Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite podcast where we help marketers and CEOs learn the latest tips and tricks to help ignite growth in their business. This isn’t your typical marketing podcast. We push beyond platitudes to deliver you real world stories from the trenches. Are you ready to learn? Are you ready to grow? Are you ready to have fun? Well, then buckle up because you are about to enter the Ignite podcast.
Alex: Hi, everybody, I’m super excited. We’ve got Matt Kelly on the line today. You can see him and hear him. We’re trying to do more video these days because now we’re just lonely. We’re stuck at home in 2020. I saw a funny meme that had 2020 with one out of five stars and said, “Not a very good experience.” [unintelligible 00:00:52]
[laughter]Matt Kelly: I saw that.
Alex: We’ve got Matt Kelly. He is at Salesforce and heads up some of the HLS Sales, Healthcare Life Sciences. We’ve had a ton of medical practices and hospitals on Ignite, which has been great. But I thought, since so many of those conversations go to technology and how medical groups and hospitals can use technology to advance their marketing campaigns and drive more sophisticated customer nurturing campaigns, who better than to get one of these Salesforce experts on the line with us. Matt, it’s good to have you on Ignite. Give us a little bit of your background on how you came to Salesforce and how you got all charged up to help medical practices grow.
Matt: Yes, absolutely. After school, I found myself working for a couple of start-up electronic health record companies. These EHR companies eventually found a way to expand their revenue sources. We started medical billing software as a part of our technology. We also found that services really became a really big part of the way that we could help these practices, so revenue cycle management services, really understand how they’re not being able to collect revenue and engage with patients and engage with other partners and stakeholders differently.
After that I became the CRO of one of these companies and we launched a couple other services surrounding the technology that a lot of these practices use, so we actually launched a telemedicine app, as well as a chronic care management service. That chronic care management service is really in place to help mine all of the data inside your EHR, find different audiences and different patients that were afflicted with two or more chronic conditions, and then help them run campaigns to check on them, make sure that they’re following their care plan.
Then we would bill insurance for that 20 minute phone call that we would do once a month. That company was purchased by another group and Salesforce recruited me so here I am happy to be doing what I do.
Alex: There you are, and I bet that their telehealth is offering you is taking off right now. Just for everybody’s sake, we’re in 2020 in the middle COVID, anybody that listens to this in future years. I bet that’s super important. You came from the EHR side, what made you want to get in marketing, and technology, and the product side of helping medical groups grow? How did you transition both products and technology? What was interesting about Salesforce to you?
Matt: At the time, Salesforce was really developing a verticalized approach to the market and that vertical seemed to align with my experience. One of the reasons they reached out to me in the first place was HLS, healthcare and life science, really started to take off. They found that not only some of their pharma clients, but really payer and provider were a really big focus. The dynamic and the relationship between payers and providers, servicing the same patient and really coming at them from different angles is really where Salesforce found a niche and found a way to help.
When I really became part of the team, really started to understand exactly how we do that, it’s all in engagement. It’s all communicating with different groups of patients in a way that helps them understand the complexity that healthcare really offers them. A lot of times when patients don’t follow their health plan, when they choose not to really care about their bill, when they choose to step away and back away from taking care of themselves, which the healthcare providers are really helping them understand how to do better. It’s really a communication problem.
Our ability to help that and influence the way that patients really receive information, the family members and the continuum of care around these patients, how they understand what’s going on, and they can take part in the engagement, once I really started to dig into that and how Salesforce helps there, it felt like 100% the right place to be. So does that makes sense?
Alex: Yes. It’s interesting because it really sounds like Salesforce not only helps with the patient acquisition part. I’m just going to talk about the provider side. I don’t have a ton of experience in pharma or the payer side [unintelligible 00:04:42].
Matt: No problem.
Alex: The provider groups it really feels like it’s just not a patient acquisition platform instead of [unintelligible 00:04:48] really helps their continuum of care. Matt, I get questions all the time from our provider groups where you keep asking me if we have CRM, if we’ve connected our marketing platforms, if we’re doing nurture. Healthcare and life sciences has a long way to go to catch up to some of the other industries. They know it, we know it, it’s great. Where do you tell them to start? Walk us through the full suite of services as it relates to HLS and what you see provider groups bring, every kind of product that they may use and then we’ll talk about where they should start.
