Capturing Demand with Creativity with Michelle Liro

Michelle Liro of Definitive Healthcare shares her expertise in B2B marketing, offering valuable insights straight from her playbook:

• Unique Strategies: Discover innovative marketing moves, such as using a book launch as a promotional tool or igniting interest through a Facebook Live competition—Michelle has successfully navigated these tactics.

• Healthcare Hurdles: The US healthcare market poses significant challenges, especially when trying to engage industry giants like Pfizer. Michelle provides an inside look at these complexities.

• Dollar Decisions: Navigating budget constraints, particularly with platforms like Google AdWords, can be tricky. Michelle discusses essential tips and tricks for managing marketing budgets effectively.

• Demand Dance: How can you create demand for products that potential customers don't even know they need yet? Michelle shares her insights on generating interest and desire.

• Economic Curveballs: In today's economy, every purchase decision is scrutinized. Michelle discusses strategies for adapting to these challenges and ensuring marketing effectiveness.

Summary:

Michelle has been with Definitive Healthcare for about three years, joining pre-IPO and experiencing rapid growth. In this episode, she shares her journey through her B2B marketing career and offers insights into the innovative strategies driving Definitive Healthcare. The company focuses on providing data and analytics for the U.S. healthcare market, helping businesses understand and navigate the complexities of healthcare.

[Read the full transcript]

pharosIQ: Welcome, welcome, welcome to week three of pharosIQ’s podcast, the podcast that brings you all things B2B marketing, all things not boring. Um, this week we have Michelle Lero, VP of Demand Generation with Definitive Healthcare. Welcome, Michelle.

michelle: Thanks, PharosIQ. I'm really excited to be here today.

pharosIQ: So Michelle's been with Definitive for about three years, joined pre IPO, been a real wild ride as they're growing specific, you know, growing really, really rapidly.

Um, so quickly before we jump into all things podcasting, Michelle, tell us a little bit about Definitive and then a little bit about yourself and your journey throughout your V to B marketing career.

michelle: Sure, absolutely. So I'll start a little bit with Definitive Healthcare. Um, And actually, one of the reasons why I joined is I was a former customer of Definitive Healthcare, so I was very familiar with the product.

And I know we're going to talk about some campaigns today. And one of the examples I'm going to share is sort of creative use of data. So I was actually a user of Definitive Healthcare before I came to work here. That being said, Definitive Healthcare, as the name would imply, we are focused on all things healthcare.

So we have data and analytics platforms all about the U. S. healthcare market. So if you want to understand the U. S. healthcare market, you know, if you're doing research, want to understand the market, if you're trying, if you have a product or service you want to sell or market into the U. S. healthcare system, Um, it's kind of all of the above.

So the best way to explain it is by example, if you're a pharmaceutical company, let's say you're Pfizer and you're introducing a new, Um, Uh, medication for diabetes, and you want to, um, understand the patient population, how many patients have diabetes, where are they being treated, etc. You can use our data and platforms for that.

Um, all the way down to if you're dumpster. com and you have dumpsters that you want to get a contract with your local hospital to have them using your dumpster service for their garbage removal. We have clients in that space as well. So it's anyone that either wants to understand or market or sell into the healthcare space.

We pretty much cover it all.

pharosIQ: Got it. So your decision makers are usually sellers, marketers, product marketers, product management, the gambit then?

michelle: Uh, yeah, really strategy team, sales and marketing for sure is one of our really, those personas all the way up to strategy, business strategy teams, uh, uh, product development teams, et cetera.

So yeah.

pharosIQ: Awesome. It's interesting that how often that happens where you're a customer of someone and then you end up, I, I was the old joke, like the hair club for men, like, not only am I a president, I'm also the client, but it happens more and more. I have a ton of customers who were like, how'd you get there?

Like, well, I, I bought this product and I just kind of fell in love with it. And it's a really great marriage because. When you're, when you're, if you're that passionate about something that you would go to a place because you really loved the product you were using, you just kind of push that passion to the team and the girls, so kudos to you.

