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Transcript

00:05
Caitlin La Honta: Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of The Science of Sales and Marketing. I'm Caitlin La Honta, co-founder of Sirona Marketing, and joining today is my co-host, Letitia Rodley. Today we have a really exciting session. We're joined by Jim Burke, who is the Senior Director of Industry Marketing at TalkDesk. Jim, thank you so much for joining us.

00:22
Jim Burke: Great to be here with both of you.

00:23
Caitlin La Honta: Yeah, awesome. So really excited about this because you started your career in sales before moving over to marketing. And I know we made the joke when we were chatting before this of whether or not you went to the dark side or came from the dark side, and that can maybe be a debate that we get into later. But we'd love to hear your reason for moving from sales into marketing.

00:43
Jim Burke: Yeah, it's one of my few good little business jokes. If I'm talking to marketers, I came from the dark side. If I'm talking to sales folks, I came to the dark side. And everybody laughs.

00:54
Caitlin La Honta: Yeah, yeah. And I know that also sort of gives foresight to now moving into the healthcare industry, which was also part of your career. You started more broadly in tech sales and then started to get more focused on the healthcare side. We'd love to hear about that journey as well. Was that something that you were intending to do, or sort of how you found your way into healthcare, and then the experience of going from selling broadly to now selling to a very specific market?

01:18
Jim Burke: You know, as I think about it, it's funny because both my move into healthcare originally and my move into marketing were really things that came to me out of being laid off from various sales teams. The first layoff was actually what got me into healthcare. I had a different startup that ran out of money, and everybody had to go home one random Thursday in January back in, I think, probably 2015.

01:29
Letitia Rodley: You—

01:40
Jim Burke: We had a mutual investor. I had worked really closely with the marketing team at that startup when I was a sales rep and inside sales rep for them. They had a need for a content marketer. They brought over our content marketer, and they asked him, “Who else should we pluck from this company that just had a lot of folks let go?” That’s how I fell in with Impulse Mobile, which is that same company that I left and then came back to after the second layoff.

So in both cases, I was just kind of thrust into it. I had sold into some healthcare accounts previously, like in other roles where I had kind of a broad geographic territory. Going into a healthcare-focused company, where you had to rapidly learn how to speak the language that both your colleagues and obviously all of your customers were using, turned out to be really good for me. I kind of learned through all the bumps in the road through my sales career how to get familiar with product and markets really, really fast.

It had been kind of a forcing function. We’d either be talking to different types of businesses in the same geographic territory, or as I had changed roles, I had to learn a new product portfolio and a new buyer persona. In both cases, I was kind of thrown into the deep end, both of marketing and of healthcare, as a byproduct of layoffs.

02:47
Letitia Rodley: What is something that you wish all marketing teams understood about sales that you kind of brought over from that sales piece?

02:55
Jim Burke: It’s a great question. I think that as I’ve gone further in my career, again, I had a very weird situation at first because everybody I was working with immediately—our head of demand gen, my head of product marketing, eventually my CMO there—all had sales in their backgrounds. Our team there grew, and we were bringing in more folks that maybe from day one after school had been marketers. It became very clear that that’s not typical, that a lot of folks really do see a wall there.

So when I work with folks, whether they’re on my team or cross-functionally, that don’t have that sales background, the things that I tell them are: you have to understand, certainly, their accountabilities. You have to understand how sales is managed, how sales leaders manage their specific teams, their requirements for understanding deals, and their prioritization of time and effort.

I remember when I was a sales rep, it was just kind of second nature that you obviously have your scoreboard of whether you’re closing your quota and retiring your quota. And if that’s not happening—and for a lot of sales reps, it’s beginning of quarter, beginning of the year, everybody starts at zero—the immediate question is: where are you spending your time? Where are you spending your resources? Where are you working to improve that ultimate scoreboard?

