's the most fundamental, that's customer facing.

Justin Steinman: 00:26:08

Everybody will get that.

Justin Steinman: 00:26:09

You get your biggest bang for your buck.

Justin Steinman: 00:26:11

So we did a round of positioning documents for all of our products and our solutions.

Justin Steinman: 00:26:16

We haven't even touched MRDs yet.

Justin Steinman: 00:26:18

I've been here a year.

Justin Steinman: 00:26:19

This is the first time in my entire career I haven't had MRDs.

Justin Steinman: 00:26:23

You know what?

Justin Steinman: 00:26:24

I don't have the capacity or the people to write them right now.

Justin Steinman: 00:26:26

I know we need them.

Justin Steinman: 00:26:28

Maybe we'll get to them middle of next year, praying that we can.

Justin Steinman: 00:26:32

But I don't want to kill the organization, have people writing MRDs on Saturdays

Justin Steinman: 00:26:36

and Sundays, like that's just miserable.

Justin Steinman: 00:26:38

And so the trick, as I said, is to figure out when you've seen these best in

Justin Steinman: 00:26:42

class marketing organizations operate at scale, how do you pick the most impactful

Justin Steinman: 00:26:46

things based on where you are in your company's journey and you get them?

Justin Steinman: 00:26:52

If you want to shift to talk a little bit about people, which I know is a

Justin Steinman: 00:26:55

pretty big passion of yours, Erica.

Justin Steinman: 00:26:58

I always talk about putting people together as a puzzle.

Justin Steinman: 00:27:01

I wanted some people who have worked at scale, right?

Justin Steinman: 00:27:05

So, you know, our head of product marketing came from Wolters

Justin Steinman: 00:27:08

Kluwer, our head of demand generation came from PTC, but she

Justin Steinman: 00:27:12

previously had worked at Imprivata.

Justin Steinman: 00:27:15

Those are all large companies.

Justin Steinman: 00:27:16

Our head of corporate marketing came from an ad agency in Cambridge,

Justin Steinman: 00:27:20

where there was eighty people.

Justin Steinman: 00:27:22

We have hired product marketing people from Cardinal Health, all

Justin Steinman: 00:27:27

the way down to a small, hundred person medical device startup.

Justin Steinman: 00:27:31

If you look at our demand gen team, we've hired folks out of Athena Health,

Justin Steinman: 00:27:35

again, who have worked at scale.

Justin Steinman: 00:27:37

But our head of marketing operations is someone who's on their first

Justin Steinman: 00:27:40

job still working at Definitive, who grew up with the company.

Justin Steinman: 00:27:44

He's an immensely talented guy.

Justin Steinman: 00:27:46

And so it's really that combination of blending the right skills,

Justin Steinman: 00:27:50

attitudes, big and small, to go on that scaling journey together.

Erica Seidel: 00:27:55

I love that.

Erica Seidel: 00:27:56

I like the analogy of a puzzle.

Erica Seidel: 00:27:58

I think of it that way too.

Erica Seidel: 00:28:00

Because sometimes when I do a search, it's like, oh, we need a CMO and then

Erica Seidel: 00:28:02

we need, you know, three people under them and should we have the CMO that

Erica Seidel: 00:28:06

focuses on brand or on performance?

Erica Seidel: 00:28:08

And whatever it is, they're going to have to hire somebody around them.

Erica Seidel: 00:28:12

And I always tell people, it's like a puzzle, you know, you put in one

Erica Seidel: 00:28:14

piece first, maybe it's the more junior person, maybe it's more senior

Erica Seidel: 00:28:16

person, and then the rest becomes a little more clear over time.

Erica Seidel: 00:28:21

You can't Einstein it too much.

Erica Seidel: 00:28:23

Let me ask you a topic that you and I have discussed before, but I just, I love this.

Erica Seidel: 00:28:28

Can you talk about your favorite interview question that you

Erica Seidel: 00:28:32

ask when you hire somebody?

