GETTING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR MARKTING TOOLS

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Caitlin La Honta (00:05)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the science of sales and marketing. I'm Caitlin LaHonta, co-founder of Sirona Marketing and I'm hosting today's session with my co-founder Abdul. And today we are joined by Jake Stritch, who is the head of marketing at Ganymede. Welcome, Jake. yeah, yeah, thanks for joining. So you recently started as head of marketing at Ganymede. Can you tell us a bit about what Ganymede does and why you were kind of brought on to build out the marketing team?

Jake Strich (00:19)

me.

Yeah, absolutely. So Ganymede is an instrument connectivity and lab data platform, and it makes BioPharma and biotech companies and their labs smarter. So think plug and play data integration and analysis that cuts out manual tasks like file uploads, exporting from instruments, and really helps labs run more efficiently at scale.

Caitlin La Honta (00:52)

Awesome. And so you recently joined as head of marketing. Can you talk a little bit about what it's like to join as the first marketing hire and sort of how you approached understanding what your priorities should be and kind of getting the lay of the land, knowing where Ganymede is as that series A startup stage?

Jake Strich (01:06)

Yeah, absolutely. I previously to Ganymede, I had worked at a few different biotech companies at larger scale. And so I was coming in and basically implementing the ability for us to have.

to scale up our processes at a marketing level. Before I joined, there was really no marketing programs or campaigns that were integrated with the product roadmap. so tying all of that together with all the different teams was a core focus here. And then also to all the classic growth marketing channels, like paid ads or webinars or events and things like that that we want to get more bang for your buck, how can we implement those kinds

of

best practices across the channels as well. So that was like one area is like channels. And then also thinking about our technology stack. How can we get the most out of, you what we have based on the resourcing? And then also to like, how can we do smart marketing? Like thinking about ABM, thinking about the integrated campaigns to be really targeted and put the why behind why we're reaching out to people and going out to the market. So that's been like my core focus here for the last couple of months since I joined is laying the foundation for that.

Caitlin La Honta (02:07)

Mm-hmm.

Jake Strich (02:12)

to build up as we're scaling and preparing for future funding rounds and in our own future growth.

Caitlin La Honta (02:18)

Cool,

yeah, and I mean, you just mentioned a lot of stuff, which, and I know you're gonna get into a little bit of how you did set some of these things up really smartly to do the work for you from a technology perspective. There's a lot of really cool marketing tools, but sort of within the framework that you've established and are now building out, how do you kind of approach prioritization within that being a team of one, and or kind of getting the resources you need to...

get stuff off your plate and automate things to make it more efficient for you as one person right now.

Jake Strich (02:47)

Yeah. So that is the challenge, right? Is there's a lot of things to get done and I'm only me, just a team of one right now. And I think when you're considering all the tasks that have to get done, obviously you have to think about big picture and the ability to zoom in. as like, know, head of marketing is a generous title. I think it's more like I'm marketing lead, like diving in and taking care of what needs to get done, but also thinking about how can we scale this up, you know, when we are ready to have more head count as well.

One thing I've learned which is really interesting and I didn't really consider this as like a superpower here at Ganymede is we're a small team. We're about 30 folks.

Well, what I've learned is I may be the only person with marketing in my title, but every single person on our team is absolutely dedicated towards marketing. And so I've leveraged that a lot here. And our team has been really gracious, you know, whether it's the sales team really taking the lead on going and being at the events and helping coordinate on driving outcomes, like meetings generated and also being at the booth and getting more booth traffic. I've been able to work with those teams really closely.

along with engineering, tying in engineers. We have amazing engineering talent here.

at Ganymede, people who come from the biotech and pharma industry who also are computer scientists and they understand deeply the needs that these labs and these scientists have to solve for in terms of their data issues. So with that in mind, know, one way we've been leveraging our engineers for marketing is putting together these weekly or not weekly, sorry, monthly webinars around our apps that we're

releasing pretty frequently. And we're having the people who are actually building the apps walk through with the end users what that looks and feels like and why they built it that way. Which is really powerful. It's not just coming from someone who's selling the software. It's coming from the people who actually are on the ground building it and putting in the code.

Caitlin La Honta (04:33)

And this.

Yeah, we hear a lot kind of.

What you've been saying broadly is like marketing is everyone's job. In every company it should be, but especially in the early stage when, you know, everyone is representing the brand and every touch point you have, you're building that awareness of who Ganymede is, why you all are a great solution. There's always that opportunity to represent that because, you know, you're not a huge company that's super, super well-known, though you're building that recognition, of course. Would you say that that notion of getting everyone on board

to be marketing or always marketing? Is that something that just is embedded in the company culture? Or is there certain things that you're doing to help drive that with the broader teams that you're working with and partnering with?