And so I think for marketers, a lot of times we don’t necessarily always appreciate that sales has a constant prioritization challenge every single day, every single hour, of where’s the most ROI for the next minute of their time, their energy, their mental focus. And that’s not necessarily always going to be clear to them if it’s, “Hey, I gave you 10 different PDFs that you guys need to learn and start bringing into outbound cadences.” That may not be a priority toward the end of the quarter.

So it’s really understanding what the day in the life looks like beyond just the actual selling, the actual pitches, the recordings that you might have access to. What’s going on in between those customer conversations that hopefully a lot of good marketers are spending a lot of time thinking about? What does their job look like beyond just the stuff that’s gonna show up in your Gongs or whatever you might be looking at?

The other thing that I would say is—and I think about this a lot when I’m in conversations with our leaders and even folks that are maybe even in leadership positions over sales or who have a lot of customer conversations—there’s a very big difference between your CEO, your CTO, your VP of sales, whatever they might be, and an AE in terms of what their conversation with a prospect, especially a very early conversation, looks like.

Something that’s going to generate you both sales and marketing pipeline is very different when you talk about a frontline salesperson. They don’t have the same credibility. There’s, I think, an understanding of a power imbalance when you’re just the sales rep and you’re talking to maybe a customer C-suite person or somebody who’s a VP there who’s maybe having a parade of different vendors come in to answer an RFP or a specific set of projects.

You have to arm and equip them to handle conversations that are going to happen at the AE level. They may have to keep somebody’s attention in the first two or three minutes of a first call without the benefit of slides or a cool slick video. I think about that a lot when I think about the materials that we have to create, the building materials for a new product launch: how do we help not just tell the stories that we have to tell as marketers, as executives, as our own C-suite members, but also what does a frontline rep that’s just trying to get 15 minutes of focus from a very busy VP need—especially if they don’t have that panache and the huge LinkedIn profile and the warm introduction that you may have with those other personas?

06:18
Letitia Rodley: It’s really good feedback. It just kind of validates further the importance of that sales and marketing alignment from the top all the way through to execution, and ensuring that your top leaders are engaged and understand and are aligned on the metrics and the goals. And then your managers and your execution team are all also equally aligned at each level. I think that’s a really good point.

06:39
Caitlin La Honta: I also love what you said about just the skills that you learned in terms of learning a new domain really quickly. When you’re in sales—especially when you were selling at Oracle and selling to a lot of different industries—you need to learn very quickly: what is this industry? What does this specific persona care about? How do I speak to this specific persona? All of those details, which obviously in healthcare are numerous and quite deep.

So just that skill of learning how to learn something quickly is something that you brought into marketing and brought into the healthcare side when you moved in there. And I think it’s one of my favorite things and skills for marketers to have. I come from product marketing, where built-in curiosity and the desire to just dig in and learn and figure it out is so important, especially when you’re going into such a deep domain.

So I feel like both for sales and for marketers, that’s just a really good skill to have, and why I think people are successful moving into this industry is they’re willing to just roll up their sleeves and figure it out when it’s not always the easiest space to learn.

07:37
Jim Burke: I mean, I couldn’t say it better in terms of curiosity. I came out of college, worked at Oracle. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. They put me on Linux and virtualization sales, so I’m a 22-year-old who doesn’t really know what those things are at the time. I mean, I knew what Ubuntu was, but I didn’t work with x86 servers operating Enterprise Linux.

07:52
Letitia Rodley: Them.

07:59
Jim Burke: And I’m trying to sell to people who, if you’re a leader in that space, you’ve been working on Linux—with Linux usually in your job title—for 30 years. And to talk about that power dynamic, like I had people at Oracle who could meet that and were deeper and were on committees that helped guide the roadmap for the Linux kernels. But I wasn’t that guy.

08:07
Caitlin La Honta: Yeah.

08:07
Letitia Rodley: Right, right, right.