Matt: This might be a little bit of a rant. Please stop me at any time and tell me to take a step back. A lot of times when we hear from a provider, we’re really dealing with a wide range of different types of providers, whether it’s a multi-location privately owned medical practice that might have private equity behind them. It could be any number of different sizes of hospitals. Rural health is certainly a big part of how we’re seeing problems arise through the way that healthcare providers are really providing access to care around the country. The answer to your question really is going to depend on what type of providers that we’re dealing with and how sophisticated their existing tech stack is.
Alex: Let’s say they’re starting with nothing. I’m seeing a lot of rural hospitals, a lot of providers, have nothing. What are some of the first things they can look at and then we’ll talk about the products as they get more sophisticated.
Matt: We went into a big question at Salesforce around whether or not Salesforce can be an EHR for them. Do we need an EHR and Salesforce? Or can Salesforce be our EHR? My personal opinion, and really the answer that we give in most cases is you still want an EHR specifically for its ability to meet meaningful use criteria. Salesforce is not meaningful use compliance. If you’re going to be billing Medicare and Medicaid, if you’re going to be attempting in any way to qualify for any of the reimbursement incentives and not have some of the penalties that come along with not being compliant with Meaningful Use and the Affordable Care Act, you definitely want to start with an EHR. That’s pretty standard.
Now, once you have that in place, and if you already have one or maybe you have access to multiple, a lot of practices or hospitals have grown through acquisition and through those acquisitions they may have access to multiple different EHR systems, Salesforce can be a place where all of those systems and anything else that you’re using can all connect into one place and be a centralized database for all the people that you’re engaged with.
That could not only be patients that could be all of your healthcare providers, all of your partners, all of the people that fill in the gaps like couriers, and just whatever those extra services are that surround the type of care that you provide, Salesforce can be your one place where all of that is found, any of your patient-facing or people-facing, employees can access and see everything in one place, rather than logging into all these different platforms and all these different programs.
We really begin a conversation with Salesforce. We really want to understand where is all the data sitting? How many different systems are you using? Can we consolidate any of those for you? Or how are those programs going to be able to come into this whatever you use from Salesforce, which I can describe next.
Whatever you use from Salesforce, being able to create one view, a 360 degree view of that person. It could be a patient. Again, but it could be the son of an elderly patient that you actually communicate with the son. The elderly patient doesn’t ever want to take your call. They don’t want to answer your mail, they don’t have an email address. Really being able to understand who it is that you’re engaged with and the information that’s necessary to make that engagement personalized, and helpful, and high quality, that is what Salesforce does.
Alex: I know that Salesforce helps with the patient communication and nurturing and making sure we [unintelligible 00:08:40]. It almost sounds like it can help with provider referrals and the nurturing system over there you mentioned. You know that. Okay, let’s walk through [unintelligible 00:08:51]. We want to make sure we’re communicating with our patients. We’ve got to have an EHR, we’ve got to have a CRM so that we have all the hubs. The hubs are there. What are the spokes? Now how are we communicating? What does the toolset look like? Where do I start? I have EHR, I get CRM, what do I do next?
Matt: At this point, once you know who you’re engaged with, now we start talking about use cases. What do you need help doing? If you start on the beginning stages of that spectrum, it’s really about driving awareness in your community, making sure that all of the potential patients that you have not served yet are aware that you exist, they know what type of services that you provide, and why they may choose you over somebody else. These are people that you do not know. In marketing terms we would call that an unknown audience. Known are the people in your system, your first-party data, your existing and past patients.
The unknown audiences are all the people just like them and even in some cases we hear people want to access new patients that are moving to the area, new movers. That is a term that we deal with a lot. We want to access the new movers and we want to do it in a way that’s inexpensive, we want to do it with data, we want to do it digitally, and sometimes we don’t know where to start.
Really, that’s a lot of the conversation is just not only helping them understand that these tactics are possible but really understand how do you begin? What type of people do you need to hire? What type of skill sets do you need to make sure that you have on staff or with a services partner that can help you? You own the technology, but a services partner can come and actually push the buttons and make it work for you and do all the things that you needed to do without having to hire 10 people. That’s a really good place to start.
