BoneChat #101 - The "Everything App" to make your sales force better

Okay. Welcome to Bone Chat number 101. It's amazing. Uh, we have Laura, Lan, and Mike, who many, most of you know, they had fruitful careers at both Smith Nephew and Wright Medical. And then Mike founded a company called ConveyMed. 6 years ago, but they're doing something new. And so today you're gonna get to see a startup in the making with a really big vision. Uh, Laura Lynn and Mike are creating what I call the everything app that could change the way sales teams communicate. And this is a really early look and this should be interactive. So, uh, don't be shy, ask questions, and I'm gonna turn it over to Laura Lynn.

Welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Tiger. We really appreciate the opportunity to present to you guys today. So thanks very much for having a look with us. I am going to go through just— oh, sorry. I'm going to go through just a handful of slides. Can you see the slides at this point?

Yes.

Good. All right. So the everything app, as Tiger said, is called Convey Connect. And it's an AI-powered sales engagement for your med tech sales team app. That's what the app does. Um, and at ConveyMed, what we believe is that med tech companies can really benefit enormously when their sales teams are aligned to the mission and the purpose of the company, connected and engaged with each other, so they're building camaraderie and they're sharing culture and best practices that they've had, successes that they've had, where they have easy access to training that fits into their workflow, which is on the go all the time, right? And they have access to the sales resources that they need to quickly accelerate the sales cycle and close more business. So that's what we've built. That's the app that we've built in Convey Connect. What is the reality of a sales rep? They're not— it's not an office job. They're not sitting behind a desk day in and day out. They spend 95% of their time in the car, in the OR, in the bowels of the hospital chasing instruments through SPD. They are not sitting behind a desk or on a laptop. And so what we have built is, is really easy access in the Convey Connect app. They're frustrated because all of the training that they do day in and day out It generally lives on a desktop LMS. The sales assets are scattered, and even if you can find, even if you have good access to the portals, it can be really difficult to find. I know the system that we had a few years ago, I really struggled and I knew where the stuff was. I really struggled to find the sales resources that I needed to provide to the field because it was just, they were all over the place and not very well organized. Communications occur via email or text. Well, again, they're not sitting at their computer looking at email all day. They don't have their email open all day. Their inboxes are very crowded, very full of all the information that's coming at them from many, many different sources. And we all know that there's that, you know, the product manager for every product line who is always gets the phone calls. It was for one of our big product lines, it was Jennifer. You gotta call Jennifer. And so, but Jennifer's not always available. Jennifer has a job. Jennifer has products that she needs to launch. She has collaterals that she needs to do. So the sales rep who was relying on a phone call to a product manager may not always get the time-sensitive question answered that they need answered. We all know, you know, we've all experienced all of the Gallup engagement tools that were— have been so big in corporate life. We know that engagement across an organization drives performance, right? And research shows that engaged sales teams outperform their peers. That's— it's evident in quota attainment. Engaged teams have higher quota attainment, they're more profitable, and they spend more time selling. They're more focused on revenue-generating activities. So again, that's the app that we built. Uh, we are very honored about a month ago to have pitched this app in an innovation pitch here in Memphis at, um, it was called the DelTech, um, Innovation in the Delta, sponsored by the Epicenter. And, um, we won the med device pitch. Um, and so we're really excited. It really is, um, adding to this idea that this is needed. We really believe that there's a big need for this. It's a unified mobile platform, one app for everything— training, sales content, private newsfeed. So there's engagement, driving engagement. There's AI-powered capabilities to make your sales team product experts immediately so that they're not waiting to call that product manager that may not be reachable. And then there's instant knowledge sharing. So you can push information to them throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the quarter, cited sources that can get to customers within seconds. Too. So we think that this is really a great opportunity to put everything in one place, be the single source of truth for a company and its sales team. All right, so I'm going to switch technologies here and hope that this works. I'm going to do a quick demo. This is where I always hold my breath.

Yes.