Justin Steinman: 00:28:34

Yeah.

Justin Steinman: 00:28:34

And so now we'll see who listens to your podcast when they prep for an

Justin Steinman: 00:28:37

interview at Definitive Healthcare.

Justin Steinman: 00:28:40

Because the wily listener out there will say, all right, I heard this and I know

Justin Steinman: 00:28:43

if I'm going to get in front of Justin, I'll have my answer prepped and ready.

Justin Steinman: 00:28:46

I've asked the same question for a decade now.

Justin Steinman: 00:28:48

And I've asked it, I kid you not, in every single job interview I've done.

Justin Steinman: 00:28:53

And I've interviewed two, three hundred candidates over the past decade.

Justin Steinman: 00:28:57

And I love it.

Justin Steinman: 00:28:58

And the question is simply, "Pick a product you think is

Justin Steinman: 00:29:02

marketed well, and tell me why."

Justin Steinman: 00:29:05

About two years in I put a limit on it.

Justin Steinman: 00:29:06

I said it can't be an Apple product because they were starting to answer

Justin Steinman: 00:29:08

Apple and I got really tired of it.

Justin Steinman: 00:29:09

So I've added the don't make it an Apple product.

Justin Steinman: 00:29:11

I have had people answer this question about John Deere tractors,

Justin Steinman: 00:29:17

Porsche, Tesla, Gillette shavers.

Justin Steinman: 00:29:20

Somebody answered it recently about Johnny Walker.

Justin Steinman: 00:29:24

You get all over the place.

Justin Steinman: 00:29:26

Someone answered it about their Sony television one time.

Justin Steinman: 00:29:29

And I love it.

Justin Steinman: 00:29:30

The reason why I love this question is because it enables me to think about

Justin Steinman: 00:29:35

the value of your marketing skills, but you set the ground rules, right?

Justin Steinman: 00:29:40

So first off, it's a surprisingly abstract question.

Justin Steinman: 00:29:43

But you have to immediately create a structure.

Justin Steinman: 00:29:46

So, can you walk me through the categories of marketing?

Justin Steinman: 00:29:50

Do you know who your end buyer is?

Justin Steinman: 00:29:52

What's the awareness strategy, demand generation strategy, channel strategy,

Justin Steinman: 00:29:57

positioning, pricing, packaging, all those kind of key factors of marketing.

Justin Steinman: 00:30:02

You can come up with your own framework.

Justin Steinman: 00:30:04

Then you've picked the rules and I'll talk to you about whatever product you want.

Justin Steinman: 00:30:08

And then you have to say, okay, well they understand their buyer,

Justin Steinman: 00:30:11

their buyer's needs are this.

Justin Steinman: 00:30:12

They positioned it this way.

Justin Steinman: 00:30:13

They price it to go after that way.

Justin Steinman: 00:30:15

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Justin Steinman: 00:30:16

And so can you evaluate and explain to me why that product is marketing well?

Justin Steinman: 00:30:21

I've seen people go up in flames.

Justin Steinman: 00:30:23

They thought it was fantastic interview up to the point, and then they can't answer

Justin Steinman: 00:30:26

that question and they don't get the job.

Justin Steinman: 00:30:28

And I've seen people in an interview where I thought there's no way in the world I'm

Justin Steinman: 00:30:32

going to hire this person, and then she comes in and just blows me away with an

Justin Steinman: 00:30:36

answer to the last question, and I'm like, wow, I must've missed something here.

Justin Steinman: 00:30:39

So it works really well.

Erica Seidel: 00:30:40

And do you guide them as they go along and say like if somebody

Erica Seidel: 00:30:44

takes a sentence rather than, a paragraph or two or three, do you say look, I'm

Erica Seidel: 00:30:49

looking for you to structure it and, take some time to take a beat if you need it?

Justin Steinman: 00:30:54

Yeah, of course.

Justin Steinman: 00:30:55

I also engage with them.

Justin Steinman: 00:30:56

Look, I'm a marketing nerd.