And it's becoming more and more popular.

michelle: Yeah. Right.

pharosIQ: Awesome. So, uh, social media, right? I've noticed it's just, I'm fairly, fairly active on LinkedIn. So when I say social media, I, I look to it from a B2B perspective is really LinkedIn. I know there's other channels, but we'll get there in a second, but I've noticed you're, you're fairly active as far as posting per definitive content, things of that nature.

Right. But I also noticed like a lot of folks on this podcast and a lot of my customers, you're not as active with your own personal. Social on LinkedIn, personal brand, et cetera, right? Um, why do you think that is?

michelle: Yeah. So for me, the two, my two go to platforms for social are LinkedIn and Twitter. LinkedIn.

I am more of a consumer rather than a creator. I follow a lot of people, you included. You're one of the people I see in my feed all the time. Um, there's a lot of just phenomenal content out there. A lot of great creators. Um, I'll, I'll, I'll name some names if you want me to throw them out. I follow people like PharosIQ Walker, Ross Smith.

Simmons, um, I'm trying to think off the top of my head, uh, Tim Davidson does some pretty funny, uh, content. There's just a lot of people, uh, Lily Ray, she covers, uh, she's more on Twitter than LinkedIn, but she covers SEO. Um, there's just a lot of great creators out there. Um, in addition, I like to, I like a lot of the articles that people will post.

They'll find interesting articles on topics, you know, sometimes marketing, sometimes other areas. So I tend to be more of a. A consumer of the content rather than a creator. I'm not looking to necessarily build a personal brand, so to speak. I know a lot of people, depending on their role within their organization, they are not only doing their job as a marketer, they're evangelizing a new way of marketing or a new way of thinking.

And so as part of that, they want to be out there sharing Philosophy or their thought leadership around a particular topic. Um, I do sort of share my thoughts in that way for, for definitive, but I tend to do that via webinars. Like this year we had a whole series of webinars. Like I did one back in Q1.

You know, three campaigns you can get up and running in 30 days and top seven tips to improve your marketing programs. But I tend to do that via webinars rather than on LinkedIn.

pharosIQ: It's interesting. He mentioned PharosIQ Walker. He's, we're like Superman and Batman, our opinions on how to do B2B marketing. I've been, I've tried, I've tried to get on his pod, but he doesn't like people who don't agree with them.

So, PharosIQ, if you're out there, I don't agree with you. And I'd love to talk to you about it on your podcast for all of your wonderful guests We'll see if I

michelle: like the, what I will share is I like the diversity of thought because every business is different and I don't, I personally don't believe there's a one size fits all when it comes to marketing, marketing strategy, marketing tactics, marketing execution,I really enjoy and even within a business, even our, My own business right now where we have very different ways that we go to market with our products, depending on who we're trying to reach and what they're using our product for.

So that's why I like it. I like the diversity of thought and hearing different opinions and different approaches to things.

pharosIQ: Yeah. It's, it's great. I love his, I mean, he's, he's a, he's great with thought leading, you know, it's, it's great to have other thoughts in the market, right? It's just the nature of that, you know, when some, there's not like when some of the thought isn't as evidence based, is it, is it proven to write over, uh, over a period of time longer than six months, 12 months in a year, right?

That's where I tend to be like, Oh, come on. Right. Like I, that sounds great. Everybody would love to hear that. That's like saying I have the solution for sales and marketers to get along. Right. I'm sure everybody would love that solution, but it's I've been doing this 17 years and it just doesn't happen.

So for the most part, but interesting, you mentioned go to market. Um, that's obviously the rage right now. I just did a webinar on go to market, right? It's, you know, there's a whole batch of consultants popping up. Every CEO wants to have a meeting with their, their leaders across channel about the go to market.

