AI, Personalization, and Data-Driven Strategies: Winning SaaS Marketing in the Healthcare Sector

Thank you. I truly appreciate the opportunity on this beautiful day in Dallas.

Yeah, so it’s very personal. I lost my mother at that time, the age of 58 years. Then my wife and daughter have had immunity issues, which obviously led to a disproportionate focus on healthcare and life sciences. The Japanese have a beautiful word about introspection and finding your higher purpose. They call it ikigai. Ikigai is basically understanding what your higher purpose is, how you channel your talent, your aspirations, what you are good at, basically towards that higher purpose, and you deliver value to your society and community while obviously earning a living. It’s that magic intersection often called the true north or your mother-lord or whatever. Because of all some of this adversity that has hit me, I was forced to do some deep introspection and come to the conclusion that I needed to do more than just to earn a paycheck every two weeks. That has led to my focus on healthcare and life sciences over the last 20 plus years. The idea is to deploy my… I have three master’s degrees from three countries. I’ve been educated in the US, Israel, Canada, and India. That’s four countries. How do I channel all of that learning and my experience at companies like SAP, GE Healthcare, Tableau, Ortrics, MediAnalytics, which have all been market leaders, to drive up the health and the quality of life of chronic ill patients with multiple morbidities who really want to lead a better life, want to lead a higher quality of life, manage their disorders and their issues, their wellness issues with leveraging technology best practices.

That’s the inspiration for what I do. I’ve been very focused and lead life with a higher purpose. By the grace of the Almighty Lord, it has served me really well thus far.

Absolutely. Right now, my leading is, I speak at multiple conferences. I’m called to speak at multiple conferences. I just spoke in the Reuters Health Conference. The big key takeaway, I was in multiple panel discussions and presentations. The big takeaway is, especially in the world of AI in a healthcare context, there’s so much of noise, there’s so much of height. There are so many solutions which are literally looking for problems. You’ve got startups who have done something interesting in retail or manufacturing, and they think they can automatically solve healthcare problems. I just wrote this post, literally cutting through all the noise and clutter. Basically, key takeaway is the world of AI, especially in healthcare or in any industry, is far more than Gen AI. Gen AI is getting disproportionate VC investments, it’s getting disproportionate hype, but it’s the least mature and it’s the most vulnerable of all the AI modalities, because as we know, hallucinations, pay The IP infringement, bias, the length of the prompts, et cetera, there are endless issues, right? But for whatever reason, as with everything else, because of fear of missing out, we see VCs, we see CIOs, CPOs, CMR, CHIOs, trying to figure out what their healthcare IT strategy is, disproportionately focused on Gen AI, which I think is a mistake.

So for the first time, I’m proposing this notion of a portfolio management approach to artificial intelligence, balancing the more mature modalities like machine learning, natural language processing, deep learning with Gen AI, as well as medical robotics, which no one talks about, which includes machine vision, AI and HR, AI and BR, and have actually crafted, I’ve got a framework, a strategy framework for how do you recognize what will deliver value and ROI from an AI perspective. I’ve articulated 60 news cases in that web in that blog blog post which has basically gone viral. I’ve put it in the chat. It’ll be great if you can include it with this interview, which is getting engagement and resonance from all across the world because people just don’t have clarity on AI. My purpose with Mark Stroud Insight insights is to help organizations, healthcare organizations that are trying to figure out what their AI and analytics innovation strategies, or innovative vendors that are trying to penetrate the healthcare market with a solution looking for a problem. How do you meet that challenge? How do you cross that chasm and ensure what gets truly delivered are AI use cases, are AI technologies and modalities using this platform, using this portfolio management approach, which delivers real value for clinicians, executives, nurses, technicians, caregivers, which basically serves to improve the quality of their life, their efficiency, their productivity through augmentation, through automation, and now with a gentle KI workflow.

Long-wide answer, but I hope I answered your question.