Jake Strich (05:18)

Yeah, I would say like it's

Both situation. but really our culture is embedded with not just building great products, but being able to tell people about the products as well. So when it comes to like these motions, it's kind of like a, like a reflex that everyone has to think about marketing. It's not an afterthought. It's really like, how do we make sure that this is easy in terms of the value props and statements that we're putting out there and aligning it actually with product value and delivery. so think that's something like, you know, we think about.

Caitlin La Honta (05:34)

Mm-hmm.

Jake Strich (05:47)

from the beginning in the product development cycle versus just saying, like we have this new product, figure out how to tell people about it and make a web page and things like that. It's really involved from beginning to finish.

Caitlin La Honta (05:58)

Yep.

Abdul Rastagar (05:58)

And I wonder how that's going to change as you guys grow and bring on more employees, right? Whether they're still going to have that mindset for, hey, my job is to sell and do marketing, even if they're not, you know, in those functions. Is that something that you guys screen for in interviews actively, or is that just kind of a byproduct of how you work?

Jake Strich (06:14)

I think in an early stage startup, it's just a byproduct. And I think that's something, as we're scaling, that is something I'm thinking about how to like, from a culture standpoint and growing this team on the marketing side of how do we get people still connected to the other functions. I've been at other companies where the functions are very siloed.

And, you know, when you have functions meeting without other teams seeing what's going on and they're not included in those meetings and there's no conversations happening between the teams. People tend to work individually and exclusively. So my goal here, like, you know, in terms of the culture and with marketing is to be embedded with the other teams working really closely with our salespeople because they are on the front lines. They're getting live feedback from customers and prospects and also talking to the engineers about what they're working on as well.

Caitlin La Honta (06:30)

Mm-hmm.

Jake Strich (06:58)

the complexities and the nuances of the different development issues that they're working through too.

Caitlin La Honta (07:03)

Yeah, and one of the things that you said that I also think really stands out is that

every person, whether they're a marketer or engineer in product development, the underlying question is like, what's the value for the customer? It's not, I'm building this cool technology in a silo or I'm, you know, just focusing on my role as this very specific slice. It's like, I'm focusing on how can I build a better or market a better product for what's going to serve what the customer needs. And so that's like a naturally a marketers, you know, marketers POV is always what's the customer value and customer benefit, but that being embedded in all the other.

teams as well just speaks to how well that like culture of we're always marketing is at Ganymede so that's really cool.

Jake Strich (07:44)

Yeah, the product itself is very customizable and we make sure that like every customer has it built to their specs. And I think with that in mind, you know, there's obviously the productization, but there's also like the delivery and the services aspect of it as well. And so we're getting so much feedback from each customer that people who are the implementation managers or the engineers, they're getting this direct feedback and then relaying it back to us in real time. So we are meeting on a weekly basis, getting and

discussing this, how is this impact not only our existing customers, but how can we talk about this to the broader market and what are like the key features that would matter for everybody? Obviously, you want to make sure that everything's productized, but there's a lot with this kind of product. It's very technical and very specific and modular to each customer's use case. So you have to consider like what can be replicated across the board and scalable. At that point, we're talking more high level messaging, value props.

Caitlin La Honta (08:30)

Mm-hmm.

Jake Strich (08:42)

and things like that too.

Caitlin La Honta (08:43)

Yep. Yeah. so, you know, since you've joined, it sounds like good news. was a lot of this sort of marketing was happening through these other teams, but you really brought a lot of process and structure and are starting to elevate, you know, a lot of the kind of marketing efforts. So it'd be great to speak to you. I know you've done a lot of work here, kind of how you're approaching the go-to-market tooling and setting up a lot of these systems to start scaling out and building some of your priorities on the marketing side.

Jake Strich (09:10)

Yeah, so in terms of go-to-market tooling, you have to really think about the more tech stacks you can actually afford. When you're doing your research and you look online, there's a tool that will say it does this, this, and this, and then you're like, so what does it actually do for me? And how does that all tie together?

Caitlin La Honta (09:17)

you

Jake Strich (09:28)

And what I'm really grateful for is working at a company like this, at Ganymede, we're very technical and we like to think like through integrations and data flow and things like that. And my CEO really challenged me around this was making sure like all of the different technologies that we want to implement actually has impact, actually integrates across, and we can actually see it in being sourced in a single place. So with that in mind, it's like, what is, what is your marketing automation platform? So like the fundamentals of, you know, Martechs

Abdul Rastagar (09:48)

Ahem.

Jake Strich (09:58)

You need your marketing automation. You need some sort of data enrichment tooling. You need a way to de-anonymize web visitors. That's a new tool that's come out in the last couple of years, but now it's a must-have because that is real-time insights you can pass along to your sales team.