All right, y'all can see it. Okay, so this is the app. This is a demo version of the app. Um, and it's a good opportunity to say I'm running this on my iPad. It runs on a smartphone, uh, runs on a tablet. It runs as a web app on a laptop or a desktop as well. And there are opportunities, I think, to use it across all of those platforms. If you're the administrator who is pushing out the content, you probably want to do it from a, you know, from the laptop-based application. But if you're the rep, an iPad or an iPhone or a smartphone are your tools of choice. The point about the smartphone too is that it's not just iOS compatible, but it's also Android compatible. So it's available for all of the platforms that your sales team is going to be using. So when you open the app— and Mike, jump in if I have glossed over something that you think we need. Please jump in. So when you open the app, the very first home screen that you see is the company feed. So think of this as sort of your LinkedIn social media engagement driver. So this is where you can put new resources if you've added a new resource to the library. You can add it here. And so then they can, they can have a look at it here, but then they can know that if they want to do more things with it, they can go see it in the library. There you can put weekly leadership updates, interesting things that are happening. The J&J spinout we talked about, interesting things that can help your sales team be in the know and be knowledgeable about Things that are important to their business, you can put here. Videos, you can add videos for surgical techniques. You can put references to articles that have been recently published. You can put them here and then also put them in your other libraries. One of the things—

I would just add, if we think about how we all consume content now, many of us are scrolling, right? We scroll through LinkedIn, we scroll through whatever news app of choice we like. So this is just an opportunity for the sales team for a given company to just be able to scroll, keep up with what's going on in the company, what's going on in their markets, get access to new tools. And also, Laura Lynn, make sure you show them how they can like and engage. They can like and also chat and create that one-to-many engagement.

Absolutely. And it's kind of funny, as I was preparing for this, I was sort of surprised by all the notifications that I had to turn off my iPad to try to prevent them from all popping up. To your point about this is how we engage with with, you know, so much of the, uh, the, the things that we're interested in through, throughout the day. Um, so again, you can put, um, you know, so many things here. You can, uh, put— this is not really where I wanted to do this though, honestly. Um, but you can, you know, like it and, and those sorts of things. Um, now I'm going to move over to the library. Um, and again, this is a white label app, right? So this is customized for every client that we're going to work with or that we are working with. They can name these resources the things that are appropriate for their businesses. It can be sales library, it can be sales tools, it can be sales resources. The categories within the sales library are defined by the user. We have a client that has sort of new updates at the top, they have surgical techniques down, and then they have IFUs is the next row, and then the last row they have videos. So this is 100% customizable. The app is also branded, and the skin is put in that will match the colors and logo of the company. So it's 100% customized to the client who's going to be utilizing this, this app. So again, you can open things here. You can see that there's a download button. So if you are, you know, going into the bowels of the hospital and you're going to lose connectivity and you want to read this value analysis, brochure, you can download it. It will save to your downloads file in the app, and you can open it up without needing Wi-Fi access. That's true of the majority of the, like, the PDFs right now that we have in the app. Um, go back to this.

It's funny to see Fitbone because that was our competitor at Ellipse Technologies.

We— yeah, for our demo app, we've taken some liberties in putting up different companies' products so you can see how the brochures, the app views, the videos, the audio files. And you can also— they can also be multimodal, like one tile can have a presentation, it can also have like a PDF. So it gives you the opportunity to—

So let me, let me throw out a kind of the first question. So if there's a rep that's repping 3 different companies' products, so would they go to the app and they could just toggle back and forth between Orthofix, Smith Nephew, a startup, or how did, how would that work?

Yeah, we need an app at each company for that to be you know, for that, for it to work that way. What we can do within the app is if you have different sales forces, like if you have a full sales force and if you have a sales force that only has access to, you know, a bank of products, let's call them A, and another sales force has a bank of products called Product B, or, you know, Family B, you can set it up so that they have access to some things that are shared, but they also have unique access to only the materials that they need for product family A, or only the materials they need for product family B. So that's one of the ways that we, that we have this set up. Yeah, unfortunately right now this is a company-driven tool, as opposed to it being flipped around the other way.