Even if you've already been in market, all of a sudden that we're all re going to market again, which is always hilarious. But, um, I've noticed your. Your path, your journey has been. In some software sales, you know, software sales type companies, some, you know, traditional technology, and now this, this definitive is a bit more data, you know, it's a little bit different of a product in a cell.

Do you have you found the go to market to be drastically different or somewhat similar than the SAS and technology products you've been involved with?

michelle: Yeah, not really. We are just, um, we are a SaaS platform, uh, just to share that. What the real difference is, honestly, like, I worked at a company, for example, called Improvata, which we had security and identity management software, mostly for healthcare.

We sold into multiple industries, but healthcare was one of our industries. Um, SaaS platform. The way I marketed those products isn't all that different because at the end of the day, you businesses are either trying to solve, solve a problem or create an opportunity. And they're looking for products and services that are going to help them do that.

They are trying to grow their business. They either have a challenge that they need to solve. They need to automate something that's manual or something's inefficient and they need to make it more efficient. Or they're trying to make money and they just want to know how your product and service is going to help them do that.

They have goals and how can your product and service help them achieve those goals. So from that perspective, I don't really think it's dramatically different whether you're selling a SaaS product or some other type of product or service. At the end of the day, people are just trying to solve problems and you have to figure out how to help them solve their, their problem.

Go to market, I think, and I have this here. We have some, it depends on what it is. So for example, I mentioned as it is just a hypothetical example, dumpster. com, right? That's probably going to be one lead equals one chance at an opportunity. That's not going to be a whole buying committee where they have to really think it's like, Hey, we want a list of hospitals that we can call into to try to sell our dumpster service, right?

That's. It's kind of a yes no answer. They're going to look at us and they're either going to say yes or no versus a pharma company. That's going to be a six figure deal. You're going to have a buying committee. There's going to be a lot of back and forth. They have to evaluate all the different use cases.

They have to look at what they already own, right? That's going to be a longer sales cycle. Um, so the nature of your strategy, that's two very different strategies of how I'm going to market to the dumpster dot coms of the world versus how I'm going to market to Johnson and Johnson or Pfizer or Moderna or any of those companies.

So that's really when, when I think about it from that perspective, from a demand gen, Strategy. You have to match the strategy to the audience and the type of buyers that you're selling to, even if it's the same product, um, in which case it is for me, it's the same product, but why it's being used is very different.

pharosIQ: It's tactically the solution you're solving for is seen very different because there's that, and I think that's where go to market is really headed. Right? I think. We've all been there. We've all seen the fancy VP of X brought in, who's had experience at the enterprise or something of that nature. And they bring their playbook, right?

That they've seen success with in the past. And the hard thing about, I guess, go to market nowadays is, is, I mean, just think about how much the world has changed since 2022 and 2020, right? Like if you were a successful executive in 2019, your playbook is just ancient. It's dead.Like it doesn't, like there's been, so ma I mean we had covid, we had the technology boom where money was cheap and PEs and VCs were just fueling investment.

That drove a whole bunch of growth and then the, everything fell off the planet. We had a run on a bank and now we have ai. Right? And that's just like a four year span. So like, you know, like you as a, as a, a leader, a go-to market leader, marketing, sales, customer experience, even finance you like, you have to consistently be reinventing yourself and reinventing.

michelle: Yeah, the pace of change, especially in the last like 9 to 12 months. I mean, since COVID, but especially in the last year, the pace of change of the economy in the economic indicators. And are we heading into a recession? Is it a soft landing? Is it harder? Everything is coming under scrutiny. Things that used to be a really quick sales cycle.

No, no big deal. We're in rapid growth mode. This is going to help us grow. Check. Yep. Sign that purchase order. Things are going through a level of scrutiny that people I think aren't used to. Um, but you mentioned you've been doing this for 17 years, right? So you lived through 2008, 2009, like I've lived through down cycles before.