Unfortunately, healthcare is pretty well regulated. So HIPAA and related regulations ensure that it has to be compliant. From a marketing perspective, personal experience, obviously, we usually don’t touch in 98% of our use cases and applications, there is no need to touch HIPAA data that would violate HIPAA. But also there’s PIR, there’s GDPR in Europe, which presents significant challenges, which is why from a healthcare perspective, it is far easier to market in North America versus Europe. But educating yourself, being cognizant of what the regulations are, which sometimes often differ from state to state, and ensuring that you bring that into your marketing practices, your marketing best practices, your campaigns, et cetera, help ensure that you do not violate HIPAA, you do not violate GDPR and other relevant regulations, and ensure that you don’t pay hefty fines and finalties or lose your ability to market your products. Yeah.

Very good question. The big fallacy that a lot of startups and smart to medium enterprise SaaS companies make is, as they grow, they’re obviously targeting the user persona for UI design to ensure user readiness and all of that. The fallacy is that the user persona is great from a product development perspective. It is not your ideal persona from a go-to-market perspective. From a go-to-market perspective, you have to clearly, as part of the go-to-market strategy, understand who your buying center is, who the buyer personas and the influencer personas are, what keeps them awake at night, what is a day in their life, what will get them the next promotion, what are the KPIs and metrics that will get them resources, investments, additional team members, and assure of the next promotion, help them keep their job. Then you have to align your positioning, messaging in a value-based way around those metrics KPIs they care about, that they care for versus the users. Product management and development should focus on users. Marketing and sales should really focus on the business, the executive persona, and ensure they can deliver value. And most importantly, healthcare and life sciences are very conservative industries, and rightfully so, because they are focused on the business of saving lives.

You should present very compelling customer success stories and proof points on how in a provider context, how Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, MD Anderson, Mount Sinai, has seen value from developed, from adopting your analytics and AI products. How Anthem and Cigna and United Health care is deploying your solutions or platform in a payer context, how Pfizer, Eli Lilly, or Medtronic is deploying your platform and solutions and services from a pharma and med devices perspective. And those big name references and testimonials really help you engage with the target business buyers and basically accelerate the velocity and drive reduction and increased win-loss ratios. Most people don’t do this. Yeah.

Yeah, it’s something that I’m going to write a pretty well-informed blog post on. I consider myself AI-ready chief marketing officer. So there are multiple layers. I think from an efficiency productivity perspective, there’s obviously content copy, blog writing with tools like Jasper. There’s obviously graphic design, generating abstract, forward-looking graphics that in line with future-looking AI use cases, et cetera. I think video editing or generating videos, compelling videos with AI. Those are the efficiency and productivity apps. There are obviously apps like Goang, which help you capture conversations with customers, both from marketing and sales perspective, and it feeds back an AI-driven summary, for instance, that allows you to take notes and forward-looking action items. In terms of account-based marketing, technology technologies or platforms like SixSense, et cetera, are also adopting AI in terms of personalized content aligned with the target accounts that you are going after. I think that there are a myriad of users. I think personalization or hyper personalization is an area where we are going to see a lot of innovation, and I can’t wait to see some of it. It’s still something that the Bernard Mars of the world are starting to talk about, but I’m very excited with a GenTech AI from companies like Salesforce and ServiceNow.

Clearly what Salesforce, they just introduced a GenTech AI 2.0. I’ve just seen a post this morning in terms of how is it going to alter the marketer’s workflow and a day in the life. I think that’s going to be very interesting in terms of… I think the big users are going to be call center, self-service personalization. If a patient is calling, only your customer is calling in, your customer is calling in into call center, boom, using Gen AI, understanding the entire history Potentially, sentiment analysis and understanding how to respond to it very rapidly is an obvious area. I think the customer service area, from a marketing perspective, sentiment analysis, working that into… For instance, if you’re a healthcare organization and you want to target your diabetes patients who also have arthritis. Basically, mining your clinical data from your electronic health records and using that propensity data to ensure you’re targeting the right patients or their family members to ensure you can drive them to additional modalities or therapeutic areas is very promising. In the clinical trial area, recruiting patients for specific clinical trials, ensuring they have You’re monitoring their state for any event, events or exceptions that occur, et cetera.