So is your— let's talk about the business model. And I guess this is self-funded. You guys are kind of funding this Or do you have outside money?

We are bootstrapping.

Bootstrapping. Okay, cool.

Yeah. And I've got a slide in a minute when we're done with the demo, I can kind of show you kind of what the business model for this is.

Oh, let's just keep going then.

Yeah, just keep going. Yeah, if that's okay. We sort of talked a little bit too about sales training and compliance training and all those kinds of things, right? And so in addition to your sales resource library, you can have a training library. And I think one of the— we've all done compliance training, you know, kind of ad nauseam for a bunch of years now. And, you know, here you can have your compliance training modules loaded into the app and you can have, you know, a link at the bottom where you actually take the quiz. So you do the model— do the module, excuse me— and then you take the quiz and the quiz goes back to the LMS or wherever all of that information lives so that you can see that the rep has been compliant. I haven't really mentioned this, but it's also maybe a good time to mention that all of the, the things in the app can be sort of tracked, right? So you've got user compliance around the things that the subscribers that you have, how they're interacting with the app, and making sure that they are doing things that they need to be doing from a performance management perspective. But then you also have it the other way around, which is, you know, which resources are being utilized within the app. And you can take those resources and put them into a location on the app where they're easier to access so that instead of being, you know, maybe to the right, the thing that's most popular is being most available, just again to make it really easy access for the rep. Got it. You can also have— and a lot of these things can be toggled on and off. So you can have a directory of all the users who are on the app. And kind of part and parcel to that, we have the ability in the chat function to have sort of a WhatsApp or a GroupMe or a group texting function where you can have, you know, a group of people who are having a conversation about something. And it can happen here and happen here very kind of very easily. This can be toggled on and off as well. So there are clients that we're working with that don't want to have the directory. They don't want everybody to see everybody else because of some sensitivities between the different product groups and, and distributors. Groups, and so they have elected to sort of toggle that off. Let's see.

Got a question from Patrick Kania, who's in the background. What analytics do you have to understand the levels of engagement?

So full analytics, and that's— it's one of the things that we're sort of thinking through right now is how to manage the analytics because we've got the backend has everything that, you know, it has every touch, every click. Click everything, but what's meaningful. And really, we have, you know, some experience with this based on kind of our podcasting heritage, you know, providing data to the client that's really important for them to have. And so we've got the capability to have access to everything. So we'll know how many people are subscribed to the app, we'll know how actively they're using the app, we'll know what they're clicking on within the app. Does that sort of answer your question, Mike?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so.

Well, Patrick, I think it becomes a performance management tool, right? So if you have those reps and distributors and agents who are using the app regularly, the thesis would be they're going to be more active in the market and probably be at a higher percentage of quota. Those who are not engaged in using the resources that the company has given them, chances are they're not out hustling maybe as much as you want. You could, you could see how they're doing relative to their sales. Now, we don't track the sales. That's up to the company. But you can track engagement at the level of the user, what tools they're using. You can also look at what tools are most popular so that you can prioritize the sorts of tools that you create and highlight and make easier to find. So there's a lot of robust analytics that come with this.

Got it.

Kyle, you got a question, comment? Nope. So I would think, Mike, it would be the opposite. I would think the underperformers would use the app a lot. And the— this— no, Mark. Mark's saying no.

Okay.

I think they should use the app probably. Yeah. I think they should because you'll have everything at your fingertips and it'll be so easy. I'm sorry, Mark. Did you want to?

Well, no. Yeah. I think I— my philosophy has always been to give 80% of my resources to the top 20% of my performers. So Underperformers, I don't even hardly think about them. They, uh, but I do believe that engagement drives sales. And I have 3 things that I think are maxims in my life. And one is all information has value. And that, so bringing this information easily and accessibly is huge. Secondly is easy always sells. If it's not easy to use, nobody's going to use it. The third thing is if you have to train people how to use it, it's too complicated. And the reason I say that is because who— nobody trained me how to use Facebook. Um, nobody had trained me.

Struggle with it sometimes though. I still struggle with Facebook sometimes.