Interviewer: That was a about [unintelligible 00:10:38] acquisition. If I have the unknown patient and I don’t have first-party data on them, Salesforce can help me generate brand awareness in my local communities how? How is it doing?
Matt: Great question. This question could go in a couple of different directions, so I’ll try to bucket it and make it short and sweet. A lot of times, people think about social media as this platform that they can start to better understand, better listen for what’s happening, the type of just activity that surrounds social media platforms. That is a great place that we can help, not only listening but publishing and then engaging with all of the different activities that surround what you publish. Social media is a great place to start.
Digital advertising. Now, not just paying a bunch of different places to place ads in general, but using data, using web visitors that you don’t currently know and following them after they leave your website, being able to better understand who those people are with second and third-party data. We have technology that allows you to access second and third-party data, layer it over any of the unknown web behavior, and web visitors that you have and start to get to really understand who those people are, and then you’re able to choose who you target with digital advertising and who you suppress your digital advertising to. That’s a big deal.
A lot of people don’t really understand that you want to be able to suppress digital advertising to certain people that have no business seeing it. So many people think that they’re just going to spend money on digital ads and, hopefully, something happens. You can be a lot smarter about it. That’s what a big part of the Salesforce platform can help you do.
Interviewer: [unintelligible 00:12:14] to prevent oversaturation with people that are never going to come into your practice or hospital. There’s other pieces of data, and you say, “Hey, listen, they’re not a target for diabetes care or anything like that. It’s not serving our endocrine practice.” Okay, I got you. Salesforce technology can help fill in the gaps. Well, you were talking about the audience building stuff. That’s something that a lot of people don’t know about. Does a practice come to you guys and say, “Hey, listen, we want to generate more patients.” What do they do? They buy audiences from you, and then they put them into some marketing platform to [unintelligible 00:12:45]? What are they doing there? How do they get access?
Matt: No, no. A lot of times, the conversation is a lot more pointed than that. It’s not necessarily, “We want new patients, help us out, what do we do?” It’s very specific. An example is, “We want to drive more joint replacements. That’s what we want to focus on. It’s a highly valuable service. It’s high margin. We want to be able to find a very specific audience for hip replacements.”
The further we get into that conversation, the deeper we dig, we find out that they really want to find a certain age range, they want to find a certain zip code that these people live in, they want to find a certain historical search propensity to need it like search history, prior visits, that they may be able to mine and connect the dots between. It’s not just hip replacement. It might be, “We just invested and we redid our entire maternity wing. Now, we really need to make sure that everybody in our area has their baby here instead of St. Vincent’s or instead of wherever.” No offense to St. Vincent’s, but wherever it is. It’s very pointed and it’s very purposeful into what they want to be able to do.
Interviewer: That specific audience that you [unintelligible 00:14:04].
Matt: Yes. Now, to your point of how does Salesforce help with that? They don’t buy audiences from us. What we have is technology that allows them to better understand datasets and then make better decisions on who you create as an audience from these data sets that exist. You take your first-party data, that may be an audience. Then you take that first-party data, and you create an unknown look-alike audience of people exactly that, but you don’t really know much about them. You have access to second and third-party data sets. Sometimes that’s confusing. I can break that down a little bit more.
Let’s say that you have a group of people around Atlanta, and you want to be able to target people that just registered for a baby shower at Buy Buy Baby. Buy Buy Baby has anonymous datasets of people that have just registered for a baby shower. Now, again, it’s not their names, it’s not their social security numbers, it’s not identifiable data, but it is people that exist with an anonymous ID.
Your ability to match other datasets from other places, whether it’s your first-party data and you can identify who these people are because you already have their information, you already have consent to message them, that’s a great audience, but it could be people that anonymously, you are able to identify on Facebook or wherever, Pinterest, and you place an ad on people on Pinterest that are creating a Pinterest board of nursery ideas that also just registered at Buy Buy Baby.
That’s an audience that you were able to identify with first, second, and third-party data that you can place an ad on Pinterest directly to those people about how wonderful your maternity ward is and how great your doctors are. You can put promoted content in front of them, whatever, and you can find them on all these other places as well.
