Letitia Rodley (00:05)
Hi, welcome to the Science of Sales and Marketing. I'm Letitia Rodley. I'm a partner with Sirona Marketing. And today I'm joined by Caitlin La Honta, who's co-founder of Sirona Marketing, and Roger Pellegrini, who's head of marketing with Albert Invent. So thank you for joining us today, Roger. Thank you, Caitlin. I'm going to take a minute to give Roger and Caitlin an opportunity to introduce themselves really quickly. And then we'll jump into the meat of this conversation. So I'm going to start with Caitlin. Caitlin, do you want to take a minute to introduce Sirona and yourself?

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Caitlin La Honta (00:38)
Yeah, thanks, Letitia. I'm Caitlin La Honta, co-founder of Sirona Marketing, along with Abdul Rastagar, who sometimes makes an appearance on these podcasts. We help life sciences, technology, and health tech companies with their go-to-market strategy and marketing. I've been at it for about two years, but I've spent my career in life sciences technology marketing. So it's great to be on this session today with you, Letitia.

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Letitia Rodley (01:00)
And Roger.

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Roger Pellegrini (01:01)
Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Over at Albert Invent, we bring digital transformation to companies in the chemistry and materials science industries. We offer a unified data platform to chemists making things like new glues, new paints, new glass—any new material. They can use our software. Like Caitlin, I have a background in life sciences marketing as well. We worked together at a company called Benchling. And yeah, looking forward to discussing that.

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Letitia Rodley (01:33)
Thanks. So we all had kind of the meeting before the meeting. We were thinking, what are the topics that we think could be of the most value and the most interest to our audience? And we landed on three areas. The first one I want to talk about, Roger, was you had talked about going in as a new marketing leader to an organization that is highly steeped in science and what it meant to be the lone marketer establishing that discipline, proving out value, and showing performance very quickly. Can you talk about your MO when you walked into the organization? And further to that, how do you translate the art of marketing to a group of scientists?

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Roger Pellegrini (02:19)
Yeah, absolutely. Those were a lot of big questions in there, so we'll tackle them a couple at a time.

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Letitia Rodley (02:22)
Yeah, we'll figure our way through it.

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Roger Pellegrini (02:27)
You’ll have to remind me of a few. Coming into Albert Invent, I joined the company just a little more than a year ago in June 2024. Wow, the time has really flown by. It feels like more time has passed because we've done so much, but it also feels like less because it’s gone so quickly. My first MO going into the company was to figure out what's most important. Who are we selling to? What types of opportunities are we looking to get? What's our average deal cycle time? The usual metrics: deal cycle time, deal size, win rate, that sort of thing. The way I looked at those metrics was from the ground up, from the bottom of the funnel up. My philosophy is always that you need to understand the bottom of the funnel before you build your top of the funnel. There's no point in building a top of the funnel if everything leaks out at the bottom. You can generate as many leads as you want and get them qualified, but if you don't know how to bring them from hand raise to deal close, that's all for nothing. And if you don't know how to make them successful afterward, then what's the point? So it starts by looking at the customers and the customer success process, then the deal closure process, and then moving up the funnel and assessing gradually where marketing should sink its roots.

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Letitia Rodley (04:00)
Given your background, did you run into areas where it was nuanced working with scientists in regard to their understanding of marketing? When you walked in and said, “Let’s look at your funnel, your ICP, your average deal size,” were you getting big question marks, or did that methodology resonate?

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Roger Pellegrini (04:26)
It's really fun working with scientists and leaders who don’t have as much exposure to marketing, because the ones I’ve worked with have been very open-minded. They haven’t pretended to understand my expertise any more than I understand theirs. That mutual trust has been foundational. Beyond that, when it comes to the more quantitative aspects of marketing, it resonates very clearly with them—sometimes too much. It’s easy for technical leaders to over-index on numbers and miss qualitative nuance or the unmeasurables that are always in the room with us as marketers. Working with them makes me sharper quantitatively, and I like to think I show them what marketing can bring that they might not expect, including ways to have a little fun. The worst thing is thinking you have to be overly technical to market to a technical audience. Scientists are people too.

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Letitia Rodley (05:55)
Right, right. I think that’s really interesting. Caitlin, does that resonate with you as well? Your experience is almost exclusively in life sciences. You bring that art of product marketing, messaging, and identification. Have you found it challenging to articulate the value of marketing to people who are heavily steeped in science and data?

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Caitlin La Honta (06:41)
Yeah, I mean, we see this with a lot of our clients. They're struggling with how to convince their leadership team or board to invest in things like brand or longer-term plays that aren’t just tied to an easy metric like lead counts. Within that, it’s about finding what you can measure, but also building trust over time with quick wins. So yes, doing things where you can build a feedback loop and show growth in measurable areas, while also saying, “Trust me on these areas we can’t measure, like brand investment, because that will pay off over time.” You hear 80/20 or 60/40, and I think it depends on company size. But it’s not just about saying, “We can’t measure it, so we’re out of luck.” You have to build the case that some things we can’t measure are still important. Use indicators—customer anecdotes, quotes, backchannel references. Those are not hard data, but they are still qualitative measures that matter. I also agree with Roger’s point about fun. Sometimes people worry about oversimplifying for scientists, but I always remember: we’re translating something complex for someone steeped in a different domain. They may be brilliant, but not necessarily experts in technology. That makes it even more important to communicate simply, clearly, and with a focus on outcomes, maybe in a fun way, rather than worrying about being overly academic.