08:21
Jim Burke: I don’t have the ability to say, “I can sit with you as an equal and talk about something that you clearly are one of the industry’s experts on.” But I had to be able to provide some level of value on that. And Oracle did a very good job of helping us get—not know enough to be dangerous, well, maybe dangerous—but more know enough to add some value to those conversations, because there was some information that we could provide and some value there.

08:21
Letitia Rodley: Right. Yeah. Value.

08:47
Jim Burke: So I didn’t know that that wasn’t the case for everything. And so when I get to the next shop, you have to dive in and you have to be curious because there’s no way I was ever going to be successful just taking the training off the shelf and trying to sell Linux to Linux people.

And then it’s been the same thing for healthcare. One of the things that I’ll say to our new reps that may or may not have a lot of experience either in our side of the healthcare universe or might be new to healthcare themselves is: nobody in healthcare knows everything about healthcare. You can be a 50-year industry veteran here. Buyers in our world are usually on the IT side or the patient access side. They’re not clinicians, and the clinicians don’t necessarily know their world. So it’s so big and it’s so complex that if you can get curious, you will be surprised at how much value you can add to other people in this space because we’re all curious about the ecosystem and the industry, which is actually maybe a hundred other industries all kind of jumbled up together.

It rewards that. It’s too complex for anybody to feel like it’s a single learning curve that we’re all on.

09:43
Caitlin La Honta: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a really great segue to talk about TalkDesk and your journey when you joined TalkDesk, really to help build up and build out the healthcare vertical within the company. Would love to hear, I think just initially, speaking about this term of being in a horizontal company and needing to go learn and go deep into a vertical.

When you joined TalkDesk, I know that it was in the early stages of this being a strategy that the company was thinking about or ready to move in the direction of, but obviously there was a lot of work that had to be done to actually fully stand that up. So I’d love to hear, when you joined, what were things like, and then sort of the journey to where you are now, from both the marketing perspective, but then also what it means to stand up teams from a vertical perspective across sales and customer success, and how companies can think about that for those horizontals that are looking to sell into this space.

10:39
Jim Burke: I mean, yeah, that’s why I came here. It was very interesting to me to see how that process worked, and I’m a product of that decision. TalkDesk made the decision, I think in about 2020, our CEO said, “We’re going to do industries, we’re going to do verticals.” And that alone—I mean, if there’s a secret, I think there is that this wasn’t something that a single functional lead came up with.

And to the degree that our chief marketing officer at the time was a big advocate of it as well and kind of pushed that, we got CEO-level buy-in. And what compelled me to make the move from a company that is in some ways like a point solution—Impulse Mobile and Impulse—to a horizontal platform, is that we were going to do it the right way. We had top-down leadership buy-in that this was not going to be a purely sales and marketing operation.

We were going to hire product folks. We had a vision of eventually getting to a kind of end-to-end verticalized—not just go-to-market—like an end-to-end verticalized business unit, really, where our healthcare customers can work with healthcare specialists really at every stage, from marketing material certainly, but much more importantly through implementation and customer success and all the stuff that they need when they’re live from us.

And that vision—I don’t know that we will ever say that we’re done with that—but we’re so much further along in the four and a half years that I’ve been here since. But yeah, it was a big deal for us to come in and view verticals as not just a sales and marketing opportunity, not just a way to unlock a little bit more TAM that we could kind of do off the side of our desks.

That felt very different to me than what I had witnessed from other horizontal companies. I think there are a lot of similarities, obviously. We were and continue to be a company that serves all verticals, so solving the challenge of how to translate that into specific verticals—there are certain things that, from a marketing perspective, we’re doing that are a lot like other horizontal companies.

What makes my job easy is that I don’t have to do that in a vacuum where I’m the only person thinking about industries. I’ve got so many more people thinking about it from an implementation perspective, from a product development perspective. We have way more people working on industry products than we do marketing them. And I think that is indicative of our way of thinking about this: this is not just convincing healthcare companies to buy us. It’s really trying to understand their issues, their challenges when it comes to customer experience automation and the patient journey and the member journey, the consumer journey.