That same ID that identifies them on Pinterest is the same ID that they use for Pandora. It’s the same ID that they use for Twitter, and so on and so forth. That’s a little bit about how we do it. Our technology allows you to create these audiences. You then push that into Pinterest, you push it into Facebook, and Pinterest and Facebook put that out in front of them. You pay Pinterest and Facebook for the ad. We just have the technology that helps you do it smarter.
Interviewer: Got you. The audience targeting, you’re not buying audiences, you just buy– got your access and your technology that [inaudible 00:16:38] better. Okay, I got you. How big of a practice or hospital? How big do you need to be? This sounds super sophisticated and really advanced. [unintelligible 00:16:46] afford Salesforce, if they can, you’ll get that sophisticated with it?
Matt: Yes. That’s a really good question. I think the answer is less about how big of a group you need to be and how big is the opportunity that you have in front of you. You could be a 50-person company, but if the opportunity that you have in front of you is a $10 million opportunity, if you do it right, spending $500,000 on software is a no-brainer.
I think that that is a big part of to understand about how Salesforce engages with you as well is really helping you identify the scope of what could be done, how valuable it could become for you, and then really helping you create a project around not only acquiring technology but understanding how to set it up, how to use it, who to help you use it if you don’t have the people on staff and you’re not big enough and sophisticated enough right now to really know what to do.
We can connect all those dots for you and, basically, help consult you through that process so that you can make it a reality. A lot of people don’t really look at Salesforce like that. That’s really my job. That’s what I do. I help consult different provider groups, different payer groups, pharmaceutical companies, how to really think about assessing the value of what the investment is going to help them realize. That is what we do.
Interviewer: I like that you put it that way. Assess first the opportunity before you go and say the technology, the agency, the advertising is too expensive. There’s a ton of people out there tearing their ACLs [unintelligible 00:18:21] location orthopedic group. Don’t you want to be in front of them? We need billboards on [unintelligible 00:18:25], put that stuff towards tech and advertising instead. I’m totally with you [unintelligible 00:18:29].
Matt: No, no. You’re right.
Interviewer: Do these provider groups need to be nervous about investing in tech agencies, et cetera, if they have no one internal? Do you work with groups that have internal teams or do they fully outsource everything? Is there an ideal situation?
Matt: Yes. We see everything. We see all types of teams, small teams, huge teams. Some of the companies that we work with have six different marketing teams that all specialize in one thing. Now, they represent different brands, they represent different channels, they have different strategic planning, different budgets. In terms of, what is ideal, what we’d really like to do is find groups or describe a way of working together. What is ideal is a group that is willing to take on an evaluation process that’s complex. Where we fail is when a company is not willing to go through a little bit of a complex evaluation and really listen to what’s possible. A lot of times, they don’t want that.
All they want is, “Hey, do you have a tool? Yes or no?” “Yes, we do.” “How much does it cost?” “$300,000.” “I don’t know what it costs. I’ve got a thousand questions for you.” Then they say, “Well, okay, cool. That’s way too much. I don’t care. What else do you have to say? All you need to know is A, B, and C.” It’s not that simple. It really isn’t. What’s ideal, no matter the size, no matter if they have people internal, is if they’re just willing to go through an evaluation that helps them assess what the options are.
If they don’t have a team and they don’t have the type of people that would be able to set up this technology, to use it, to better connect all of the dots with all of the spend we would work with somebody like yourself, Alex, actually. We’d recommend that they take a call with you. We can be there, we don’t need to be there, but if they need help we have a huge network of partners that can help perform any level of services that you need.
Interviewer: The [unintelligible 00:20:31] group it could just be a couple docs and maybe a manager or something, and I know the answer because we work with a group like this, they don’t need an internal marketing team. The ownership can work. They can [unintelligible 00:20:42] specialist from an app or outside vendor. They could get an agency to run the advertising on Salesforce’s technology. Guys, you don’t need a big internal team to make the same thing. You can be [unintelligible 00:20:55] in advertising and technology without this. Before we get into– I have a couple more questions but I want to get– I know email is huge.