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Letitia Rodley (09:18)
Interesting. The other thing we talked about, which particularly interested me, was ABM. You said you have a succinct TAM and ABM is a strong approach for you. Can you spend a minute defining what ABM means to you in your environment? It’s such an ambiguous term—sometimes it just means a targeted account list, and sometimes it means a truly bespoke campaign. How do you define it, and what has worked or not worked for you?

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Roger Pellegrini (10:06)
Absolutely. I have a long history with ABM—account-based marketing. Before Albert, I was head of ABM at TruVeta in healthcare, and at Benchling I built the first ABM program. Back then, it was still early days before ABM quickly became a buzzword. For me, ABM isn’t just marketing. The cornerstone of my ABM programs has been regular meetings between a marketer, an SDR, and an account executive. They form a pod. Each week or every other week they meet to strategize: what accounts are we targeting, what did we do last week, what did we learn, who did we meet, who should we reach out to next, what intent signals are we seeing? These are big accounts—over 100,000 employees, with the potential to become seven- or eight-figure deals. They’re white whales. ABM is about connecting marketing, sales, and SDRs to run a unified, bespoke go-to-market strategy for each account. It’s not “hyper-personalized marketing,” but really hyper-personalized engagement.

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Caitlin La Honta (12:23)
Roger, in that context, where does marketing add unique value? Some might say that’s just account management.

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Roger Pellegrini (12:49)
Marketing brings skills that wouldn’t otherwise exist in a purely sales-led motion. It’s our chance to apply them directly, one-to-one, on accounts that matter most. For example, we run digital ad campaigns targeting individuals, monitor numbers at the contact level, and build personalized landing pages for each account. I think of it as: if I could put one perfect piece of paper in front of my ICP, what would it say? Then we design that webpage or ad. Marketing and sales share research and anecdotes from conversations, which inform our content and messaging. That’s the richness of the partnership. And it’s fun—thinking creatively, using first principles, not just copying tactics.

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Letitia Rodley (15:23)
Impromptu question: as an early-stage marketing leader with limited budget, time, and resources, what three or four critical tools do you need to launch an ABM campaign?

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Roger Pellegrini (16:07)
Honestly, Outlook is enough to start. Maybe FedEx. I don’t believe email is dead, and I don’t think direct mail is dead. No channel is dead; it’s about how you use it. Think of each email as a gift—you want the recipient to be excited to open it. Too many people follow the same “rules” for subject lines and copy, and everything sounds the same. For startups, lean into low-cost channels like email, social, and direct mail. The message is what matters most.

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Letitia Rodley (18:12)
I agree—email is one tool in the omni-channel mix. You need to be everywhere your buyer is. But double-clicking—what three tools do you need when starting fresh?

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Roger Pellegrini (18:46)
Well, at Albert, we use HubSpot. I’ve never worked at a startup that didn’t have HubSpot or Salesforce. You can scrape by with Outlook, Excel, and LinkedIn for a while, but eventually you need a lightweight CRM plus marketing automation. That’s essential. But do you need specialized ABM tools like Demandbase or 6sense? No. We did a lot of ABM at Benchling for years without them. They’re nice to have, but pricey, and not necessary early on.

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Caitlin La Honta (21:45)
I always wonder if in healthcare and life sciences, you could just do a quick Google search and come up with your list of accounts in 15 minutes. In horizontal industries, maybe big ABM tools are worth it. But in our space, you can often do a lot by being scrappy—Google searches, outbound email, FedEx gifts. Creativity goes further than tooling.

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Letitia Rodley (23:32)
Final topic: lessons learned. Marketing is about testing—try, adjust, repeat. Can you share one or two lessons learned at Albert? Something that worked really well, or something that failed and what you learned from it?

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Roger Pellegrini (24:05)
One big lesson: how much you can achieve with a scrappy, focused small team. At Benchling, I grew from employee 25 to 800 and from a small marketing team to 50+. At Albert, we’re 150 people total, with five in marketing including me. When I joined, it was just three. The needs were similar, but the scale was smaller, so we had to cut corners. The question was, how do we get it all done? The answer is: with the right people. If you build a great team with clear ownership and eager contributors, you can get more done than 50 marketers in a more distributed organization.

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Letitia Rodley (26:22)
Right. Well, we’ve really enjoyed speaking with you, Roger. This has been great. I love this part of our jobs—I could talk shop with marketers all day. Thank you very much for taking the time.

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