I've lived through two down cycles. This is my third down cycle. So I kind of knew this was coming, right? Everything comes under much heavier scrutiny. So when you think about the type of content you need to produce, like for different, you have to keep like CFO, even if you didn't normally have to even think about the CFO in your sales cycle before you better be thinking about it now, because most stuff, even smaller purchases go all the way up through a heavy level of scrutiny now to say, do we really, and.

You know, our budgets are tight. Do we really need this? Is this really going to help us achieve our goals? Or can we put the, can we delay this purchase for a little bit until the economy feels a little bit more secure?

pharosIQ: Interesting. You say CFO. Cause you know, it's, that's the, that's the, that's the big change, right?

Like, so to the point where my selling organization, now we have a slide in our proposal. Debt like, you know, we have a call we run. Everything's great. Next step. Here's your proposal recommendation. Like, we have a slide called the CFO slide. It says on the top of it, the CFO slide and it's and it's really 3 points, right?

What does it cost? What do they get? And why does it matter? Right? Because that's that's what we're talking about. You know, and we found it like a ton of our customers have got back to us and said, like, to love that slide. Like it's all I had to do is forward it over to my CFO who will eventually ask me those three questions.

And I was able to quickly articulate it. So it's the CFO finds their way into everything these days. Like it's sorry, Jeff. I know that's my CFO. I

michelle: love my CFO, Rick, if you're listening, he's awesome. But yeah, no, things just come. It's natural, right? It's, um, Economically more challenging right now. And the level of justification needed to make a purchase has increased.

So the more we do this ourselves for our own sellers, the more we can provide them with information about not only return on investment, but how does this help, how is this going to help someone's business be more successful either to make something more efficient, right? Cause they're either looking to make something more efficient or to make more money.

So if you can show them how it. So it makes you more efficient and helps you make more money, um, that can help you justify the ROI and like, why, why do we need to do, why do we need to make this Purchase and why do we need to make it right now? Um, because it will help our business right now, even when we're in a tough financial environment.

pharosIQ: That's a killer point, right? And any seller out there, any marketer, that second part of it, the right now is what will win you the deal, right? No, no one is saying that your product isn't valuable and that they don't have a need and they don't have a solution, but every executive team is sitting around saying, which problem do we have to let go right now?

Right. Which, which problem do we just not have the bandwidth cost cash or resources to solve for? Right. So as you're making that pitch as you're, as you're really getting out in front of your customer base, it's not only why and what, how are we solving for the problem, but why it's important to solve for it right now at quantifying that.

And that's the difference between hitting your targets in 2023 and what will be 2024 and missing them and saying, Oh, the deal pushed.Right. Right. So really amazing point on that one, Michelle. So, all right. You mentioned PharosIQ Walker earlier, um, which leads me to my next question because it popped in my head, um, demand gen versus lead gen.

I'm hearing a lot of. a lot of demand marketers and a lot of marketers in general, differentiating the two, like they're different, right? Um, do you think there's a legit difference between demand Jen and lead Jen, or is this just fancy podcast or influencer wordplay?

michelle: Uh, I think it's a little bit of semantics.

Um, that being said, I do there, I actually think of it a little bit differently. There's Demand creation and demand capture and like I say this sometimes even to my own team, like it's right there in my job title. Demand generation, generation, we have to generate demand. Um, and really it comes down to not 100 percent, but demand creation is You have to, you know, explain to people that they have a challenge and that you have a, you know, There are people who are in market and that's demand capture and that tends to be inbound, right?

They're going to come to you. So you better have your SEO and PPC game on full throttle, right? You got to make sure If someone's on Google and they're searching, you better make sure you're, and they're in market, you better make sure you can be found, so to speak. Right. And so that's all content marketing and bound rates.

We have a whole engine that we do behind that. Um, but those are people that are already in market. They already know they have a need and they're looking. To buy something. Um, what about the other, you know, 99. 9 percent of the market that is, uh, that is not currently looking for a product? You're going to need to convince them that they should be looking for a product like yours.