Caitlin La Honta (10:08)

Thank

Jake Strich (10:11)

How do you align messaging with your SDRs doing outreach as well? Making sure that they have all the information and that they're equipped with the right messaging to do that kind of outreach. So a lot of it has been tied to providing context internally and also gathering more data around people who are engaging with us, whether it's through our ads, our website, or the events that we're at, making sure that our team can actually

actually

follow through with them because we're a vertical company. We are not like this broad horizontal SaaS company. We focus really on the biotech industry. So we have a limited amount of people, especially within our ICP, really around bioinformaticians, computational biologists, lab automation engineers, and process dev people.

There's only so many of them, you know, in our total addressable markets. We really need to make sure that we get as much information to make it, you know, a good experience for them, you know, receiving sales outreach, our marketing, making sure that it's the stuff that they actually want to see. Cause that's what brand is. It's like, you want to make sure that you're building, you know, the warm and fuzzies, the feeling that they have about you before they even engage with you. And that's kind of part of this marketing motion is making sure that we're leading with that. So that even before they talk to sales, they're primed and ready.

Abdul Rastagar (11:05)

Mm-hmm.

Jake Strich (11:28)

based on what we have out in the market.

Abdul Rastagar (11:30)

Yeah,

you touched on a couple of things there. Initially when you said, you know, make sure your Martech stack is...

smart and actually has some sort of results for you. actually, talked to a different client recently where they consolidated their Martech stack and saved a bunch of money because of all these tools that were either redundant or weren't used or were you being used and not having an outcome, right? And being able to take that money, reduce it and take that money and invest it elsewhere in other activities. So that's something that it's easy when you start up building the, your Martech stack, it's easy to go down the road of I need this tool, that tool. Next thing you know,

you've got this kind of big puzzle there in front of you. So I'm fully with you. I don't think you need the whole world. I think you need the right tools.

Jake Strich (12:08)

Yeah.

Yeah, I think when you think about that, and Abdul, that's great point, is like...

You could buy every tool in the book, but at the end of the day, like as the person who owns these tools and leads this, like I think you, when you're thinking about budget and impact, you just don't have those resources available in, you know, an early stage startup, like you would, you know, in a larger company. so you really have to be more discriminant about what tools you onboard. Otherwise, you know, the, the worst fear I have is like, onboard too many tools. have too much tech blow and we're in tech.

Abdul Rastagar (12:45)

Yeah.

Jake Strich (12:45)

And now we're obligated to an annual contract for something that no one's using is not helpful to anyone and we can't spend that money on going to an event or on advertising or on developing pieces of content. That would be like, there's a trade-off you always have to consider with that. So a lot of the times, you know, I lean towards no than I do towards yes. It has to fit my piece of the puzzle. It can't just be like a maybe it'll work. It has to be an absolute confirm.

Caitlin La Honta (13:06)

No.

Jake Strich (13:12)

And I can be a pain in the butt with sales reps, I'm not going to lie. Like I want to validate everything. And I think you should. And I think that one thing that again, my CEO challenged me on is like data flow. How does the data flow from web, from imports, from, you know, all the different tooling and how does that get displayed and reported on? Ultimately, like, you know, this is an exercise that can be painful at first, but I think is really necessary when you want to be efficient in this, in this environment.

Abdul Rastagar (13:17)

Mm-hmm.

Caitlin La Honta (13:31)

Mm-hmm.

Abdul Rastagar (13:40)

And the other thing about it, you have to really think ahead. I've been in a, instead of a company where, you know, some of the decisions that were made early on, on the Martech stack. then years later, the company grows and grows and now it's a mid-sized company. And all of a sudden you're looking at costs that are exorbitant, but you're locked into these systems either through contract or because of the amount of data you have in there. And the migration is not easy. And now you're like, oh my gosh, I'm spending so much money for something I'm barely using, but that decision was made years ago and here we are stuck with it. Right. So.

Caitlin La Honta (14:01)

you

Jake Strich (14:08)

That's exactly right. And one thing...

When I think about this, like I've walked into companies where I'm locked in, there's no way to get out of it. There's a three year contract and you didn't sign the sign off on it. What's cool here at Ganymede is, you know, I've been given full license to be that person, to actually sign up for the right tooling. But what's something that is interesting is there's a lot of tools that are very low cost, low risk, and also like a lot of them, there are free tools out there. you know, there's tools that knock out like these high, highly overpriced enterprise

Caitlin La Honta (14:29)

Mm-hmm.

Jake Strich (14:39)

like I don't want to name names and bash any specific vendor, but there's tools out there. I'll name ones that I recommend, which would be like first one, if they don't have this, thinking about recording web sessions and seeing how people are interacting with your website.

Caitlin La Honta (14:41)

Thank

Jake Strich (14:55)

website is super important. It's the digital footprint of your company and being able to track how people are actually engaging with it and what content they're consuming and how is obviously you can get that from Google Analytics, but how do you do one step deeper and see like sessions and recorded like web sessions. And one tool I really love for this is it's a Microsoft product called Clarity.