Justin Steinman: 00:30:58

So if you want to talk about Coke and why Coke is marketed well, I'll geek

Justin Steinman: 00:31:01

out with you and we'll talk about that and talk about Coke channel strategy.

Justin Steinman: 00:31:05

And, you know, I'll dive down into it.

Justin Steinman: 00:31:07

It's actually more fun when people pick consumer products cause everybody

Justin Steinman: 00:31:10

has an opinion on a consumer product.

Justin Steinman: 00:31:11

But I've had people talk about Salesforce.com, which I think is a

Justin Steinman: 00:31:14

very well-marketed product or service, and all different types of stuff.

Justin Steinman: 00:31:17

So yeah, I will dive down and nerd out with you on marketing.

Justin Steinman: 00:31:20

And if you can nerd out with me on marketing, you're

Justin Steinman: 00:31:21

probably going to get the job.

Erica Seidel: 00:31:23

That's awesome.

Erica Seidel: 00:31:24

And do you do that at the beginning of the session or well at the end?

Justin Steinman: 00:31:29

Always the last question.

Erica Seidel: 00:31:31

Oh, why?

Justin Steinman: 00:31:32

If I asked you that question at the beginning,

Justin Steinman: 00:31:33

I'm going to throw you off.

Justin Steinman: 00:31:35

And if I throw you off, you're never going to have a chance to get an impression.

Justin Steinman: 00:31:39

Look, interviewing is like dating, right?

Justin Steinman: 00:31:41

So I want to get to know you.

Justin Steinman: 00:31:42

If I hit you with that question beginning of an interview, it's going

Justin Steinman: 00:31:46

to rattle most people cause it's not at all what you're expecting.

Justin Steinman: 00:31:48

And look, the majority of people interviewing for us probably

Justin Steinman: 00:31:50

will not listen to this podcast.

Justin Steinman: 00:31:51

So they won't be expecting that question.

Justin Steinman: 00:31:54

If I knock you off at the beginning, I'll never have a chance to get to know you.

Justin Steinman: 00:31:57

Hopefully by the end, when you've established rapport over twenty minutes

Justin Steinman: 00:32:00

or so when it hits you with this, you go, okay, I can roll with it.

Justin Steinman: 00:32:06

The smart candidates always say, "Hmm, give me a minute to pick a product."

Justin Steinman: 00:32:12

That is always the best thing to do.

Justin Steinman: 00:32:16

Because otherwise, you just jump in and you answer it you're going

Justin Steinman: 00:32:19

to get in all sorts of trouble.

Justin Steinman: 00:32:20

And ultimately, and this is really important, I'm not

Justin Steinman: 00:32:23

the hiring manager, right?

Justin Steinman: 00:32:25

My team's the hiring manager.

Justin Steinman: 00:32:27

So, there are very few candidates by the time they get to me

Justin Steinman: 00:32:32

that I put the kibosh on.

Justin Steinman: 00:32:33

I do put the kibosh on some, but if you're gonna work in my organization,

Justin Steinman: 00:32:37

I interview a hundred percent of the people who are going to work

Justin Steinman: 00:32:39

in Definitive Healthcare marketing.

Justin Steinman: 00:32:41

In fact, I'm usually involved, no matter what organization I'm in,

Justin Steinman: 00:32:43

even if you're just thirty minutes.

Justin Steinman: 00:32:45

Cause there's nothing more important than getting the right people.

Justin Steinman: 00:32:48

But I'm going to give my feedback back to the hiring manager and be

Justin Steinman: 00:32:50

like, hey, look, I wouldn't hire Joe over here, but it's your call.

Justin Steinman: 00:32:55

And you know, at the end of the day, I'm going to hold you accountable, Mr./ Ms.

Justin Steinman: 00:32:59

Hiring Manager, for the results and your team.

Justin Steinman: 00:33:02

And if you think I'm wrong and you want to hire Joe over here, go for it.

Justin Steinman: 00:33:06

And if Joe delivers results, I'm more than happy to be wrong.