So that's where a lot of the outbound campaigns come in. So we do like outbound, you know, integrated outbound campaigns, webinars, events. You have to go to them. They're not coming to you. You have to go to them. So that's more of an outbound. So, To me that it's, it's two parts and you have to be doing both.

It's not one or the other. You have to be creating demand that doesn't yet exist. And then when it does exist, you have to be capturing that. You have to be there when they're looking. They either have to know your brand or find you online. You know, you have to do all the things that you need to do so that they know you exist when they're ready to actually make a purchase.

pharosIQ: Amazing differentiation. Loved it. I mean, both are, both are. Equally challenging, right? Trying to like, now we're like now just trying to capture. I mean, PPC SEO are so competitive, right? And, and let's face it, Google and being, I mean, it's, it's like a, an interesting puzzle that has. Pieces missing and without any directions.

It's like the worst Lego set to ever create, to try to do paid to pay, you know, like finding a paid media person who understands how to play that game is like, that's someone you should pay forever on your staff, just because Google can eat your money so fast with absolutely no results.And then they just say like, Oh, sorry, we're optimizing the algorithm.

And you didn't, nothing happened for you for your 20 million you spent with me, right? So like that part of it is so challenging, but also the creation side. And the way I like to see it is. I can't remember somebody smart said this on LinkedIn and it wasn't me, but I'm stealing it. Um, it's like demand creation is about those people who don't have a need that are in your target ICP when they do, you, you want to be the first company they think of, right?

Like, so if I, I have a problem, boom, I know that this solves for it. And then they become the, you know, they're typing your name in Google and not the problem. Right. And I think, and I think that's where, right. You know, lead generation, it's gotten to the point where I don't want to say it serves sales so much right where it's like, Oh, I need to generate leads for the BDR team is any leads to call and to do this thing and all that.

And it can be done that way. Right. But I've always found lead generation, especially at the top of the funnel is like building your community of people willing to listen to you. Right. Like your, your target ICP, like for me, it's demand generation, man. Right. Like, uh, like I want to put content out there and get as many folks into my community of opt in email.

Or so, so when I put content out into the space, um, and someone's like, oh, I need leads, I need intent. I need those things. I want them to be typing in MRP and not I need leads. And that's the real long term goal. That's. And again, equally as challenging as the capture. So marketing is really hard. Yeah,

michelle: that's what keeps us employed.

I say that sometimes when I'm chatting, I have a, I have an awesome team, by the way. Some people are like, man, this is like so complicated or so difficult. And I always, I say to people, if this were easy, we wouldn't have jobs.So, um, you know, we're always looking to automate what we can automate and, you know, make things more efficient and all of that.

But I think the things that are, the things that are easy have already been automated, right? So, um, it's the things that are hard that still require people to, uh, be putting deep thought into them and figuring out strategies and tactics to achieve it, achieve a goal.

pharosIQ: And then you have to unautomate it, right?

Because it became so easy because it was automated. Then it became almost useless. Right. You know, and when things reach that point where there's so much automation that everybody's automating the same thing, it becomes almost background noise. So then you have to unautomated and give it, give like a more personal touch to what was everything sick up and down in the big cyclical path of that, which leads me to the, the meat and potatoes of, of said B2B boring podcast.

Let's talk campaigns, right? Um, you've been doing this a long time. Um, what is your favorite? The, one of the most favorite campaigns you've had from a demand perspective, creative, unboring, right? What was it? How did it work and why do you love it?

michelle: Yeah. So I've actually got three examples today. Coming at creativity from different angles as I was prepping for this.

Um, to be honest, I did do this really amazing campaign a few years ago that generated 18 million in pipeline.I thought about sharing that one. Um, it was interesting, but. Kind of complex, et cetera. Um, what I thought would be more useful for the audience because I feel like it might spark some ideas is how how to think about campaigns in a creative way.

So the 1st 1 example is about creative use of data. And the other two are creative use of content. So we'll start with the data one mentioned, you know, I was a client before I was a employee of the company. Um, I actually used before I worked for definitive. I use definitive health care's data for this particular campaign.