And then realizing that one of the reasons why healthcare in that example—but whether it’s financial services, retailers, public sector—one of the reasons why there are differences in the types of experiences people have is probably not just because these industries are slow to adopt, but because there are gaps in the products. So we’ve set out on an industry-by-industry basis to fill those gaps and create purpose-built products.

Again, it makes my job from the marketing side way easier because I can say we’re not just like any other horizontal platform that just wants to get X percent of the U.S. healthcare IT spend, which I think is a lot of what’s out there. For us, it’s: we really took the time to bring people in from the industry, understand these problems, and then go build stuff to actually solve them.

13:48
Letitia Rodley: Yeah, coming in—if you don’t mind just to follow up to that—I would imagine, I’ve not done this myself, but I would imagine going into an organization that’s horizontally focused and building out a niche for a vertical as a new marketer would be a challenge. So it’s amazing that you’ve got the support and the commitment from the organization that says, “We are going in deep with healthcare.” But what did you experience, or what were some lessons learned in trying to build out that market in a place where you’re not recognized as a player?

14:22
Jim Burke: So, two ways to answer that. It’s a good question. Two ways to kind of break that down. There are also challenges internally, because I came in, I was at the time the only healthcare marketer. And we had an industry marketing team that rolled into—and continues to roll into—our product marketing function, but we were obviously and continue to be a very small minority of the overall marketing team here.

So to get what we needed to get done back in 2021, and today, done, we rely a lot on our peers cross-functionally within marketing. We obviously rely a ton on our peers across all those other functions in product and strategy and customer success, sales, solution engineering, of course. But even within marketing, to get a product launch done of our very first industry experience clouds all the way up to the product launches that we did enhancing our retail experience cloud last week, all of it requires shared resources.

We don’t have an end-to-end vertical marketing team within a team for each of our verticals, like hardly. You’re looking at it for healthcare. So we have shared resources when it comes to everything. Today, back in the day, a lot of what we had to do was be internal evangelists, even within our own teams—for the demand gen folks, the marketing ops folks—to say, okay, let’s take whatever KPIs we’re running the marketing team and the business on, let’s slice it by industry.

Let’s try to understand and kind of develop an understanding of not just our overall marketing funnel, but what the marketing funnel for healthcare versus banks versus retailers versus public sector versus whoever it is. That was not something that we were necessarily built to do. It’s not something that a horizontal marketing function was set up to do.

Again, we had great buy-in from leadership to go do it, but it is still something where you’re having to constantly remind folks that may have their KPIs and their marching orders to think about, “How is our U.S. pipeline doing?” Well, it might be great, but if we’re not getting it done in this particular vertical, that matters to me and my team a lot.

So we need to make sure that we’re understanding: are we feeding our industry-specific go-to-markets the same way that we’re feeding everything else? And what are the differences there when it comes to sales cycle? What are the differences when it comes to your marketing mix in terms of tactics, in-person events versus industry-specific media? A lot of that is just getting the data and getting everybody familiar with the fact that there needed to be discrete motions for each of these.

I don’t think I necessarily had to do a whole lot of convincing that that needed to happen, but a lot of the execution of it—and keeping that mindshare there—that was something that was a really important part of our early team’s work.

And today, thankfully, we’ve had the success that we’ve had in verticals, and we continue to have such amazing buy-in from leaders, that we’re organized very much at a marketing level around vertical-specific programs where it makes sense. There are certain places where we’re still kind of across the board, but healthcare, we track it very specifically. We have dedicated healthcare budget across my peers that don’t just focus on healthcare, and they very much spend good portions of their day thinking about how do we make the healthcare-specific marketing motion work.