The reason, the reason Apple and Mac have done so well for so many years, it is so intuitive. They, they, they nailed that to begin with. So anyway, those are just things I think about when I'm in the digital healthcare world. So, but I love this idea.

Thank you. And I haven't showed you the thing that we're sort of very excited about having so much potential that we, I think we're only really at the very, very cusp of it. And I kind of saved it for last. It's going to take us out of the app from a demo perspective. And that's the AI agent. We talked a little bit about, you know, on my team, it was Jennifer who would get all the calls about our big product line from the, the folks in the field. But here is the ability to have an AI agent that can make your salesperson an absolute product expert in front of their customer within a few seconds. This is how it's sort of implemented in the app. You can see that it kind of lives down here at the bottom of the app as an AI agent. But I'm going to show you 3 of the sort of embodiments that we, that we have created AI agents for. There's, I think, a whole lot of other things that could be created in the future. But from the product rep expert, the AI agent goes out and it searches only the data sources that you have identified within the app to search to get answers to these questions. It doesn't go out to the web. It doesn't go out beyond the app. It doesn't— it's not going to make up information. We've— I think we've all probably experienced that a little bit with AI. This is only— and it will tell you if the information that you're asking is not— if the AI agent can't find it. So just as a quick demo, in the demo space, running this on Zoom, it goes very slow. So I've sort of preloaded this. You can select a product, you can have a dropdown of what the products are. For the Remedy Shoulder Osteo Remedies, they're a spacer company. And so for their Remedy Shoulder System, the question is, what reinforces the humeral stem in the Remedy Shoulder? And then you would press get answer, it goes out and it looks. Um, here's the answer. The humeral stem of the Remedy Shoulder Spacer is reinforced by a stainless steel rod, which provides added mechanical strength. And it gives you the source. And I, again, I could click on this source and it works and it takes me to that shoulder system brochure and it tells me that it's on page 3. And so you can verify that the information is in fact correct. When you have that brochure up, you can forward it to the surgeon, to the OR tech, to whomever maybe potentially needs this resource available to them. So we think that that is one really, really good use of AI.

And that AI goes in and crawls the library inside the company?

Yeah, there— and Mike will tell you that there are— you have to you have to organize the data in such a way that it looks for the data and it can find the data. So a lot of the resources that exist here are PDFs, and PDFs sometimes, because they're made up of tables and they're made up of, you know, data and images in a PDF, you have to sort of break down the PDF so that it's more text manageable so that it can be searched better and have a higher chance of finding finding a better answer or finding the right answer.

That's a cool, that's a cool feature.

Another, another embodiment that we have imagined is that if you, and when I say you, I'm talking to you as the company that we're working with, right, to develop the app for. So if you have access to CPT code data on a particular set of CPT codes that are appropriate for your products, we could take those CPT codes and you can add information to them to really make it useful. But— and I'm going to show you kind of one here. It's John Redfern, and I've already sort of typed in— typed his name into it. And what it's going to pull up with this one set of data— and this is CPT code data that has been added to. So someone at the company has gone in and said, are they on contract? Do they have— do we have a contract with this person? In the case of Dr. John Redfern, we do not have a contract, but it can show you how many procedures are identified in the space that we are playing in. So Dr. John Redfern does 64 total procedures. His market opportunity, $160,000. Um, he's got 2 kneecap fracture, uh, treatments that he's done. He's got, uh, 30 olecranon fractures that he's done. So if I'm a rep and I want to know who I should be targeting, I can use this tool to figure out information about Dr. John Redfern. And if I hit continue, what actually happens next— and again, I'm not going to do it because it takes a few minutes to do it— is in here it does— the AI agent does go out and look on the web for information about Dr. John Redfern. And it creates this brief and it says, okay, Dr. Redfern, he's a board-certified orthopedic surgeon, specializes in sports medicine. Here's his education and his training. Here are recent publications in the last few years. These are how he's ranked from web resources. Here's his CMS open payment information. And there's a lot of other information that you could put in here to make this even more useful for your sales team to actually utilize this data. This is not data that ConvaidMed owns, so this is data that the partner company, the parent company who's utilizing this app, would need to have access to and then organize it in such a way that it's useful for their sales team. Another similar tool using the same data is kind of this site of care summary. So if I have I'm out in Colorado somewhere and I know that I don't have a lot of business perhaps in Durango. You know, I'm going to look and see, you know, who are the people that maybe I should be talking to in Durango. And then you could do all of the stuff that we did before with Dr. Evan Tabacoli or with Dr. Matthew Smith and to find out if he would potentially, he or she would be potentially a good target for me. All of these These resources are exportable as a CSV file. So once you have this information, you can send it to somewhere and then continue to interact with it and do things with it. So that is what we have built agents for at present that could be integrated into the app.