So we were doing an ABM program out to hospitals and health systems. I was working for a company called Improvata. We made, uh, Security and identity management software for hospitals. Um, and so we were targeting the IT departments in particular, the CIOs and maybe the director level on the IT teams at these hospitals and health systems.

Um, and this is where creative use of data comes in. So when we were trying to select, which we, we only had budget to target 300. Um, we couldn't target them all. There's 6, 500 hospitals across the US, right? We can't target all. We. We managed to secure enough budget to target 300. We had a great program, whatever.

How do you select the 300 that we're going to go after? I started doing analysis. I pulled the data just to poke around on like, what are, what are some of the variables we would want to use and stumbled across something really interesting when, when, you know, spending time with the data can be really useful.

What we found is. In hospitals and health systems. I will not bore your audience with this. There's something called the HIMSS MRAM score. It's a score that indicates how technologically advanced a hospital is. And so if you score a six or a seven, that means that you're, you're much more advanced in your use of technology than some of the other hospitals out there.

And we thought, well, that's, that's a good, Like let's go after the ones that are more technologically advanced because they're probably going to be more open to the type of software that we sell, uh, unknowingly stumbled into the fact that when we sorted by this, nearly 100 percent of the CIOs at these hospitals were, were women.

We were not looking for that angle. Um, so not only for that campaign, did we focus, we focused on the hospitals that were the most technical and we had very good success rate with the campaign. Um, it actually gave us an insight for the rest of Our other campaigns, we actually spent more money, time, energy, focus on the hospitals and health systems that had female CIOs because there was this correlation.

Don't, I don't know why that was. It was just something we uncovered, but I'm sharing this because I think sometimes people, when they think about their ICP and they think about, Look at all of the data facets you have available to you because you might uncover something if you spend a little bit more time doing the analysis, particularly if you're doing an account based program on that account selection.

Yes, you should look at intent data. Yes, you should. You know, there's all tech tech install data. You should be looking at all these different. Um, this was something we never would have thought to look at if we hadn't just poked around in the data, like a couple layers, um, and it had a broader impact across all of our, we started to see better conversion rates, better win rates across all of our programs.

Once we had this insight. So I wanted to share that a little bit different probably than what you're what

pharosIQ: you're saying is women are more, are smarter and more forward facing than men in it. That's what you're that's the synopsis.

michelle: And hospitals and health systems. I think that's an overgeneralization it.

Um, like I said, I'm not going to speak to why, but the data did what the data supported is that the hospitals that were had C female CIOs were a bit more advanced in their what people call digital transformation that some of the, you know, I was What you may or may not know is hospitals still use pagers.

In fact, it's like 1998 inside a lot of hospitals and health systems. So, um, they're getting a lot better though. Um, it's definitely been more modernized. The other two campaigns are more content centric. So one I would strongly suggest I've been doing this in a lot of different companies is, uh, Log into Amazon and go to the business book section because there's new business books being published all the time Um, this is a win win all around, uh, find an author Better probably not to have a big name author because that's going to come with a lot of speaking fees and everything else.

Somebody that's got a book coming up, it's a complete win win. So if it's a book that you know your audience would care about, and the perfect example I have of this, we just did this, probably seen this book, probably can't see it because it won't zoom in on it. Uh, using behavioral science and marketing by Nancy Harhud.

So we know our audience would be, I personally was interested in this book. I know my audience would be interested in this book. So we invited Nancy to be a guest speaker on a webinar. Um, she covered some of the principles that are in the book. Um, you can use the book itself as a 50 people who register are going to get a copy of the, The book, you can then take that webinar, you can turn it into derivative content like blog posts, social media posts, uh, et cetera.

You can promote the recording. Um, I've done this at so many different companies where it's a great way. Somebody has just produced. Really solid piece of content in the form of a book. They like it because they get to promote themselves, promote their book. Um, it's great for us because it attracts in the audience that we're trying to attract, uh, in.