I think a genetic AI is going to introduce a whole new level of monitoring and exception management and trigger workflow, self-service workflows, which is, I think, a very exciting and the next frontier from an AI perspective, which will go across. I think it will start with marketing and sales, but it will go across other areas into technology, software development, product development, et cetera. I’ve seen some amazing platforms which can develop apps, no code apps, with just capturing requirements and pointing them to data sources. It’s scary if you think about the millions of people engaged in software development who think they’re indispensable. It’s a brave new arena. On the one hand, there is automation that helps in augmentation, which helps you do your job better. The piece that is not being talked about is what does it mean in terms of employment for a lot of areas, a lot of low-hanging fruit that is going to be automated by AI? What does it mean for a lot of those people who are copywriters today or lawyers, clerks, et cetera? How do you retrain those people to ensure that they can find alternative gainful employment? Being strategic area with societal implications that is not being talked to.

Candidly, I don’t think we have clear. Obviously, as technology evangelists, we want to drive new technologies into the market. But at some point with AI ethics, compliance issues, and what does it mean for society at large when you want to displace a lot of people because of the automation, because of automated workflows, how do you then retrain them and ensure that they can find gainful employment and take care of their families is not being talked about in us. Long-winded answer, but it was pretty philosophical. I feel I’ve addressed both the marketing side, but also what are some of the implications from a healthcare perspective and society at large?

Yeah, exactly. It’s constantly evolving, right? You blink and look back and something new is happening there. My training, I’m a product manager who turned into a product marketer. I have a little bit of a bias. Content is king, right? If you look around today, everything is content-driven, right? From the offers you’re seeing on your mobile phones to dynamic personalization to understanding what is the value your solutions are going to deliver, right? It’s all about content. I think the challenge for marketers and chief marketing officers like me is how do you dynamically, constantly regenerate the content that is fresh, that is meaningful, that is consumable, and that is compelling? I think that’s the million-dollar question. The question is, I mean, SEO, as we know, it is dying with generative AI-driven responses, et cetera. So understanding and mastering that is how do you do SEO In a Bing and a Gemini in a ChatGPT context, what does SEO still mean? How do you ensure that the content is always recent, but the content can be time and be personalized for your target buyer persona in a marketing context? The big thing is, today people are so well-informed.

They can do so much of their research on their own. How do you take them across most of the buyer’s journey online? From the time they put in a search term on Google Chat, GPDR, Bing, to informing them about what is the value your solutions drive? How is it differentiated from the competition? A quick, short, compelling video demo, right? So that they’re at a point where they can literally make the buying decision or they are ready to engage with your sales force or pre-sales folks to actually experience the enterprise SaaS solution. That’s the context we’re talking about. And basically, you trigger the buying cycle versus the traditional way, which is go to an event, have conversations with customers, which may or may not go anywhere, which are very long marketing and sales cycle. So I think dynamic personalization has that ability to compress that online buyer’s journey and take them closer to the buying decision. I think it’s going to change on a weekly or quarterly basis based on all the innovation that’s happening. So it’s a fascinating new frontier for marketing and both in the auto market that I’m anxiously looking for to monitor, learn from, and deploy some of this cutting edge platforms tools and technologies.

But do that. My challenge is to do that with caution because Gen AI has its channel.

Exactly. Yeah.

I think in almost every market today, but especially in healthcare life sciences, healthcare life sciences is very thought leadership driven. They want to see best practices from their peers. I mentioned, I’ve yielded off a number of names, right? Thought leaders like the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, MD Anderson, Mount Sinai, Metronic, Pfizer, Lili, Novartis, Novo Nordis, Because companies like that, Johnson, United Health Care, Cigna, Anthem, are at the forefront, right? For leaders, and I’ve taken this on myself, I realized early on, one of my career coaches advised me, and this is my advice to younger folks who are starting up on their careers is everyone you’re competing with has a resume on a LinkedIn profile. So that doesn’t differentiate you anymore. So what will differentiate you with is how well are you scanning this horizon? You can’t absorb all the information. There’s information overload. Despite the information overload, how can it specialize in key niches and then isn’t an original perspective that none of your peers, or most of your peers are not doing, which is both compelling selling in terms of differentiating yourself and also differentiating your employer and the company and their platform solutions services in a very non-salesy way.