Justin Steinman: 00:33:09

True story, there is someone in my marketing organization today, I'm

Justin Steinman: 00:33:13

not going to give you the name, but this person bombed this question.

Justin Steinman: 00:33:17

And I didn't want to hire this person.

Justin Steinman: 00:33:19

And I told Randy, the hiring manager, I said, don't hire this person.

Justin Steinman: 00:33:24

And he said, I'm going to disagree with you.

Justin Steinman: 00:33:27

I'm going to hire this person.

Justin Steinman: 00:33:28

And this person's going to prove you wrong.

Justin Steinman: 00:33:31

And I'm happy to report that actually told Randy the other day, "I was wrong.

Justin Steinman: 00:33:36

This person did bomb the question, but it's turned out to be a fantastic hire."

Justin Steinman: 00:33:40

Let's pivot a little bit since we are running out of time.

Justin Steinman: 00:33:44

I would love to hear you, looking ahead to 2022, are there any trends

Justin Steinman: 00:33:50

that you foresee for B2B SaaS marketers that are in scale-up mode?

Justin Steinman: 00:33:55

The biggest trend that I see right now is it is wicked difficult to hire.

Justin Steinman: 00:33:59

That's the Massachusetts guy in me coming through.

Justin Steinman: 00:34:02

I wish the hiring market had been like this fifteen years ago

Justin Steinman: 00:34:05

when I was a product marketing manager coming out of B school.

Justin Steinman: 00:34:08

My god, I could have written my ticket instead of, you know,

Justin Steinman: 00:34:11

praying for getting a job and doing tons and tons of interviewing.

Justin Steinman: 00:34:15

Many more doors slammed in my face than offers that I got.

Justin Steinman: 00:34:18

I think the war for talent next year is going to be every bit, if not more,

Justin Steinman: 00:34:23

brutal than it has been this year.

Justin Steinman: 00:34:26

And so when you've got a winning person on your team, you got to

Justin Steinman: 00:34:30

keep that person on your team.

Justin Steinman: 00:34:32

I think that's the big one.

Justin Steinman: 00:34:34

Second trend I see, and this is, again, kind of in the "no kidding"

Justin Steinman: 00:34:37

or, "thanks, genius" category, you got to continue to be able to measure.

Justin Steinman: 00:34:42

And I think a measurement is going to be really tricky because of

Justin Steinman: 00:34:45

all the changes that are going on with, you know, the mobile devices

Justin Steinman: 00:34:50

and the tracking and Apple's new privacy policies that are going on.

Justin Steinman: 00:34:55

I think most people know this by now, but Google has actually shifted

Justin Steinman: 00:34:58

its rankings to be mobile first now.

Justin Steinman: 00:35:00

So if we are in a world where we're all trying to market to people on their

Justin Steinman: 00:35:05

mobile devices, and then we've got the conflicting challenge of Apple and more

Justin Steinman: 00:35:10

and more privacy regulations going on, how do we get the right metrics and insight in

Justin Steinman: 00:35:18

a world where we can make good decisions?

Justin Steinman: 00:35:19

Marketing over the past ten years has been way more data-driven.

Justin Steinman: 00:35:23

And so, as a result of being digital, we're all used to

Justin Steinman: 00:35:25

having all this good data.

Justin Steinman: 00:35:28

I don't know what kind of data we're gonna be able to get next year.

Justin Steinman: 00:35:30

I mean, I'm sure we're gonna figure it out, but that trend

Justin Steinman: 00:35:33

worries me a little bit.

Justin Steinman: 00:35:36

I think those are probably the two big things that are on my mind right now, are

Justin Steinman: 00:35:39

kind of top of mind or I'm thinking about.

Erica Seidel: 00:35:41

That's great.

Erica Seidel: 00:35:42

It's interesting the first one about hiring.

Erica Seidel: 00:35:44

You're making a joke about coming out of B school and, like, being

Erica Seidel: 00:35:47

happy to get whatever job you got.