And so it's kind of like a win win all around. Um, and I've done, uh, this was the most recent one, but I've run this play quite a bit, um, we'll also use the book and like potentially if it were an ABM program as a follow up, um, You can actually, you know, FedEx copies of the book to people and things like that as like a follow up after the, the webinar just as a, Hey, I thought you might enjoy a copy of the book.

pharosIQ: Awesome. Yeah. It's like, I mean, everybody loves it. Like I've seen it advance people giving away books, right. It's become quite popular to give away books written by your founder these days. I mean, you have the founder led book strategy that I've seen this popping at least in my space. It is a lot, but a really cool one.

Interesting. It reminds me of kind of an anecdotal, you know, this is more prospecting, but, you know, marketing can use it as well too. Um, but I've, and I heard this from a colleague and I just had to steal it and I've been doing it ever since, you know, if you go on LinkedIn and you find type in a hashtag topic, right?

Let's say, you know, intent data or ABM, right? There'll be a list of events. You can go and you can find a bunch of a bunch of events that have those similar topics, and if you register for the event, right, maybe one with one of your competitors is throwing. It's an interesting space. There's a little tab on the event post registration that says networking, right?

And it will list all of the people who have signed up for the event. The event on LinkedIn, right? So obviously if you sell ABM or intent solutions, and there's a whole bunch of people signed up for an intent or ABM webinar on LinkedIn, they're probably interested in what you're selling. I've prospected into those lists and seen, you know, like 25 percent email response rates because it's so top, like someone's just like, and what you're saying from a content perspective is trying to, I think, figure out.

Catching someone in that lightning bolt moment of when they're thinking about a problem or a solution and a thing like a book or a webinar or that piece of content is like that really great attachment that that synapse is like connectors are really awesome advice like tons of, you know, the real goal here.

Again, the podcast is these ideas. You know, spur ideas for all of our guests out there. I think you gave me one. think you've given everybody a couple one more. We got time. I've got

michelle: one more and this one's my favorite. So I saved it for last. If you wanted something that was kind of different, unique, not traditional.

I know that the, the nature of this podcast is B2B not boring. We're trying to not be boring here. Let's do something outside of the box thinking. So this one was, um, Prior to Definitive Healthcare, I worked at a company, uh, headquartered in Boston called PTC. Uh, PTC, uh, most people know them. They have, uh, CAD software, right?

So target audiences, engineer, heads of engineers, heads of manufacturing, right? It's very industrial. So a lot of software for that space. We came up with this idea, um, in part, I don't know if you have teenagers. I have teenagers. I have three boys. Um, if they're not playing video games, they're watching video games, right?

So anybody who's listening to this, who has teenagers knows exactly what I'm talking about.They're either playing video games or they're watching other people play video games. So we thought about that concept. We looked into Twitch. Um, if you're familiar with Twitch, a lot of gamers will live stream themselves gaming or like, eh, we don't know.

If that's really going to, um, good fit in terms of target audience, but will they consume the content? So we went with Facebook live instead. And what we did is we had a community community of, uh, engineers who used our. Software tool. And we set it up as a competition. We set like a, almost like a head to head competition.

We gave them an object, say like a chair and said, who can design this chair faster using our software? So we gave them the object and then they had to go into this 3d CAD software. And it was almost like a face off of power users of our product. Um, we did it as like a, let's just see what happens. Are we going to get, are like three people going to show up?

We had hundreds, hundreds of people. Show up to watch people use our product. Um, people just like, they like watching people like advanced users use your product. Now, this isn't going to work for every product that's out there, but if you kind of take the concept of it, it's just like watching sports, like people like to watch NFL and major league big, because they like watching people who are really, really skilled.

Do the thing that they're really skilled at. And then if you add a competition into it, you can really draw a crowd. Now, did it generate immediate leads, immediate opportunity? No, of course not. It was more of a community building, brand building type exercise, but we wound up. I haven't, I think they're still doing it.