Cool.

I'll pause there.

Any thoughts on that? We're, you know, basically what we've done is with the app is we've now we can deliver safe, secure artificial intelligence to a field-based sales force. And so these are two or three of the tools we've thought of today that could be useful for sales reps out in the field, a product expert, you know, a pre-call planning or customer intelligence thing. But there, there must be others. And so love to get feedback from the group or any other ideas about how, you know, AI could be potentially useful for, for, for the field.

Yeah. Colleen's got a question comment.

Yeah. So I was wondering if the app or the agent, I mean, do you kind of have the capability to separate what's searchable by sales rep territories or when they're when they're searching, are they— is it kind of an open field? They're searching— I'm— the physician one that we just looked at, that agent, I like that. I mean, I think it has some great information that, you know, usually you can only find by doing a whole bunch of searches. But I'm just wondering if you can kind of control territory focus, I guess, is the way to put it.

Control territory focus.

So, um, so what she's asking is global search or territory-specific search.

So compile all the data from your territory instead of looking city by city or surgeon by surgeon looking for, uh, a geographical block.

Yeah, like if you have an agent, a sales agent that, um, you've you know, contracted with to focus on, I don't know, Atlanta. Can you— and then you have another one that's focused on, you know, another city, maybe in Georgia, maybe somewhere else. But do you— is there a way you could map a sales agent's territory to the, you know, the data that they can search for? Right. So you don't have a lot of conflicts, I guess, is what I'm— you know, one of the things that, you know, I've always had to deal with is, you know, conflicts between your sales resources where, you know, they both want to, or more than one person wants to claim a particular surgeon or hospital or whatever.

Yeah, we haven't solved that problem. But to answer your question, yes, you can, you can identify the specific region and look up the surgeons or potential clients in that region. But you, but you can also look at somebody else's region the way it's set up today. So we haven't set it up today where an individual user can only look at his or her geographical area and nobody else's. Maybe that's what you're trying to get to.

Yeah, I'm just wondering how, yeah, yeah, how can you kind of start to eliminate or reduce the number of conflicts? I know for, for us in some companies I've been with, what we would do is allow, I'll call it a global search on not this much information altogether, but a global search. But, and then we would keep track of that. It's like, okay, so no one's really, quote, claimed that territory. It's a, you know, something that we're not active in as a company. But we, if you're able to, I guess, know that salesperson XYZ, you know, reached out to that territory or searched on that territory, maybe it's a way to help those decisions by management saying, okay, you know, John Sales Guy has been, you know, researching this surgeon or this territory. So it at least gives that salesperson kind of a head start if we're trying to figure out how to assign it.

I think, you know, a lot of the tools that are, that are from where this data comes from, management like Acuity or Alphasoftware or Med Scout or whatever. Yeah, that's why I think that's why people are investing in those tools and they're quite useful for the, for that purpose. Well, this is really for the person in the field before they go on a sales call to be able to look up their surgeon, get as much information as they possibly can as part of their preparation process, and which will, should lead them to have a more successful engagement, right?

Got it, got it, understood.

Got it. All right, Mauricio, got a question.