It's free. It's incredible. It integrates with HubSpot. So when somebody converts through our website and they fill out the form, we in real time will get not only will we get their information that they put in the form and then do enrichment on the backend, we actually get a link that identifies to that user their web session. So that information is passed on to my sales reps. So in real time, you know, I send out like a Slack notification to our team. Hey, this person just filled out a form.

they can go to the HubSpot record and see the entire timeline of what they did. And that's the real power of your tooling and the data flows. And that's the things like...

Abdul Rastagar (15:49)

Thank

Jake Strich (15:54)

How useful and actionable is that data and what are you doing with it? So those are the kinds of things I'm thinking about on a daily basis. I don't want to overload the team, but they do love the information. It makes it helpful for them to know, Hey, like a deal you're having, you know, you have an open opportunity right now. And these five people from your opportunity are visiting our website right now. Just like, know, these are the pages that are looking at.

Abdul Rastagar (16:15)

Yeah.

Jake Strich (16:17)

And that just helps them tailor their conversation and have a lot more confidence going into that next call and knowing that, they are looking at these different products. They're looking at these different resources. I can bring these up. Obviously you don't want to be weird about it, but you do want to make it like a helpful guided conversation that is helpful to anybody.

Abdul Rastagar (16:33)

Yeah.

All right, Microsoft, you got a free shout out. Not that you needed it.

Caitlin La Honta (16:36)

Yeah.

Jake Strich (16:37)

Yeah, I know there it's a free tool. mean, like if you're a startup and you're looking for like the free or the low cost tooling that that is one of the first ones I recommend to people.

Abdul Rastagar (16:40)

Very cool.

Caitlin La Honta (16:47)

And you're just like a whiz at knowing how to connect all these things together. do think, like you've said, there are free tools out there for a lot of these different things. You just have to probably learn how to kind of stitch everything together and make the data flow correctly. So that's always something that might take a little bit more work on the part of the marketer than a paid tool might enable. But it's still really cool. One of the things I also really like that you said is that when you know your target audience and

There's probably potentially even write out a full list of who those folks are. The important piece, it's still important to track, but what becomes important is the depth of information you're getting. It's not just, need a lead to enter my system. It's I need to know more about this person to understand better about how to engage with them, especially for this audience who's highly technical and scientific. Having more information about each lead versus a bunch of leads that you maybe only have a little bit of information about, which is more common potentially in horizontal where you're just targeting a lot more people.

you need to know a lot more. I feel like, you know, Abdul and I talk with a lot of companies where they want to invest a bunch of money in growth and demand marketing and they're like, we're going to pay for all this money in SEO, SEM, or all this money in Google ads. And they're going to, you know, potentially waste that money because it's not actually reaching or getting information on the exact leads that they should be going after. So I really like this like personalized or more in-depth digital marketing that you've you sort of landed on.

Jake Strich (18:07)

Obviously you want net new leads, but you have to think also too, like how are you treating the people that are down funnel too? So, you know, in terms of that, like what kind of programming and services or offerings are you putting out to people that are already in your database? Because people in your database are the most likely to convert to an opportunity versus like the linear path of someone going through and filling out a form and becoming a lead right away.

That's a really like the dream scenario, right? But there's also the reality that there's people that are not ready yet. The common statistic is 5 % of leads are really in market and the rest are not. So the question is, how do you gather those signals and make sure that you're actually finding out who's ready? So part of it is, you should be running the different types of tactics like SEO. SEO really to me is more like how do people

Abdul Rastagar (18:39)

Yeah, that's a holiday buy,

Caitlin La Honta (18:39)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Abdul Rastagar (18:46)

Yeah.

Jake Strich (18:59)

identify you on the web. And this is actually a really interesting topic because it is worthy to invest in understanding how Google perceives you because Google is just taking data.

you know, for example, you're using Google search console. It's just taking the data of how people are seeing you show up in search results, how they're finding you and how they're getting to your page. and that can help you tailor the content you're putting out too. And also like building out different pillars and areas because once Google identifies using authority on a certain topic, then you're going to be showing up for those search results. And on the paid search side, it's like, what, what

Keywords are actually driving, you know, demand and which ones actually have like dollar signs tied to them that you should be bidding on and which ones are like more, like longer tail, lower volume, but still high intent. And that's the interesting thing about our industry. And I think what differentiates, you know, biotech from, you know, let's say retail, for example, where you have like high volume, but like lower cost, you might have higher costs here, like in terms of per clicks and things like that, but it might be very low volume.

And the reason why is that the competition can be very high just to fight for 100 searches per month on a keyword because it could be for a certain type of instrument, it could be for like an ELN or a LIMS, and things like that are worthy to bid on within this audience. So I don't look at keyword volume really as my primary metric. I look more like at the competition decks. I look at the min and the max page bids that people are putting on because that's telling me that there's a market for it.