That’s a product of a lot of that kind of slow and steady—not that slow, four years—kind of steady, I would say, maybe not slow at all, investment and focus on this. And I think that one of the things that is a theme as I look back on the last four years and as I think about what the next four for us at verticals look like at TalkDesk is: you have to go as fast as you possibly can, but you can’t necessarily rush certain things.

We didn’t come in with industry-specific sales teams. We didn’t have all the functional, cross-functional work around each individual vertical that we have now on the marketing side. We built that. And I think one of the things that I give our leadership credit for, all of my peers credit for, is that we didn’t try to throw gasoline on something that wasn’t ready for it. We really stayed steady as we grew.

We didn’t deploy industry-specific sales teams for all of our verticals with a hundred sales reps in each on day one. We picked and chose how we were going to get vertical-specific sellers, how we were going to get vertical-specific customer success and solution engineering folks. All of that has happened during my time here, and it was all done very carefully with the backing of some of that data that I was talking about.

The other thing we do all the time—and this is very specific to healthcare, but I think it matters in every industry we work in—is make our customers the heroes of our stories as much as we possibly can. Because healthcare ultimately needs to see other logos that they know. Honestly, in most cases, people that they know—other CIOs, VPs, people that they engage with at conferences and professional associations—they want to have that trust because a lot of what we do is not just reduce your costs or improve your revenue or even necessarily improve the patient experience.

A lot of what we’re trying to do from a market perspective is de-risk. Every technology investment that healthcare systems—especially on the provider side, but really all of them—make comes with tremendous risk at any level. So they’re constantly seeking to de-risk those projects and those spends. A lot of that is walking the walk when it comes to not just having our own thought leadership be out there and speaking the language, but also showing: these are real customers, people you know, people that you’ve worked with, people that you trust in the industry, that are getting real results with us.

Again, when we can do that, it makes my job really, really easy. And I give a ton of credit to the wider organization for giving us the tools to go tell stories with our own customers.

19:34
Caitlin La Honta: It speaks to, well, the power of having investment and belief in marketing from the C-suite. I mean, that’s something we talk to our clients about all the time, or we talk with companies where they just don’t believe in the value and it takes so much energy to convince them. And maybe it’s not even worth that energy. But when you have a leadership team who’s really bought into the value that marketing can drive, then it opens so many doors.

And then also the notion that you had a larger marketing team to work with and benefit from—you’re not starting from scratch. While the healthcare vertical was small, there were so many resources you could tap into, which also gives a head start.

And one of the last topics that we wanted to talk about, which is really interesting, is Letitia and I both come from the world of working primarily for and with point solutions. And we sort of have this message and bias of, like, don’t go horizontal because this industry is so niche and specific that you really want to work with those purpose-built point solutions.

And you had had that experience as well, working for an industry-specific company and then going to TalkDesk. I’d love to hear, as you’re now working for a horizontal company that’s selling into these specific verticals—especially healthcare, which is so specialized—how do you think about the messaging and positioning for the horizontal solution? And I know those customer stories are a big component of that, having that social proof. But where do you actually point to the strengths that a horizontal offering can bring to a vertical?

21:00
Jim Burke: It’s a great question. You’re absolutely right. I’ve marketed against horizontal platforms. I’ve marketed against point solutions. I’ve done both at both places, because sometimes when you’re in more of a point-solution firm, a lot of times your most visible competitors are often other point solutions. And so then you’re trying to figure out whose solution is the pointier. I don’t know.

But the only correct answer—and I think about this a lot, we think about it a lot too because we compete against other horizontal platforms, or I would argue platforms that are extremely horizontal and do treat it as just a pure sales and marketing play, and we also obviously run into a lot of point solutions that do bits and pieces of what we do.

The most successful horizontal business software probably of all time—I don’t know the status—is Microsoft Office. And of course, you’re not going to have a healthcare-specific version of Excel. What we use in Excel is the same as investment bankers use, the same as somebody running an independent retailer. Of course that platform is what it is, not because it’s horizontal, but because that need meets the need at an enterprise level regardless of what vertical you’re in.