Yeah, I think, uh, like, I, I, I, I like having a touchpoint log with the surgeons to like— so if you go to a surgeon and seeing, hey, who was the last person in the company who, who interacted with this person, what commitments were made, it's always good I, I've had it when I go meet a surgeon, like, oh, your rep was here 3 years ago and they committed to this, this, and they never delivered. And you, you're starting on the wrong foot. So it would be a good heads up to, to have breadcrumbs.

Leave— yeah, leave breadcrumbs for historic sales calls.

Well, in the data that this is sort of— so you have the data source, right? And then the company takes the data and they do things with it. You know, one of the things too they could do, if you know if they're on contract or not on contract, you could say who is on contract right? Which competitor is in that? So they could also have that kind of information, Mauricio, that you were just talking about. It could be, you know, that we worked with Dr. Redfern in 2018. He came to a company lab and he was, you know, he really liked the product, but maybe nobody followed up with him. If that kind of thing exists and they are able, you know, from a CRM or some other sort of data data source, if they're able to put it into it, it could certainly be part of this. I don't know why that couldn't be sort of included, right?

Yeah. And if you have an AI agent, you can make it very easy to dictate. So if, if a rep goes to see Dr. Redfern and shows him the elbow system and there's a commitment to show him the shoulder one, you can say, oh, I showed Dr. Redfern the elbow pending on showing him the shoulder, and your whole app can help keep everything on track.

Right. So you don't go and say, oh, let me show you the shoulder when in fact you did that already.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Marissa, you're raising a really interesting point, which is, you know, the utilization of an efficient CRM tool by a medical device sales rep. I'm not sure that exists. I'd love to get everybody's feedback on that. We have not chosen at the moment to integrate with a CRM. That's certainly something on our list. But I do think there are some inherent challenges in place with medical device sales folks using CRM because it's extra work for them. So I'd love to hear more and think we need to think more about how we can incorporate CRM but keep our philosophy intact, which is to make it easy, easy, easy for reps to do their job better.

Yeah, I think the fact that you are an app and that you are AI-enabled and the way you approach the user experience, you could become a very cool AI front end for any CRM tool. So if you find a way to eliminate all of the logging into Zoho and filling the cards and going from MQL to SQL to whatever, and if you make it very easy for our rep to just chat with or dictate or chat with something, it would be a game changer. Great.

Great, great feedback. Hey, hey, Lauren, take down the, the, uh, shared screen so we can see each other better. And Maloney's up. Maloney, Dr. Maloney's up next. Oh, you're on mute.

I was born on mute. So, um, I mean, I love this. I've been studying top sales performers since the '80s.. And, uh, I long ago decided that the only way to tell— I could walk into a room of 100 reps, give them a 15-minute test, and tell you who sells the most. And that 15-minute test is an IQ test. And the reason is because the smartest guys remember the most, and so they have that information accessible. So what you're talking about here is a tool to help the middle third, which is a great way to for any company to really exponentially increase their sales. And Mike, you said easy. Easy is so critical. CRM sucks. They don't work. No, I've never seen a sales force adopt one successfully because it takes you away from what makes you money. And I can't tell you how many times I've been on the inside listening to customer service bitch because some rep wants them to look up something that lazy alcoholic overpaid son of a bitch doesn't, you know, But you know, this is the inside talking to the outside. And you know, you have to remind them the only people in this company that really make money for us are those people selling products. So anything we can do to make the good ones' job easier and make it faster. Reps will spend 2 weeks getting an appointment with a key doctor and spend 5 minutes preparing.

Hmm.

Every time.

Isn't that crazy?

It's crazy, but that's the ratio.

No, you're not wrong.

And so asking myself, what are the practical applications of this? In a, if you're making a new market, talking to a doc and you really prepared, you're gonna get their attention. And the first two questions the guy's gonna ask, if you've really successfully got their attention, is who else is using it? 'Cause they all spend 10 years learning how to be followers. They're not leaders. And do you have any clinical studies? Do you have any evidence-based studies? They never ask how much it is.

They don't.

But when you're in the OR as a rep, the common questions you want to ask, you know, AI-driven tool like this is how much, you know, what's, what's the price of this widget on this contract? I don't know. I forget. You don't wanna call customer service.