That is very important. You don’t talk about feature functionality. You talk about what are exactly as you’ve seen, and I’m putting a link to my thought leadership profile, all about what are best practices in terms of healthcare use cases in a provider context versus the paid context in the clinical area versus the revenue cycle material versus robotics-driven surgery. It’s at that specific use case level, what are best practices that leaders are adopting? And then hopefully in there, what are best practices that your platform solutions and services are delivering without focusing on the feature functionality, really focusing on it from a customer’s adoption perspective. And if you do that, A, you get attention. It helps differentiate your employer’s, your company’s platform solutions and services, articulates the value that customers are seeing. And if you do that somewhere along the way, you are improving your positioning as a thought leader as well. I like to think humbly that I do this well, far better than I’m probably one of the only few CMOs in the healthcare and life sciences industry who’s also recognized as a thought leader. I put out very original content which spawns companies and consulting services across the world, and I’d like to keep doing that.

For For folks that work with us at Machstrad Insights or with me as a Chief Marketing Officer, I bring that personal brand to work for them and ensure that I can promote, I can reinforce their brand and thought leadership, leveraging this original mind share that I bring to retailer.

Yeah. Marketing is both art and science, right? Yeah. In my case, I’d like to think of myself because I’m a very marketing science-driven CMO who embraces both the science and the art, but ensure that you never lose sight of the data, the analytics, and the insights to really monitor success. Everything we do, whether it be product marketing, content marketing, customer marketing, value discovery, demand gen, marketing communications, ARPR. I basically look at what is the company, what is the CEO strategy, then how does that align with my strategy and metrics as a chief marketing officer. Then I think my challenge and opportunity, which I think I’ve learned to do well, is cascade my metrics down to every member of my team based on agnostics to whatever function that they’re doing. Because at the end of the day, you can only improve what you can measure My philosophy is almost, I come from a background in manufacturing, it’s almost a lean six Sigma, so you’re constantly improving. The only way you can constantly improve is constantly measuring the metrics. Again, fail fast. Not everything will work in marketing. You take a risk. If If something doesn’t work, the metric standard is not working, you fail fast, you pivot, you change, or you stop doing something, but also ensuring that what is working well, you celebrate that win, you pat yourself in the back, and then immediately start thinking about how How do you improve on that metric?

So be it like a MQL to opportunity conversion, be it opportunity to deconversion, be it yield from a webinar or an event or a campaign, be it sales enablement. How well are you Training your sales folks to be able to deliver your positioning with confidence? The number of reference customers, how well are you converting your current and satisfied customers into reference customers and evangelists. So there are metrics for all of these areas is. And I ensured that we deploy those metrics, not for the sake of doing it, but ensuring that everyone in the team has visibility into what he or she is measured against, which basically drives a winning behavior. So at the end of the day, we are all rowing together as a team and ensuring that we are all contributing to winning, right? And taking the company forward, building quality pipeline, helping sales convert leads and NQLs into opportunities and deals, and eventually, obviously, building a purpose-driven brand which eventually enhances the company’s market valuation.

Yeah, very good question. Again, something that marketers or, say, startup vendors. Market is usually the last area that a lot of innovative startups invest in, and that’s a fallacy. They think, Oh, my God, if we build the product and the technology and people will come and they’re discovering. Of the thousands… Here’s a prediction. I’m going to board prediction in one week. Here, I see thousands of AI startups that have been spawned. In the next thousand, 80% of them will die. 80% of them will die because they don’t understand this. 70 to 80% of the code that gets written doesn’t see the light of the day because they don’t understand how do you cross the chasm to becoming mainstream. So there the success is All the things I talked about, clearly understand who your bad persona is. Clearly understand what is the job to be done. What is the job to be done? How well are they and their teams doing it today? What is not working? Then something like AI, does it really serve to augment and innovate and do it in a whole new way that delivers 5 to 10X of the value that they are seeing with the status quo?