You also go, okay, there are also really successful business software companies like your CRM vendors. And we know in healthcare, you’ve got EHR vendors that don’t do hardly anything else. Oracle Health is very much just focused on an EHR. They’re not trying to do anything else, even within healthcare. It’s extremely niche. And the idea that you would ever use just a random database or CRM to replace your EHR—that’s anathema. It’s kind of a joke.

So it really is going to depend on the segment there, and it’s also going to depend on the vendors that you’re looking at. What I think that we try to do is say that the ultimate dependency is going to be on the customer.

What we see a lot of, and the reason why I think TalkDesk in the place that we play in—customer experience automation, contact center—is that it’s a complicated thing. There’s a lot of technology that is required, different types of technology at different steps of it. One of the reasons why we think we’ve been successful in healthcare is that we’ve done two things.

One is that we can reduce the amount of man-hours required to make the horizontal product work for you. Because that is a lot of the challenge that healthcare has to deal with. Because no matter what, even when they buy Microsoft Office, they still have to get a BAA in place. There are even things like that in my own example where there are extra hoops that healthcare has to jump through because of the regulations, because of the workloads—not even the legal reasons—that they have to support. We try to take as much of that off as possible.

And then the other reason for us is that because of what we’ve built and the nature of the industry that we come from, we can take a lot of different point-solution use cases off their plate. The goal is ultimately to understand where most of your customers are at and tell a story that makes the most sense for them, and understand that you’re not going to be everything to everyone.

If you have a massive software engineering team, you’re probably going to be able to build amazing custom software and you’re going to accept that there are going to be trade-offs on that. That’s not who I need to worry about. That’s not who anybody listening to this needs to worry about unless you sell developer tools.

So it really is: think about where your customers are at in terms of how they would evaluate that sort of religious question of point solution versus platform. That gives you all you need in terms of a toolbox in order to say, okay, we’re going to handle our discrete use cases at the absolute highest level. These are our case studies in the very specific problems that you want us to solve. And that can absolutely win, and I’ve won in my career earlier doing that.

If you’re a platform, you need to do the opposite. If they’re really trying to assemble the best of breed, why would you—there might be certain situations and use cases where you can explain why that’s not the best strategy. And then we can have that conversation. But ultimately you need to understand what the customer’s own calculus is on those trade-offs, because there are trade-offs, and there’s no right answer other than: it depends.

24:59
Caitlin La Honta: Yeah, and I think it speaks just to the importance of having the products—even though TalkDesk is horizontal, it’s not like you are just reselling what existed before.

25:10
Jim Burke: Where we can get into some of the pointier parts of it is that we think it needs to be healthcare-specific, and it needs to be an end-to-end platform that can actually handle, in our world, patient communication, patient engagement.

Because the patient doesn’t care that they’re in one specific part of the organization chart or a specific specialty or specific facility. They’re talking to their health system. The health system is talking to them as XYZ Health System: “We’re going to help manage your care.” That should not mean a million different logins and portals and different chatbots or AI agents or whatever you might be talking about.

So, but we do agree. I mean, that’s the thing. The other way to think about it is: yeah, a horizontal customer experience solution or call center platform wasn’t getting it done in healthcare. And that was a big part of our thesis of why we went and built what we built.

We work—we’re in the Epic workshop. We work with Epic Systems. I mean, as vertical as it possibly gets in healthcare. We co-develop with them and embed our technology in there. That’s something that has nothing to do with any other industry you sell into. It doesn’t even have to do with several of the providers we work with—not all of them are on Epic.

But we have, I promise, real live engineers that wake up every day and only work on solving healthcare challenges within our software and helping our customers solve their problems. That’s all that they do. And so they work directly with Epic to go build something that only helps a segment of healthcare.