Oops.

There are some practical applications like what are the CPT codes? Who knows that? Are you on contract? You know, depending on where you are. So all that could be in there. But the main thing I like to think about is that, you know, your top sales reps, you gotta treat them kind of like, you know, knights on a horse. Everybody, everybody, they shine their armor, they sharpen their sword, you know, they do everything for them, which sounds kind of bad, but, you know, they're the ones riding into battle and get killed or lose their jobs. So I love what you're doing. So I'm just trying to think of practical ways and how decision makers, I'd love to be a fly on the wall hearing you pitch this to key decision makers in orthopedic companies and cartels, you know, the big ones, or even better, the startups. And how does it apply to 1099s versus direct sales forces? Anyway, I said a lot too much.

Well, and we think, I mean, to the point though, and I didn't mention it as I was walking through the app, but our target really, especially right now, our target is the startups that approaching product launch, they have distributors. We're not going after any of the, you know, the big companies because for a lot of reasons, because they've got first, they're very difficult to even get anything done right, to get anything approved, to get anything moved in. They've got big unwieldy IT departments and the platform that this is built on is SOC 2 compliant, it's GDPR compliant. So none of that is an issue, but it's getting into those, you know, getting a successful conversation with them that doesn't go on for years and years. And they already have big systems. They have a Lego or they have Highspot or they have something else that they're using not well and nobody likes it. And the sales team, you know, they get frustrated because it takes them all this time to figure out where to go and how to, you know, they have, oh gosh, I have to log back into that thing again and I have to find the thing there and that's going to take me, you know, 15 minutes and I've got a case I've got to get going. So that's not our target. All of that to say that the big companies are not our target. It really is the smaller companies that are really— and the smaller companies with independent reps that are struggling to gain share, mindshare of those reps, because those reps are probably carrying other products. And so, you know, along with the incentivization that they've got to do to make them interested in selling their products, making it also easy for them to be onboarded and to have all of this at their fingers' fingertips.

That's right. I, I like— I really love what you said at the very beginning about engagement. If I— every startup company should have a routine meeting every week with their— with every distributor. And any distributor that won't do that, you should, you should kill them, you know, just get rid of them. Because it's saying that 15-minute engagement means so much for your alignment and your connectivity and everything else. And to me, the secret sauce is the AI AI. I bet everybody on this phone call uses AI 20, 30, 40 times a day. I know I do. So I bet Kyle's got some good stuff.

You can't get me started with that. But I did want to comment, LauraLynn, on— you were mentioning the big companies and IT systems and Unreal. One of the other problems that exists within that ecosystem is not just that they have these legacy systems or these big systems, is they've got multiple systems that don't communicate with one another. So, they might have a QMS system that doesn't talk to a compliance system, doesn't talk to any number of other things. And that won't only exist in the largest of players, the, you know, J&J, Medtronic of the world. That'll exist in smaller players where they've been put together from a series of multiple acquisitions. And those things are behaving with layers and layers of different systems that don't cooperate. And it ends up being total tribal knowledge for how to navigate through that. Yeah. So, the earlier you are engaging someone in their life cycle, it gives you a chance to infiltrate before they've paved a road that is almost impossible to go down for you. So, I think your thought process is valid there. One thing that I had a lot of firsthand experience with that falls into part of the realm of what you're trying to do is the training and compliance stuff. And, one thing that when it came to creating educational content or asking reps to do something where they know if they go and watch a video, do a training module, do a quiz, do some sort of gamified application, they know it has the chance to improve their skill. But the commentary we always got back as we were exploring new modalities, new ways to do that is, well, if I'm going to do this, what do I not have to do now that you've given me this other thing to do? I think that's going to be an important part of your pitch. And the question that you have to answer is, is being able to say, well, Well, because you've got this library here and because you've got everything compartmentalized there and because you can use the AI agent there, this means you don't have to call Jennifer and you don't have to email Bob and you don't have to go sort through your inbox, whatever it is that that's, that's part of your story is this is, this is a subtraction of work.