It’s not something that Cardinal does a ton of for medical groups, but thinking about doing more in the future. Email is big. What do medical groups need to know about the continuum of care and making sure that we’re bringing people back in? I know people are not coming into their PCPs as much with COVID. I’m nervous about that. I think it’s getting worse because people are afraid to go into hospitals and medical practices. How can they stay in touch? How does Salesforce be [unintelligible 00:21:27] help them stay in touch with patients, get them in more often [unintelligible 00:21:31]? What happens there with email? Is it important for medical practices?
Matt: Yes. A lot of times medical practices, I’ve found, have initially stayed away from email at the scale to which we’re really talking about here because they’re worried about HIPAA compliance or more so they’re worried about having some type of HIPAA issue or HIPAA problem that they have to deal with, right? One of the things that we start with a lot of times when we talk about email for a medical group is that the Salesforce marketing cloud our exact target product is HIPAA compliance right off the bat.
Your ability to have PHI data not only potentially inside your email, but used to better personalize an email or choose when to send somebody an email or not get sent an email, alluding to certain PHIs that you need to be able to speak with them about and bring out, our ability to be HIPAA compliant is really a huge differentiator in the market when you look at email automation technology. You’re not going to find that with Mailchimp or [unintelligible 00:22:28] or HubSpot, or really any other platform that allowed these practices may have found or may have looked at in the past. I think that’s a really, really big one. Now, how email is used for these medical practices?
What we find is that email is still a very central place for a lot of people in the way that they get information. The problem though is that when you send an email you could deal with a number of different problems that you don’t really think about. When you’re sending email you could have deliverability problems. Your email could very easily be going into a spam folder or just not being delivered at all. If you’re not paying attention to that and you’re not optimizing the way that you’re building emails that’s a huge problem, right?
When you look at not only deliverability but the engagement on your emails, we find that a lot of people also are just now learning, so then we help them think through is engaging on other channels like digital advertising, social media, automating direct mail and more of a one-to-one experience, actually drive people back to your email. They may not click on the ad, but if you coordinate an email that’s important, that you want them to see with a digital ad a day or two later they may not engage with the ad, but they’ll go back to their inbox and open up your email.
Interviewer: [unintelligible 00:23:46] ad costs. They’re not clicking [unintelligible 00:23:48]
Matt: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. That’s a really cool discovery that we make with a lot of our customers to rethink the way that they prepare to make the most from their email, not just doing it, right? A lot of people could do email. It’s not hard to set up an email automation platform, but to think through all of the ways that you can make the most of the email channel, reduce your cost to serve your patients, maximize your ability to deliver information in a way that actually influences their decisions, that’s what we do. We influence patients’ decisions to care about whatever it is you told them to get healthier. That’s what we help you do. That’s what a lot of providers are struggling with. They just don’t communicate well.
Interviewer: No, they don’t. When someone goes to get an MRI at a different facility no one ends up following up. There should be automated trigger. Someone goes gets an MRI and shows positive on an ACL to email then to set up an appointment with a freaking orthopedic surgeon. I went through that, I won’t name the hospital system, but it can be great to set up those automated triggers. Salesforce has all of the data on the customers if you have the CRM product.
It’s really about this full suiteof marketing services so that you can have the 360 degree the patient, the provider or the carrier, whoever you’re talking about, that the benefit of [unintelligible 00:25:05] with the Salesforce is you can see the whole picture and you can market to someone in a million different ways because you guys have access to purchasing a lot of these software products.
You have access to be able to touch these [unintelligible 00:25:16] every which way. It’s an incredible suite. What’s the latest acquisition? Datorama last year, Salesforce purchased [unintelligible 00:25:24] and Datorama. Let’s talk a little bit about tying the results back to ad campaigns. That’s something that we’re preaching to the choir a lot. Some more advanced medical practices are starting to do that. They want to know this FBC or this Facebook ad campaign generated how many patients? Can you do that? Of course I know the answer. But can you do that with Salesforce? If so–
Matt: Yes, we can. Great question. Datorama is a very, very strong platform for the provider space exactly for what you talked about. Being able to tie how many new patient either visits or new patient appointments or new patient registrations, whatever that’d be came from what campaigns, where do we spend money to get this result? That’s what Datorama is able to help you do. Now being able to connect it into your EHR if that’s where you’re scheduling and tracking all of your patient information, that’s absolutely something that you can do with Datorama.