Abdul Rastagar (20:03)

Hmm.

Caitlin La Honta (20:09)

you

Jake Strich (20:29)

For bidding on the on that and then really tying that in how relevant is that to your services and products? Really can play into that so like that's the always on stuff that you always have to consider and then on the ABM side like you should be running ABM and ABM is really just good marketing defining your universe of accounts and making sure that you're showing up in front of them on a pretty frequent basis whether that's ads whether that's going to the same conferences that they're going to or even like setting up different kinds of guerrilla events, so

Some of my favorite kind of guerrilla events would be like I call them guerrilla events because these are kind of like scrappy things But some fun ones like food trucks parking a food truck right outside of their office You'd be surprised how much foot traffic you could draw out of an odd office when you have ice cream It's a it's something people really like and it's it's genuine. It's fun and it does drive pipeline

Abdul Rastagar (20:58)

now.

Caitlin La Honta (21:14)

Thanks

Abdul Rastagar (21:16)

Love.

Jake Strich (21:21)

So there's things like that that you should consider in terms of your tactic mix and getting in front of these different people. And then on the note, and then following up on the ABM, going back to bloated systems, this is a specific area that is a real opportunity within biotech is that right now there's a trend in that industry, the ABM vendors. Before there was a few big players in town.

Caitlin La Honta (21:21)

Mm-hmm.

Abdul Rastagar (21:29)

Love that.

Caitlin La Honta (21:48)

Thank

Jake Strich (21:48)

Again, I'll avoid naming names because I don't want to get after anybody, but I think it's important to think about this because some of them sell like as an ABX platform and they orchestrate all these different things. And my experience is that they do all these things and they may do nothing and they may not be very helpful for you.

Caitlin La Honta (21:50)

Ha

Mm-hmm.

Jake Strich (22:04)

And so what I'm seeing in that space is there's this unbundling where it's more like point solutions and specifically what you want to do. So for example, the de-anonymization and identification of website visitors, or more targeted landing page builds based on the accounts that you're going after. So things like that where you can really get specific within ABM. I'm finding that to be much more successful than these platforms that have been more traditional.

Abdul Rastagar (22:28)

Right. ⁓ So I want to go back to one of the things you said right off the beginning, the SEO, right?

Caitlin La Honta (22:28)

Yeah.

Abdul Rastagar (22:33)

It's obvious, right? is being, the traffic patterns are being changed quite dramatically by AI, right? A lot less traffic to your website, all those AI overviews are giving you answers. But that, think that's kind of like common knowledge at this point. I think what we're seeing now is like you have agents doing evaluations of software and websites, right? have, mean, Caitlin and I do that. go send out and we have AI go in and review a whole bunch of tools for us. And then we'll only go look at the websites of the top two, even though the system, the AI looked at like,

seven of them, right? How are you addressing that? Are you thinking about that at all?

Jake Strich (23:03)

Absolutely. So when I think about like the AI or LLM optimization, I don't know what the proper acronym will come out soon, but LLM optimization, you really have to think about middle funnel intent. These are people that are looking like, give me the names of products that do XYZ. So does your product do XYZ? I think that's the answer, the question you should be thinking about when you're building out content on the page because

AI, the LLMs that Google has crawling, all the pages, like they've been doing the crawls for years now, like 20 years at this point since Google's been around. The only difference now is it's collating all that information into those snippets at the top. Perplexity does something similar. They'll list it out and it's in a chat interface. And I think that's really useful. As an end user, I use that.

Caitlin La Honta (23:36)

Mm-hmm.

Jake Strich (23:50)

pretty, pretty heavily as well. So I definitely understand the need for that. And the question is like, how are you structuring the information on your website, the documentation, and do you have LLMs built within your website too? So people who want to go there can find what they need as well. And we have that on our side, exactly for this reason. So like having a chat GPT or a GPT to do those kinds of things has been really helpful for our users. But to show up in these results, you really have to think about the categories that you're playing.

Caitlin La Honta (23:52)

Thanks.

Mm-hmm.

Jake Strich (24:18)

in and again, it doesn't really change like the, from an SEO played versus AI slash LLM. Like you still have to position yourself in the right category, doing the right offerings in the right places. And AI LLM is just collating that and then summarizing that information so that it can display that to you. So hopefully when you do your search next for instrument connectivity tools and lab data platforms, that's how, know, Ganymede will be showing up because that's how we identify ourselves. And that's how, you know, AI.

It's just a mirror of what we're trying to put out there.

Abdul Rastagar (24:48)

Yeah, that's funny. We used to Google ourselves. Now it's like you got to chat with yourself to see if you show up, you know.

Jake Strich (24:53)

gosh, I'm afraid to do that.