Erica Seidel: 00:35:49

It's making me think about the abundancy mindset versus the scarcity mindset

Erica Seidel: 00:35:53

and somebody coming up in their career now, they're likely going to have more

Erica Seidel: 00:35:57

of an abundance mindset and that might stick with them over the course of

Erica Seidel: 00:36:00

their career versus people who came out, you know, during more of a recession

Erica Seidel: 00:36:05

and were building their careers then.

Erica Seidel: 00:36:07

So that's, I think that's a really interesting extension.

Justin Steinman: 00:36:10

It really is.

Justin Steinman: 00:36:11

And you know, the other question is the grass might not always be greener, right?

Justin Steinman: 00:36:16

People are saying, oh, I'm going to leave a job.

Justin Steinman: 00:36:18

And I'm going to make $10,000 more.

Justin Steinman: 00:36:21

And yeah, $10,000 is a chunk of change.

Justin Steinman: 00:36:23

Don't get me wrong.

Justin Steinman: 00:36:24

But if you're going from a place where you have a tremendous work-life

Justin Steinman: 00:36:28

balance, you really like the people that you're working here, and so suddenly

Justin Steinman: 00:36:32

you're making $10,000 more, but you're working every Sunday, is it worth it?

Justin Steinman: 00:36:37

And I think people right now are chasing a little bit of the money because the market

Justin Steinman: 00:36:43

is so frothy without thinking about the other components that go into the job.

Erica Seidel: 00:36:48

Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see just

Erica Seidel: 00:36:50

the effect of this over time.

Erica Seidel: 00:36:52

This is awesome.

Erica Seidel: 00:36:52

Thank you so much for joining me.

Erica Seidel: 00:36:54

It's so great to talk with you about scale and scaling and having

Erica Seidel: 00:36:57

scaled and your hiring and your organizational kind of decisions.

Erica Seidel: 00:37:01

It's great to get a lens into the world of Justin Steinman.

Erica Seidel: 00:37:04

So thank you so much for joining the show.

Justin Steinman: 00:37:06

Thanks for having me.

Justin Steinman: 00:37:07

This was a lot of fun.

Erica Seidel: 00:37:11

That was Justin Steinman, the Chief Marketing

Erica Seidel: 00:37:13

Officer from Definitive Healthcare.

Erica Seidel: 00:37:15

Justin had great tips on boosting marketing's contribution and

Erica Seidel: 00:37:19

reputation and transparency.

Erica Seidel: 00:37:21

Next time on The Get, you'll hear from Cynthia Gumbert, CMO of SmartBear,

Erica Seidel: 00:37:26

about scaling a SaaS business in the product-led-growth era and how to

Erica Seidel: 00:37:30

build a business first, marketing second mindset on the marketing team.

Erica Seidel: 00:37:34

Don't miss it.

Erica Seidel: 00:37:38

Thanks for listening to The Get.

Erica Seidel: 00:37:39

I'm your host, Erica Seidel.

Erica Seidel: 00:37:41

Hiring great marketing leaders is not easy.

Erica Seidel: 00:37:44

The Get is designed to inspire smart decisions about recruiting and

Erica Seidel: 00:37:48

leadership in B2B SaaS marketing.

Erica Seidel: 00:37:51

We explore the trends, tribulations, and triumphs of today's top

Erica Seidel: 00:37:54

marketing leaders in B2B SaaS.

Erica Seidel: 00:37:57

This season's theme is Solving for the Scale Journey.

Erica Seidel: 00:38:01

If you liked this episode, please share it.

Erica Seidel: 00:38:03

For other insights on recruiting great marketing leaders, what I

Erica Seidel: 00:38:06

call the 'make money' marketing leaders rather than the 'make it

Erica Seidel: 00:38:10

pretty' ones, follow me on LinkedIn.

Erica Seidel: 00:38:12

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Erica Seidel: 00:38:17

The Get is produced by Evo Terra and Simpler Media Productions.