So that is kind of the sneaky part of our answer: yeah, we’re a platform; yeah, it’s end to end; but of course we need to go build healthcare-specific stuff there. Because if you were to put that burden on providers, it’s very challenging to have them go build the basics from scratch off of a horizontal product. A lot of them do, and a lot of them have accepted that, and that was the norm.

And our whole thesis—and maybe the reason why I’m here with y’all and why we’re as successful as we are—is that if we can take some of that core healthcare-specific work off their plate and build it into our products, they can focus on optimizing and getting outcomes instead of making something that wasn’t built for them work for them.

So we try to meet our customers where they are so they can then go meet their patients and families where they are. So yeah, we split the difference a little bit.

27:20
Caitlin La Honta: Yeah, it’s not pure horizontal, I think. And it’s not a pure point solution. You guys are definitely somewhere in the middle. We were positioning this episode as horizontal versus vertical, but it’s really not—there’s so much nuance to that.

But I guess in terms of a parting question, for those marketers who do want to go specialize in a vertical—because you obviously oversee healthcare, but you also oversee the other industry verticals that TalkDesk fell into—what advice would you have? And we’ll probably get to your answer because I think we maybe already talked about it, but yeah, what advice would you have for folks who want to really go and specialize?

27:52
Jim Burke: It’s the curiosity. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s what it is. I think that a lot of what we talked about—I think there are a lot of parallels, whether you’re in a point solution or healthcare-specific company or a big one.

I think about finding a specific use case. I was at the back row of a conference for Medicare Advantage this many years ago, back when I was at Impulse Mobile, the point solution that focuses on member engagement. And just listening to a couple lines of this talk that I was in—I think I was trying to answer emails like we all do sometimes, where we’re going back and forth between the booths. Sometimes those sessions are the only time you can actually do your day job.

But I just remember listening, and I heard some stuff about specific member experience measures and how they were being changed in the Medicare Star Ratings. I didn’t really know a whole lot about that, so I just started doing research in the back. And what I wound up with was a whole set of use cases that then, to some of the stories I told about TalkDesk, I had to go find a sales rep to go get me a win on that, get a deal open that I could kind of generate mindshare around so that I could then go tell the rest of our very much healthcare-focused sales team and my team, “Hey, this is a real opportunity for us, and we should maybe build some stuff toward this. We built some marketing materials, go-to-market around this, maybe even build it into product.”

It turned into a lot of stuff that we did around Medicare Stars while I was there. And it was because I paid attention in a random session that I was in the back of.

And that’s the same thing that we do here. Even when we have a full end-to-end healthcare motion here, super robust versus where we were even four or five years ago—

29:21
Letitia Rodley: While you were curious to get one.

29:30
Jim Burke: We’re still finding use cases, and I’m still doing the exact same thing. I’m finding a healthcare-specific sales rep and we’re trying to pilot it. But when we first started, we were trying to get reps that sold across verticals to get curious with us.

And so I think that when you can get into—whether you’re already in healthcare and you feel like you’ve had that curiosity—I think, like I said earlier, it rewards you on a compounding basis for staying curious and finding opportunities. If something sparks you, especially when it’s not going to spark the general marketing population—somebody might hear “Medicare Star Ratings” and go, “I’ve stopped listening somewhere around the word stars. It sounds boring. It sounds complicated.”

That’s where, at least for me, a lot of the value has happened: where you can find a way to be interested in that stuff. Or if it’s just something that for some reason you can nerd out about—one specific type of problem that your customers have or one specific vertical—you can find tremendous ROI for your own career, for your team, and for everybody that you support as a marketer by bringing that.

Not just knowledge, but that becomes very, very powerful for the organization because if you can take the time to be curious there, especially in these verticals that are complicated, nobody knows everything. So if you can be one of those people that knows something, that’s very, very valuable. And we need it all the time, even doing it as vertical marketers. We constantly look for opportunities to get ourselves closer to those customer challenges that we can get a little bit more curious about.