What’s really cool about Datorama that a lot of people find out very soon after we start to talk about it is that you don’t have to have anything else from Salesforce at all to start with Datorama. In fact sometimes we even recommend it. We start a conversation and we find out that a practice may not really understand what’s going on. They’ve got all these different reports, all these different places. They may already have multiple different agencies. They may have multiple different websites. They may have acquired six or seven different practices and they’ve got all this information everywhere and it takes them weeks, takes them a whole month just to figure that out, right?
Before we sell them anything from Salesforce sometimes we start with Datorama because what that will do is it will answer the question where are your gaps? Where are your problems? What’s working well? Right? Do you want to continue to invest in what’s working well? Do you want to stop investing or make some modifications or changes of what’s not working? That could be through channels as well.
Before we put an email platform in place we just want to understand is email working for you or not. Maybe it’s working and you don’t need to invest there. Maybe it’s not, and that will help us better inform the conversation when we start to talk to you about email. Datorama is a great idea for providers to be able to understand exactly that. How are we growing and how can we grow faster?
Interviewer: Got you. I didn’t know that you could get it without getting anything else. Okay, that’s important.
Matt: It’s huge. It’s huge.
Interviewer: The coming down on Datorama obviously with the scale of Salesforce. I think it was $10,000 a month is what they quoted us three years ago before they were purchased and we were like, “Oh my God, no.”
Matt: That’s still a package that exists. That’s still a package. But, yes, I think to your point though is that for customers that already have a Salesforce relationship or are planning to grow a Salesforce relationship in just terms of the amount of money that they spend on Salesforce products you really create this economy of scale and buying power for yourself that a lot of people realize when it comes time to negotiate what packages they want, what price point they pay for those packages.
If you have multiple different contracts with Salesforce for different things, being able to take advantage of that bundling ability, some of that cost is already taken up and we’re able to discount or really price-combine products in a way that that gives you a buying advantage. That’s a great point.
Interviewer: It sounds like with Salesforce’s breadth up products it really sounds like you guys are such good consultants on the sales side. I’ve talked to product sales people that are like, “No, you [unintelligible 00:29:00] and this is the product you need.” We didn’t even go down that route in this conversation. It’s really we can help you with everything. Why don’t we talk about what your needs are and you guys will find the solution?
It’s maybe [unintelligible 00:29:10] maybe nothing, but it’s really so consultative on your side at this point, just because of so many products that Salesforce has. If they want to start, they have no idea where to start, what do they do? Do they get in contact with you? Do they go to Salesforce? How do they start educating themselves? Where do they go other than watching [unintelligible 00:29:30]?
Matt: Yes. This is an answer from a salesperson, so take this with a grain of salt but answer your email. I’ve emailed you already. You’ve got to start anywhere but just answer me. That’s it, right? I’ve said that jokingly but odds areyou’ve already heard from somebody from Salesforce. You’ve heard from one of our demand generation teams. You’ve seen an ad from us somewhere. Odds are you’ve seen an event that we’re having in your city. Just pay attention to that and respond to it. I guarantee you that we’ll be there to help you out. That’d be my first suggestion. Again, total joke. Totally understand that, coming from a sales guy. But it’s not though, if you don’t have an email from somebody at Salesforce in your inbox, if you’re not seeing the ads that we’re talking to you about just go to our website. It’s as simple as that, we’ve got all events, we’ve got round tables, we’ve got webinars, we’ve got tons and tons and tons of stuff going on for you to just possibly start to absorb, start to understand. If you know somebody, if you know another company that’s using Salesforce, reach out to them and ask them, is it working?
Where are you falling short? Are you having a good experience or not? Some are. Some need some help. They’ve invested in something and they need to understand how to go from having Salesforce for 10 or sometimes 15 years already and really re-rebuilding it in a way that’s more congruent with 2020. Somebody that set up Salesforce in 1999 or it’s probably, that’s year one, but 2008, somebody that set up their CRM in 2008, it’s a very different world right now. You might want to completely re-implement from the ground. I know that that sounds crazy, but it might be the best thing that ever happened to you.
