Episode Summary
When Louisy Raymond joined the Zipari team more than two years ago, she was the second member of its marketing department — and the only one who actually had a background in marketing.
Tasked with establishing a marketing strategy for the SaaS health care company, she used her 18 years of experience in the field to build her team and map out a cohesive plan. This included everything from redesigning the team’s sales decks to planning conferences and webinars.
On this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown interviews Louisy who is now two years into her tenure as the senior vice president of marketing at Zipari.
She talks about how she approached the startup’s marketing strategy (health insurance companies are wary of startups — they see them fail all too often), targeted the software’s ideal audience (the highly educated C-suite) and built out content (super niche white papers).
At the end of the interview, Louisy reveals how she keeps her finger on the B2B marketing pulse. Spoiler: She loves Medium.com and podcasts.
Guest Profiles
- Name: Louisy Raymond
- What she does: As the senior vice president of marketing at Zipari, a customer experience platform built for health insurance companies, Louisy plans and executes the SaaS company’s marketing strategy.
- Company: Zipari
- Noteworthy: Louisy has worked in marketing for more than 18 years. Prior to joining Zipari, she spent five years as the senior marketing manager at WebMD, where she supported more than $300 million in annual revenue and managed more than $20 million of business.
Key Insights
- Health insurers see a lot of startups fail, so it can be difficult to gain their confidence. That’s why Louisy has leaned into in-person events, where members of the team can interact face-to-face. The key is to first get on these companies’ radars and then send them down the sales funnel starting with demos. During COVID-19, the team has resorted to webinars.
- When your target customers are C-level industry experts, you have to show them you’re an expert, too. Zipari’s marketing team taps into its in-house sales and product experts to help with content creation. It also finds PR opportunities to publish thought leadership pieces in industry publications.
- Data is everything. Louisy loves digging into customer data to determine what is and isn’t working. She also uses data to keep her team on track. Instead of gauging progress by tracking complete and incomplete projects, she assigns specific KPIs to each member of her team.
Episode Highlights
- The personable, face-to-face marketing strategy
“We started doing a lot of events, because that really gave [health insurance companies] an opportunity to get to know us as people and to have more confidence in us — not just as an organization but the people who make up that organization … One thing we do that’s a little different is we all wear Zipari T-shirts and wear jeans, and we serve beer at our booth. It really just gets people to know us on a human level, as opposed to the suits and the heels that seem to be the uniform of business folks.”
- Bringing in PR reinforcements when targeting the C-suite crowd
“We work with a great outside PR company, and they find us a lot of opportunities to do articles and thought leadership. I’ve found that’s key for us. So, you know, our CEO writes an article in an industry publication like MedHealth or FierceHealthcare, and that will drive a lot of leads for us, especially when you’re considering we’re trying to get these high-level people — these really senior people — to see us. So that kind of thought leadership really goes a long way.”
- Appealing to multiple stakeholders through the sales funnel
“Because there are so many stakeholders, our sales team is usually having conversations with 10 people in the room — there’s like five or six conversations. And because we are a platform product that can be configured, there are multiple proof of concepts and iterations to show them what we can do and that we can specifically serve their needs.”
- Tap into your subject matter experts: the sales team
“Some of our salespeople are really strong subject matter experts. They’ve been working in health care for decades, so when we’re writing pieces of content, we’ll tap them and ask them what they think of it. That’s important because our customers are really smart. The concepts and the challenges they’re dealing with are not entry-level because they’re at the senior strategic level, and they know everything there is to know about their industry. It’s really good to have folks on the sales team who have also been working in the industry for a long time and can provide guidance there.”
- A big piece of analytics people don’t get? Backend data
“Another huge thing is we weren’t really measuring what we were doing. I feel like we were producing things, and it was sort of being measured by ‘Did we do that?’… versus measuring the outcomes. Really being able to bring in an ops and analytics person allowed us not just to start to look at the data, but also start to capture the data. That’s a really big piece of analytics that people don’t get — is the backend and setting up the backend properly.”
