044 | Building Synergy in Your HealthTech Organization with Sarah Acton of Athos | Studio CMO - a podcast by Golden Spiral, Shaping Technology Marketing

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The Episode in 60 Seconds

How do you build a company that always puts the customer first? Sarah Acton, VP of Sales and Marketing for Athos, has done so by building a synergistic organization that shares customer stories, digs into customer needs, and listens to each other. On this episode of Studio CMO, Sarah discusses:

• How to Listen to Your Customer and Each Other
• How to Build Internal Synergy for the Benefit of the Customer
• How to Cultivate a Company's Culture and Values
• Tips for Hiring the Best HealthTech Talent
• What it Takes to be a Good Client for an Agency

About Our Guest

Sarah Acton is the VP of Sales and Marketing at Athos, a wearable technology company focused on ensuring all types of athletes, from professionals to military tactical athletes, are prepared and ready to perform. With roots in consumer products at Coca-Cola, retail at Home Depot, her own business, and consumer tech at Yahoo! and LinkedIn, Sarah learned early the power of storytelling and how using data can transform and personalize a brand experience. Athos is a patented system that enables the world’s first smart clothing to measure how hard your muscles are working using the science of EMG (Electromyography). This is combined with powerful AI and a mobile app gives you insights to truly understand how your body performs. The system has helped athletes at all levels train better and smarter, whatever your goal.

Show Notes

"Our job as sales and marketing professionals is to take what we know about our product and service and find the intersection that resonates with the customer's own problem." — Sarah Acton

How to Listen to Your Customer and Each Other

Listening has been a core part of Sarah's life. She can point to many defining, salient moments where something changed as a result of listening. If you want to be a better listener, practice these habits:

• Meet face-to-face (or on the phone or video conference) with customers.
• Be curious. Dig in to ideas you haven't heard before.
• Have the mindset, "There's always something new to learn."
• Record sales calls as often as you can.
• Share a few sales calls with the entire company from time to time (provide a mix of good and bad).
• Seek to understand the day-to-day lives of your customers.
• Identify themes that arise from different sources.
• Become a copious notetaker.

"The more we, as a business, can understand our customers, understand their day-to-day lives, the better we can deliver on our promises to them. And the better we can create solutions that really meet—and surpass—their needs." — Sarah Acton

How to Build Internal Synergy for the Benefit of the Customer

When we work together, everything gets better." —Sarah Acton

In order to get any two (or more) departments to work together, they must spend time together around customer problems. Examples:

• Product Development Invites Marketing and Sales to Product Discovery sessions.
• All parties listen in on live customer service calls.
• Managers can build a shared desire to win and then share the wins together.
• All parties hold frequent check in meetings.

How to Cultivate a Company's Culture and Values

Do you know and reflect often on your company's culture and values? For reference: Athos' Mission Golden Spiral Values Sarah shared a powerful story of how Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, leaned on his CTO, Kevin Scott. Find out more about this powerful relationship.

“I would share my problem with Kevin because then Kevin could start thinking about the solution to the problem, too.” — Reid Hoffman

Tips for Hiring the Best HealthTech Talent

• Look for people who show a pattern of being intrigued by problems.
• Ask how they solved difficult problems.
• Discover how they push themselves out of the comfort zone.
• Foster interviews that are times for stories and not just facts.
• Find indicators that your candidates have a drive to solve the problems of tomorrow.

What it Takes to be a Good Client for an Agency

Sarah spent many years working for agencies serving clients and has hired agencies as a marketing executive within companies. She's seen both sides of the relationship. She and John Farkas shared a number of tips. As a company:

• Do find an agency sees the client relationships the way you do.
• Don't lob a problem over the fence to your agency and expect them to solve it.
• Do become a partner with your agency.
• Don't hide and obfuscate information.
• Do "open the kimono" and be vulnerable about the problems you are facing.
• Don't build an adversarial relationship with the idea of squeezing every dime out of the agency.
• Do be open and honest about your real budget and listen carefully to the agency's capacity to supply solutions within that budget.
• Do share the wins with your agency partner.
• Do work together to optimize your resources and those of the agency.

"I always strive to make my agency partners feel just as much a part of our wins as my internal team." — Sarah Acton

The Nature of Change

John shared this quote often used at our Foundation Workshops. Can you identify the author? “It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.” Listen at 25:35 to discover who.

Golden Spiral's Foundation Experience

Do you feel your company is invisible in your marketplace? The right agency can help you stand out in the middle of your competition and be seen for all the right reasons. Our Foundations Workshop is the perfect methodology to shape your story. Our proven process unpacks, then crystalizes, who you are, what your solution does, why you exist, and who needs to know. The workshop assembles all your stakeholders in the same place at the same time. You will build consensus and gain clarity in amazing ways. (And we’ve had great success with virtual workshops as well.) And it's guaranteed!

Our Foundation Guarantee: If you qualify for and engage in the foundation experience, we guarantee you will be convinced of the value of our approach after the Foundation Workshop. If not, let us know within 48 hours, we’ll stop, and you won’t owe us a thing.

LinkedIn's Tenth Anniversary Celebration

Sarah talked about her work on LinkedIn's 10th anniversary. Find the product of their branding work here. She mentioned the power of A Beautiful Constraint, the concept (and the book) of time and budget limitations can sometimes foster the best work. Find out more about the book here.

Further episodes of Healthcare Market Matrix

Further podcasts by Golden Spiral, Shaping Technology Marketing

Website of Golden Spiral, Shaping Technology Marketing