It’s got to be 5 to 10X for them to justify Change is very difficult. For most of our customers, that’s something that… This is the light bulb going off in the Harvard paper. You’ll see that reflected in that blog post I wrote. Something that most innovators, product developers, don’t realize is that the more change in behavior that your technology involves, the less likely it will get adopted. Because here’s the psychology. Most people like us, most people tend to overvalue the technology or whatever the current solution is. And innovators, product developers, startups, entrepreneurs tend to overvalue the solution they’re bringing to market. So if you think about it, that’s a huge disconnect. That disconnect is of the order of 9 to 10 Nice. So I’ll tell you, remember when you went from Blackberry to the iPhone? I was with the keyboard. It’s, oh, my God, in a business context, how can I take something without a keyboard? So my wife got her iPhone first, and then I was playing around with it. I said, oh, my God, and a tactile touch in 24 hours. And if I make that change from that keyboard, Blackberry keyboard to tactile touch, it opens up a whole new world of apps and this amazing ecosystem that Apple had built out, which BlackBerry could not touch, which is why BlackBerry died its natural debt.

So that is something Apple has mastered that, this notion of whenever they bring new innovation to market, it is so intuitive for the end customer. Even from children to adults to seniors, they can easily adopt it, which makes that change behavior very seamless. So that is something most software developers and entrepreneurs don’t understand is if you are involved. So for instance, in an AI context, asking a nurse and a clinician to train their model to be to use the AI is something they’re not ready for. They don’t have no time for. How do you minimize that change in behavior and deliver 5 to 10X what they are doing with an ERP or with an EMR product that your AI solution is going to enhance? If that 5 to 10X improvement is not evident, you are not going to see an option. That’s where folks like me who have studied this really well, who understand I’ve studied disruptive innovation from Clayton Christensen, the most influential thinker of our time at Harvard. I understand this well. I’ve taken over 10 software solutions to market. I’ve created healthcare businesses at Tableau and Alltrix, and this is something that I can help both healthcare providers and pairs and life sciences companies on one side in developing their portfolio strategy, but also startups and innovative companies that want to drive AI analytics, technology, innovation.

If you don’t understand the psychology of that target buyer and user, you’re not going to see adoption. And then again, I predict 80% of all of the AI startups today focus, especially on healthcare and life sciences, which are tougher industries to penetrate. But I think, of course, other industries are basically going to die an untimely death in the next thousand days. They’re going to have BCs who are going to burn themselves out and realize that, Oh, my God, we ran after Gen AI, and we’re not seeing ROI on our investment. This is something ready to play out.

I think I mentioned a lot of them, understanding your bad personas versus user personas, targeting your positioning messaging to them. But be the constant learning more. With AI happening, understand how you can deploy AI from from automation, from an augmentation, from a workflow perspective, learn to do more because marketing, we ask to do more with less. I have this post I’ve written, which is what are the 10 traits of a unicorn chief marketing officer in the age of AI? You always have to be chief marketing officer, chief strategy officer, chief value officer, chief storyteller. So of 10 roles that the chief marketing officer will need to do beyond just managing marketing. I think that’s true for all of the marketing roles. Product marketers will need to become more strategic. Demand gen folks will need to understand how to get closer to customers and how do you get customers to sell to prospects and bring them in. How do they start to work very closely with product marketing to ensure that they can take the prospect across the buyer’s journey online and with automation. Before that, they’re even touched by sales by any seller. From a Marcom perspective, again, how do you deploy thought leadership in a dynamic way to be able to bring inbound leads into the website and drive rapid conversion?

So I think how do we influence the influencers and show them the value of the product so they can in turn influence your target market? How do you deploy analytics and AI for marketing performance management on a 360-degree basis and understand how you can improve from one quarter to another? So I think all of those Because it’s an exciting, it’s also a very challenging time for, I think every function, including marketing. I wouldn’t say marketing. If you look at the no-code platforms that are developing for software, I don’t think a lot of our software engineers have any idea what’s about to hit them. I think every function in every industry is going to be challenged. The only way to do is be a perpetual learner, stay in learning mode, be very humble, don’t have this vanity around, Oh, my God, I’m so good. I’m going to be indispensable. You’re going to throw that thought out of the window, be in constant learning mode, keep your eyes open, learn from others, learn from best practices, and just ensure you’re constantly qualifying yourself, which is what literally my personal strategy to staying relevant and being a thought leader, constantly looking at what I can learn ahead of the other people, present my best practices, which in turn gets people’s attention and becomes a business case for people to engage with me, my strategy consulting practice, and hopefully as a full-time Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Marketing Officer as well.