Caitlin La Honta (24:55)

Yeah.

One of the things that's also so important and is something that is true for you all is, you know, I think where sometimes we see these programs or these efforts fail is that the company doesn't actually have clarity on who they're targeting because they haven't done the work to identify their core ICP. Whereas you all have done that and you validated this is who we should be speaking to and this is who we should be selling to. So when you build those digital marketing

channels and efforts, then they're effective. You're seeing the response that you want.

So I think it'd be great to, you some of that work I imagine, you know, predated you joining Ganymede, but one of the things that you've also talked about is just how to best translate to a scientific audience kind of messaging and brand or thinking about marketing to them. Anything to share in terms of, you know, what you've done since you've joined Ganymede to sort of speak to that really technical scientific audience in a way that's clear and understandable?

Jake Strich (25:50)

Yeah, so we do have really good mapping based on our ICPs. So we've really clearly defined like pillars and personas. I think that the challenge here at Ganymede in particular is it's a very technical tool, but it's solving for the problem for people that may not be the technical people.

The technical people I'm referring to would be like your R &D IT teams, the bioinformaticians, the computational biologists. But like the scientists in the lab, they're technical in their own way and maybe not in like the coding and doing all that kind of stuff like this is. So really like we wanna show how this ties to your workflows. And that's something I'm building out right now. It will be published soon, probably.

Caitlin La Honta (26:14)

Mm-hmm.

Jake Strich (26:31)

right around when this podcast goes out. So part of that is reframing our messaging, both how we want to be identified and viewed to the world. like refreshing the homepage, having it really clear in our nav bar of like what, you know.

who this is for and the different personas. And we have that right now, but we're tying in a couple different things around workflows. So like, for example, plate-based assays, thinking about your bioprocess teams as well, and chromatography, just to name a few. So that's like a few of the things. Like we're building out like apps, basically, spinning out these apps to target these scientists, to show them, hey, like you can do all these things. Yes, on the backend, this is really like the power of the tool,

Here's like the front viewer of everything that's going on. So they're getting like that, that UI.

based on all the, the porting of data from their lab, the global sites and the instruments all through the Ganymede cloud. So that's displayed in a very easy real time analysis for them. And so they don't need to know all the things, all the technical background later. And so what's cool about Ganymede is like, we've really been working the technical audience for years. And like, you know, previous companies was that one of the challenges winning over the IT audience, winning over the technical stakeholder. They may not be the direct buyer.

Caitlin La Honta (27:32)

Thank

Mm-hmm.

Jake Strich (27:45)

They may not be the end user, but they are heavily influential.

And they have their requirements that must be met, especially in this environment. You know, there's a lot of data privacy concerns, GDPR to name a few that you have to have, you know, really ironed out. And if you can't address that head on in the sales cycle, you're going to be in trouble. like that's one thing from a marketing standpoint, we've like led that way and we're making that now, now we're framing it more of a friendlier version towards the scientists and towards like, Hey, you know, all these things.

Abdul Rastagar (28:04)

Yeah.

Caitlin La Honta (28:10)

Mm-hmm.

Jake Strich (28:18)

that

are happening, here's why matters to you.

Caitlin La Honta (28:21)

Mm-hmm.

Abdul Rastagar (28:21)

It's, it's, love that you said that actually I had this exact conversation this morning with the CEO of a company who said, Hey, people love the product when they see it, right. But we're still not able to sell it. That's because the buying center is so large, right. You may be selling it to this particular persona, but you've got all of these people, have veto power and their job is not to purchase the technology. Their job is to protect the company. So literally they're coming in at an angle of, from a point of view of why shouldn't we get this, right? That's their first point of view.

legal, compliance, regulatory, finance, procurement, you name it, right? Gosh, who else? I'm missing here. You have to internally have that champion who is willing to overcome all of those different departments, right? And work with IT as well on top of that. And then you can make the sale in the enterprise space or certainly in the life sciences space. That's what makes this industry so unique and so complex. And that's, think, why you see those sales cycles that are 12, 16, 18 months.

And the other thing on top of that is you may be coming into somebody who has buying intent, but their budget cycle isn't amenable to buying right now, right? They're like, Hey, we're evaluating this, but we're not getting our budget till January and it's May now. So we're going to be sitting there for seven months talking to them, but she knows that sales not even realistic until then. Right. So those are all the kind of complexities that I think people are kind of underestimate about this particular industry. I assume you come across that as well.

Jake Strich (29:37)

Absolutely. And one thing to add to what you're talking about Abdul is the economic environment within biotech right now. You know, it's not a low interest rate market at the 2010s. You know, we're, dealing with creating value, not just growth, and they can't just take on more tooling because they have to really think about the bottom line.

Abdul Rastagar (29:44)

and

Yeah.