Alex: Their practice is totally changed. Guys, pay attention to the emails. They’re always reaching out. I like that Salesforce practices what it preaches. It runs the marketing. It runs the sales campaigns, it’s one of the best run sales and marketing companies ever. If you read, what did I read behind the cloud, above the cloud? What’s Mark’s talk- behind the cloud. I can’t remember. Talks about what? 35%, 40% of all people that are coming should be in sales, I went and immediately hired three salespeople. I’m like, “Get smart [unintelligible 00:31:46]
Matt: It’s good though. I think you touched on a really good point a minute ago, which is not leading with product. It was a really good point because, I have let’s call it 20 different things that I can sell somebody. Trying to explain each of those 20 things, what they do, what makes each of those 20 things valuable, how to think about using it, all the 200 problems that those things solve, it’s a very confusing way to understand what Salesforce can do. It’s never works. That never works.
Alex: [unintelligible 00:32:20] those groups that say, “You’re right, man. I don’t want to know the intricacies of every product that you’re selling me. I don’t have have a dedicated marketer or maybe I do. Maybe that person leaves or I never have, how do I make sure this doesn’t become shelfware in a year?” Does someone need to be dedicated to this? Or if it’s you and you’re an owner group, you need decade 25%, the technology can it work on its own or it needs constant love to make sure that this thing works for your organization and changes with it.
Matt: Having a certified admin has it has its advantages. We talked about what led me to Salesforce. In 2009, when I got my first sales job, I was the lowest guy on the totem pole. My boss at the time, he said, “Hey, you need to probably learn how to be a Salesforce admin. I don’t know if you’ve got the time or not, but I think it’s going to be valuable for you. Please just figure some stuff out on Salesforce for me.” I did that at every company that I worked for since.
Fully an amateur, fully just a guy who wanted to solve problems by building stuff in Salesforce. I made a lot of mistakes. I broke a lot of automations and workflows and whatever, but by doing that, we really learned the value of having a certified professional Salesforce admin. If you want my recommendation it’s definitely to have a Salesforce admin, but if not having a third party is good.
Alex: If they can’t afford it, can they go to Upwork dot com and find a Salesforce admin?
Matt: Yes, absolutely. You don’t need one, but you definitely benefit by having somebody that can help it do what you bought it for. The other quick answer to your question to help make sure that whatever you bought from Salesforce isn’t shelfware, people don’t really think about adoption. They don’t think about the internal sales process that you need to understand to adopt new technology. You buy Salesforce, you set it up, you create everybody a username and a password, you build all these cool things that it can do. Then you say, “Hey, everybody, we’ve got Salesforce now. Login and use it. Thanks.” Then you wait, right? A month goes by, nobody’s using Salesforce. What do I do?
They file a support ticket with us. “Hey, guys, nobody’s using Salesforce. What do we do?” This is a sales process. You sell the value of Salesforce to all of the people that you want to use it. You market to them and you create nurture and drip campaigns using marketing cloud to say, “Hey, did you know that Salesforce could do this? What if this problem that you have every day could be solved by you using these three fields in Salesforce? Did you know?” Then you can track when they actually do it.
You can send them an email that says, “Hey, congratulations, man. You just logged your first case in sales. Amazing. Here’s a $15 Starbucks gift card for using Salesforce. Thank you so much.” Whatever. Adoption campaigns internally are a huge use case for marketing cloud because people spend $2 million on a Salesforce contract. Then a year later they realize, “Well, nobody really is doing any of the things that we bought this for. How do we convince them to care? Marketing.
Alex: Internally. The person that signed on with Salesforce needs to understand it to a certain degree, to listen for those things that are coming up in sales and marketing discussions and internal customer service that that’s the suite that you bought to hear, “Oh, you’re not using it. It could solve these things for you. There needs to be an internal champion and that can be the owner of the business. That’s me at Cardinal, I listen to these things every day. Did you log in? Did you update? No. Okay, Salesforce [unintelligible 00:36:02]. We do it all day, every day. Go back to Salesforce. I get it.
What we’re saying is there’s got to be an internal hero for Salesforce. The technology, much like many things is only as good as the attention and the time that you put into it, guys. So Salesforce is worth the investment, but don’t forget, you’re going to have to put the time in to focus on it and make sure you spell it internally. I hate when this stuff becomes shelfware. I hate when Cardinal becomes shelfware. And people say, “Marketing didn’t work.” No, it’s because you signed with us and then you dipped out. We can’t work on our own just like Salesforce doesn’t.