I haven't been there and I haven't worked there in three years, but I think they're still doing some like, uh, programs like that, but, um, we just wanted to think outside the box and say, what would be almost entertaining for our audience that's a little outside the norm of what we would typically do to attract people in.

pharosIQ: Amazing. I have, uh, my son's 19 now, so late teen. So he's moved from the, the video game phase of his life to the car and young lady phase of his life. So it's a little bit less prominent on the, but I mean, there were many of hours with me standing behind him going, why are you, why, why are you watching someone play the game that you could just play, like, isn't it more fun to play the game that you're just, but, and then, but you actually, I mean, He never was able to give me a good.

Answer, and I think you just did, and I think we all we all just enjoy watching, watching people do things that at the most elite level, right? And I guess I didn't, I guess my brain wasn't comprehending that there's like an elite level of playing a video game, but there, you know, there is right. But now, but, you know, surprisingly, my tick tock will roll through and I'll see, like, there'll be those like people live playing old, like, yeah, Punch out from the 90s and I, and like, I find myself stopping like, Oh, I could like, okay, well, he's really, you know, like, but so I get it now, but awesome idea.

Um, I, and I think in the, especially in the tech space, right. Folks who use technology, if you're a technology marketer out there, if you can showcase power users of that tech, people will watch. I mean, I'm actually sitting to myself thinking, like, could we. Do like a live video of watching someone who's really good at creating pivot tables and cutting data up in Excel.

Cause I think every marketer would love that. Let me

michelle: tell you, I'm not making this up. Anyone listening can Google this there. It's so e sports, if you're familiar with e sports, right? Rocket league, my kids watch the rocket league, right? There is actually an international Excel e sports competition. These are people who are absolute masters.

At using all the advanced functionality of Excel and they actually have an e sports competition that like hundreds, like thousands of people log in to watch these like masters of Excel competing against each other in the

pharosIQ: finance decision makers. Right. I'm sponsoring that. Right. And some of the, some of the FPNA and modeling folks on my team are just ridiculously good.

And I'm like, Whoa, that's really great. I mean, so awesome. Well, Michelle, thank you so much. It's been an awesome, you know, I don't know how long it's been. It's been so, it's been so great that I lost track of time. We've probably gone a bit long, but there's no actual time limit for this podcast. It'd be just, you know, we're only three or four episodes in.

So we're still defining that I'm sure by the time. I'm done 200 episodes. It'll be like a two and a half hour thing, and I'll just continue to be sitting here all day, but thank you so much for joining. Um, it's really been fun. How can we, how can anybody reach you personally, either on, you know, just to kind of chat and pick your brain about campaigns or definitive healthcare.

If they have interest in your solutions.

michelle: Yeah, so, uh, definitely find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty easy to find, uh, Michelle Lero. I don't think there's too many Michelle Leros on there, so you'll find me pretty quickly. Uh, I'm on Twitter as well. Easy handle to remember. It's at Michelle Lero, uh, so you can find me on Twitter.

Um, if anyone was interested in Definitive Healthcare, uh, we do have a free trial of the product. So if you go right to our homepage, you're going to see a button right there for a free trial. Just click on that and you can request a free trial if you want to just, uh, take a drive around our product.

pharosIQ: Cool.

Awesome. Next topic of next podcast. When will people actually start calling it X versus Twitter? Um, because I, I, I, I don't get Twitter. I've never gotten the tweeting, right? But now it's even more complicated that it's X or whatever it is. And, and Elon's doing his thing though. So, um, thank you so much for joining us.

It's going to be, uh, it's going to be a great week, you know, last, yeah. Week of the quarter for most of us right last week of the month for all, you know, it's a crazy time Thanks for taking the time out of your day to join me and look forward to connecting in the future You know, let's do it again in a couple months.

All right.

michelle: Yeah, it was great Thanks so much for having me on the podcast.

pharosIQ: Awesome. Thank you so much

michelle: Thanks, pharosIQ