Jake Strich (29:56)

So even if it's a, you want to not be a vitamin, you want to be a painkiller. And if they have a real pain and you can, and you can solve for that, that's like the ultimate positioning as a marketer. If the product you have is a nice to have to your point, they're going to wait till January when it's May now.

Caitlin La Honta (29:56)

Yep.

and also not under under I shouldn't use the word underselling, under appreciating the importance of the translation to something that's going to resonate with the scientific audience. Like you all took the approach of building their relationship and the brand with IT. So the technical first message made sense. Now that you're talking to scientists, that's going to that's going to fall flat. We see this a lot. Companies are like, our technology is so amazing. We want to go technology first when we talk to scientists because they're going to think it's

Abdul Rastagar (30:35)

Mm-hmm.

Caitlin La Honta (30:41)

as cool as we do and then the scientist doesn't get it in the same way, it doesn't translate. So the approach you all have taken of like what are the core use cases and problems that resonate with them that they're facing every day in the lab that we solve and then you back into okay here's how it works and and the underlying technology if they care about that.

Abdul Rastagar (30:44)

doesn't get it.

Caitlin La Honta (30:59)

But we see that a lot of companies thinking like, if we go forward with how cool this is, everyone will care. And they honestly don't, and that's OK. You have to make it sound, what does this actually do for my day to day, in a way that's resonant. And another piece to that too is we've seen in marketing, it was always about like,

value first and business benefit. And that also got to this level of just being so extracted from what the product actually does that just simplifying it and being like, we do this use case for you. And then here's a couple of ways that it's better or faster is under, I feel like, you know, under, yeah, for sure.

Abdul Rastagar (31:22)

generic.

I'd appreciate it.

Jake Strich (31:35)

Yeah,

yeah, mean remove the flowery language, remove the nice descriptions, just get to the point. Scientists need to know is this a tool that's worth using? Is it gonna help me or is it not?

And why, why is it worth using? Like, you know, the time that they're not in the lab is not much. have, you know, their heads down a lot of the time. So like when you can capture them and their attention, you really have to one respect the science. Like I think that's the number one thing is respect the science and what the nature of their work is and honor that. And then be able to meet them where they are. And I think that's one of the challenges. Like if you have really cool tech and you just build it and they will come mentality, you're not tailoring that and adopting to your

Abdul Rastagar (32:06)

Yeah.

Caitlin La Honta (32:12)

Yeah.

Jake Strich (32:14)

end user. And sometimes your end user doesn't even know that they're an end user because if the product is so technical in that case, it can be lost in translation. So keeping it really simple, that's something like I focus on here is cleaning up, you know, and clarifying. It's not that we don't have the right descriptions. It's just that maybe it's, it's not capturing their attention because you only get 30 seconds, you know, someone lands on your webpage, you get 30 seconds. If they don't scroll down beyond the top fold and see all

Caitlin La Honta (32:37)

Mm-hmm.

Jake Strich (32:43)

things that you want them to see like too bad that's that's on you and so how are you going to make the impression whether it's visually whether it's through videos whether it's through interactive content that shows them that you are a thought leader you are the right brand for their you know their needs

Abdul Rastagar (32:58)

Yeah, and I'll say this as a former scientist myself, there was called, I'll call it what it is, there's a sense of arrogance about yourself that you know everything there is to know and anybody that comes in there has to prove themselves, right? So that's where.

inside this are very data driven. want to the evidence. Certainly I always wanted to see the evidence in the data on anything, right? Because that's what I was expected to do. So if a vendor comes in and tries to sell me ABC, it was the same thing. And we show me that proof. I don't care about the functionality. Show me that it's working, right? And it.

Jake Strich (33:17)

you

you

Abdul Rastagar (33:28)

oftentimes helped if that person was a former scientist themselves, then you would see them as an equal or somebody maybe even, you know, who can actually consult you. But what I often found, certainly as a buyer back in the old days, is that if the other person didn't speak my language, didn't have the science background, I kind of dismissed them. And that wasn't just me, that was kind of the universal feeling among everybody around me, all the

Caitlin La Honta (33:33)

Thank

Abdul Rastagar (33:51)

scientists, especially if they were PhDs, PhDs would never talk to anybody unless the other person had a PhD as well.

Jake Strich (33:58)

Absolutely.

Yeah. And again, that goes back to that principle of respecting the science and obviously not coming from the biotech background and not being a scientist myself. This is where I lean on my SMEs, the team teammates that were in the lab and understanding. this is like part of like that first 60 days or really the first 30 days, really first week you should be there. You should be listening to all the recordings of calls that you can. You should be talking to every teammate, going on a listening tour and really being able to gout it as

Abdul Rastagar (34:09)

Mm-hmm.