Matt: It’s a dip out. You nailed it. That’s [unintelligible 00:36:41] every time.
Alex: We were so interested when we were signing and like, I don’t know, move on to the next thing. Take your time. Get educated on what Salesforce is putting out there. I don’t know of a company that does more education. We went to Dreamforce learned a ton. [unintelligible 00:36:55] traveling is allowed. Pay attention, get educated, make sure you have the time to be an internal advocate and then put the proper investment in. Matt, real quick. Do you know of any secrets, any practices that are coming down the Salesforce pipeline, anything new? Where do you see the technology space going as it relates to HLS and marketing or anything anybody needs to be aware of? Get the basics down.
Matt: Yes, there is. The thing that I’m most excited about, I wouldn’t say it’s coming, but something that’s pretty new in its use and its application inside HLS. Financial services has been doing this a year or two ahead. That’s usually what we see actually though. Financial services is usually a year or two ahead of healthcare. But right now, the thing that I’m most excited about, the thing that I try to just really listen in for and apply to the business problems that we encounter is a product in the marketing cloud suite called Interaction Studio.
Interaction Studio is incredibly cool, because people don’t realize that all of the digital interactions that a customer or a patient or an HDP or whatever has with your brand, all of those matter and sometimes they happen so fast, six or seven different interactions will happen in real time. When somebody actually picks up the phone and calls you and your call center agent says hello, all of these things just happen. They were on LinkedIn. They saw an ad. The ad had a very specific message. They click that ad. It went to a landing page. They looked at that landing page. They didn’t fill out the form though. Instead, they went to your actual homepage.
They go to your homepage, they click on your blog, they read a blog post. Then they go over to another part of your website that has a phone number. They call that phone number.
All of those interactions that just happened can better inform the way that that person that answers the phone actually interacts with that person. The ability to then understand all of those interactions, the intent, who that person is, all of the different demographics that you would want to be able to pay attention to can better inform whatever that next best offer or next best action or next best piece of content, whatever it might be.
It might be a call script that pops up and says, “Hey, read this script to this person because they just did all of these things.” The ability to do that immediately with real time interaction management, RTIM, real time interaction management, Interaction Studio is amazing.
Alex: That’s along the same vein of all marketing, getting more personalized communication and marketing, getting super personalized. That’s going to be awesome, man, when you can call them and be like, “You’ve been looking up information on rheumatoid arthritis, let’s have a chat.” They’re going to be like, “What?”
Matt: That’s just one of eight different use cases for this thing. Rather than give you seven other things that it can do, the biggest thing that it does is personalization. It’s a personalization engine, and that’s on your website, making your website feel incredibly personalized to whoever is visiting it. You have 100 different people on your website at one time and it can be 100 different versions of the same website because it’s personalizing the content, the pictures, everything. How the experience is better personalized after they leave your website, what emails do you choose to send. Not a human being choosing which email, Interaction Studio choosing the email, choosing the content, choosing the picture, all that in real time. It’s unbelievable.
Alex: Real-time interaction management, RTIM, is that the acronym? Where do you get- log on Salesforce website, Interaction Studio?
Matt: Yes.
Alex: That’s cool, man. Yes, personalization. We’re going to get to minority reports. [unintelligible 00:40:40] sit around for specific [unintelligible 00:40:42]. No boards that are just catered to us. We’re leading [unintelligible 00:40:46] quickly, baby. All right, I like it. That’s covered now with [inaudible 00:40:49]. Those of you that are more advanced and have already done a lot of things Matt has talked about, start looking into that and see how you can personalize based on where they are, what kind of information, their demographic, geographic.
Sounds like it can do it all, so check into it. Guys, pay attention to your emails. Matt’s going to be emailing you if he hasn’t already, especially if you haven’t [inaudible 00:41:06]. Matt, thanks for coming on Ignite today. This has been super helpful. I know a ton of groups have been wondering what kind of tech they need to invest in.
[music]Alex: This was super helpful. I hope they all reach out to you. Thank you for doing that.
Matt: Yes, thank you, Alex. I appreciate it.
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