If we could so on- I want to ask that question.

I’d actually want to say I’m deeply spiritual, so I’d love to spend time with someone like Dr. Joe Dispenza and understand how you can quantum leap into other states of consciousness and make your dreams and aspirations literally happen overnight. I think that’s it’s something I’m working on personally. I think that’s an area university or school teaches you and that makes a huge difference between success and failure, especially in this time’s unprecedented change that we are Now, just imagine this scenario.

That’s a good one. I’d probably use something like my CRM system to understand who can I call upon to- What’s your goal to CRM system?

What do you use? The Salesforce, whether you like it or not, has the most widespread usage. But say, buying sales sports with Tableau, there’s a very interesting outgrowth. There’s a platform called Qualified, which has been built by former sales sports folks, which is a common… It uses AI and chat bots to be able to dynamically customize content with a visiting prospect right on their website and drive them potentially to a conversation or a call with a salesperson, if that’s possible. There’s some pretty cool stuff happening there. I want to understand Salesforce is going with a Genente AI. I think that’s the next frontier in terms of.

That’s a tough one. I think I’d like to time travel to 10 years forward to understand how hyper personalized can we get to the point where you’re literally sitting in front of… You’re sitting anywhere, we as individuals, as consumers, and you just think about, Hey, wouldn’t it be nice if I can do this? And lo and behold, there’s marketing content which is served up in your 3D visor, if you’re a virtual reality visor, and then allows you to both explore it, experience it, and then consume it and buy it, right? From that one workflow in your virtual reality visor. I think that’s where we are going to be, be able to time travel and see how are we going to make that happen. It’ll be very interesting.

You’ll be surprised. I’m actually known as a renaissance man. I have my hobbies tend from writing poetry to come I’m a travel blogger, I’m a photographer, I’m a Bollywood DJ, and I’m a foodie. I’m one of the best known foodies in the Dallas photo of the arena. I think the DJ part is pretty interesting. I’ll actually leverage my skills as a marketer. I go into an audience. In many cases, it’s the Bengali community in Dallas. Sensing what music they are in a mood for and being able to pivot as I’m mixing my music, literally brings my marketing skills to the fore. I’m really good at it, which is why they love to. I’m going to DJ the New Year’s Eve party for the Bengali community in Dallas on the 31st. But exactly that week.

Stay hungry, stay foolish. Steve Jobs. I think Steve Jobs is the Michelangelo, the Leonardo da Vinci of our times. I worship him. I think he’s the greatest marketer ever born, the greatest marketer and innovator ever born. All you’ve got to do is my life runs on Apple products. I’ve bought every Apple, except for the 3D visor, a bought every Apple product ever created. I think they understand their customers like nobody’s business. They understand change behavior like nobody else, which ensures amazing adoption across the world. They bridge cultures really well. So I think his advice of staying hungry, staying foolish, and always pursue your passion. Don’t do a job to earn a paycheck. That’s exactly what I do. I work in healthcare. I work in the intersection of AI analytics, healthcare and life sciences, is that’s where my passion lies. Being able to do that’s the secret to… Work doesn’t feel like work. You’re working weekends, you’re working late nights, but it doesn’t feel like drudgery or work because it’s something you’re passionate about. You can see that you are making a difference. You’re going the extra mile, and you’re helping multi-morbid patients around the world lead a better life, which is extremely rewarding and gives you purpose.

Again, stay hungry, stay bullish. Find your higher purpose and use that to create your life and your careers roadmap, would be my advice to anyone listening to this podcast, and especially younger people who are starting up on their careers.

Thank you for the opportunity. Looking forward to seeing the interview, and I wish you and your company much, much success, especially meeting the needs of the healthcare industry, given our passion there. All the best. Have happy holidays and have a great end of the year with your family and your teams. Thank you so much.