Jake Strich (34:26)

Intel and being able to talk to customers directly too is a real benefit. So there are things that you can do like as not the subject matter expert, like I may be the head of marketing here at Ganymede, but I'm really orchestrating what our team is already doing and just putting it out there in the channels. So it's easily seen and really be able to understand like, okay, like what worked at the previous companies I was at and what missed and how can we adopt that here for based on my experience? And so I think that part of.

it is like understanding, saying, I'm not the subject matter expert, but I'm going to go find people that can speak for this, whether it's our partners, whether it's our customers, whether it's our internal team that, you know, do have PhDs and they are scientific. And that's something like when I worked with, you know, different PhDs at previous companies.

Yeah, I was able to really say, you're, you're, you're, this is the area that you know. This is the area that I know. And here's how we can compliment each other and go to market in the best way possible.

Caitlin La Honta (35:24)

Yep. Well, Jake, thank you so much. This has been awesome. Would love to hear as sort of a final quick question, what advice you would have for other folks who are joining a company as the first marketing hire? Any kind of words of wisdom that you would share with them to think about how they can approach that?

Jake Strich (35:40)

Yeah. So I think it can be a very lonely role joining as like the first marketing hire or being like ahead of marketing at an early stage startup. So the most success I've had, you know, from joining Ganymede now has really been from my network of people who either they're heads of marketing or, I've branched out and met people. Um, but having a network outside of your existing workplace. So you have like your peers that you can speak to and having kind of a roundtable discussion with them.

and balancing ideas, that's where I've really been able to grow and develop as a marketer here at Ganymede.

Abdul Rastagar (36:15)

Yeah. Well, know, Jake, I think we joked earlier that we could be talking for three hours. I think we'd be talking for five hours. don't feel I feel like we haven't even scratched the surface of the conversations we've had. We could have. So thank you so much, so much for your time. Really, really want to appreciate that you were here.

Jake Strich (36:31)

Thank you guys, it was

great speaking with you.

​

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​Episode  FAQ​

​

Q: What strategies work best for early-stage marketing teams in biotech or life sciences startups?

A: Focus on ABM, clear ICP definition, and lean martech stacks. Sirona Marketing recommends building cross-functional collaboration early, aligning campaigns to real workflows, and investing in bottom-up brand awareness using subject matter experts.

Q: How can life sciences companies personalize marketing to highly technical scientific users?

A: Use use-case-driven messaging instead of feature dumps. Sirona Marketing emphasizes showing direct impact on lab workflows (e.g., plate-based assays, chromatography) and translating infrastructure benefits into workflow gains.

Q: How do you market technical SaaS to both scientists and IT stakeholders?

A: Separate messaging paths. Scientists want workflow efficiency; IT wants compliance and integration. Sirona Marketing advises enabling internal champions with role-specific content and avoiding overly technical or overly generic positioning.

Q: What tools are essential for digital marketing in biotech startups?

A: Critical tools include:

• marketing automation (e.g., HubSpot)

• visitor tracking and de-anonymization (e.g., Clearbit)

• web session replay (e.g., Microsoft Clarity)

• data enrichment and analytics
   

Sirona Marketing recommends selecting tools based on integration, not popularity, and prioritizing platforms with a clear path to ROI.

Q: How can you optimize a biotech website for AI and LLM-based search engines?

A: Use structured, keyword-rich summaries, semantic FAQs, and match mid-funnel query intent (e.g., “tools to automate ELN workflows”). Sirona Marketing helps clients structure their content to appear in AI agent shortlists and LLM-generated summaries.

Q: Why is ABM especially important in scientific B2B markets?

A: Because ICPs are narrow and highly specialized (e.g., lab automation engineers, bioinformaticians). Sirona Marketing builds ABM strategies with targeted outreach, conference overlap, personalized content, and even guerrilla tactics like food trucks outside client HQs.

Q: How should biotech marketers evaluate and manage their martech stack?

A: Avoid stack bloat. Evaluate tools by:

• data flow

• integration capability

• sales team usability

• contract flexibility
   

Sirona Marketing recommends validating all tools via ROI modeling and ensuring alignment with early-stage priorities.

Q: How do long B2B sales cycles in life sciences affect marketing strategy?

A: Sales cycles can be 12–18 months due to large buying centers. Marketing must support champions through regulatory, legal, and procurement blockers. Sirona Marketing advises mapping the full buyer committee and enabling each stakeholder with tailored assets.

Q: What’s the role of cultural alignment in startup marketing success?

A: Marketing can't live in a silo. Sirona Marketing promotes cross-functional marketing cultures where engineers present webinars, sales shares feedback, and everyone contributes to demand gen—even if marketing is a team of one.

Q: How do scientific audiences differ in how they evaluate software vendors?

A: They expect data. Many scientists won’t engage unless the person has scientific credentials or references subject matter experts. Sirona Marketing encourages use of PhD SMEs and customer proof to earn scientific credibility.