Great.

All right.

Thank you. That's great feedback, Kyle. On the sales training bit, as we were thinking through the user, the UI of this, right? We wanted to take into consideration the principles of adult learning. And as adults, we're all adults in the room, most of us, our attention spans are shorter. So we need, so microlearning tends to work better. An hour-long lecture is, we lose concentration pretty quickly. Doing it spaced over time, so doing daily little bouts of learning Improves retention, making it multimodal. Some things I might read, some things I might listen to, some things I might watch, some things I may engage with, ask questions. So we're going to put together sort of a— let's almost like a 30-day daily dose, just like you, you know, I should take my daily walk or say my daily prayers or do my daily meditation. Those habits will make you better, but you're only talking about 5 minutes to 7 to 10 minutes per day. I think any, any rep app, because it's right on your phone, should be able to carve out that time to make themselves better.

Especially if you text them, it's time.

I love that. You're— you stepped right into it, Mark, because we also can do push notifications, right? So the notifications go into the app, which you saw in the demo, but also show up on your device like a text message or any other application with which you have notifications opted into. So you can send daily reminders, weekly reminders, however you like, because that's what's available in the iOS and the Google Play stores. So we can take advantage of those ecosystems.

You know, as we started out as a podcast company, right? ConveyMed started, maybe you don't all know that, but we started out as medical education, medical education Spotify. Was kind of the original vision. Um, so we still believe, um, very strongly in audio as a possible medium as well. And I think especially when you're talking about sales reps who have these busy lives and spend a lot of time driving from one place to the other, that if you can— and, and because we have experience doing this and we have experience being in industry, um, we think that it's a nice marriage as well where we can advise a company to take some training and turn it into something that they can listen to through their AirPods as they're on their way and make their product messaging, make it audio so that as they're on their way to see that doctor, they're refreshing on the elevator pitch, they're refreshing on whatever it is you want them to have top of mind, make it in an audio format. And as Mike said, adult learning principles, make it short, so they can easily digest it, easily engage with it, and off they go, right? And you've made them better. You've made them better. And I think, Mark, to what you said about the 20% and the 80%, you know, the 20% of reps you'll do anything for and they will do anything for you. They will absolutely be all over this. You will have made them more productive as well. The best of the best, because they are going to take this and they're going to consume everything to be better. And then hopefully, as you said, we can bring up that middle third as well. But anyway, I think audio, and because we're believers in audio, I think we can help coach companies how to take some of this content that exists today as a PowerPoint, as a, you know, as a PDF, and really turn it into digestible media that can make them more successful.

Totally agree, Kyle.

So the, the output of your AI agent, because it pulls only from inside the library, is only as good as the material that's in there, right?

That's exactly right.

Now there's potentially some—

it will sometimes return— I, I don't have that answer, right? If it, if it's not there, it won't make it up.

Yeah, there's, there's upside to that because it doesn't necessarily have to crawl through the garbage of the rest of the digital universe. But I guess one thing that came to mind as you were just describing that is, and I do this on the R&D side more, but I can envision it being very similar from the sales rep side as well, where you get in your car, you're going to go pick up lunch to take to an office, and you're preparing to go give a pitch on this new shoulder system that you have, and you want a reminder of what that doctor has used in the past and maybe what some of the comparative elements You'd want to maybe go into an agent and just say, "Tell me what the main comparative differences are clinically and mechanically between shoulder system X and new shoulder system that I'm going to go pitch." Now, if there was also an audio component or the AI could just talk to you about it, that'd be really cool. I don't think most of them are operating in that space quite yet. Now, maybe the more sophisticated ones. But, the information that defined what set those competitive advantages up would have to be in there. It's not just going to go, find those for you. And then that gets into a sticky space where it means you potentially have to have some detail on your competitors and what can be released and how do you put some sort of analysis together. Maybe there's some freedom that comes from your library can also include publicly available documents that tends to not be allowed inside of some of the big companies. Maybe you guys have a window into that's a little bit different, but I mean, I think it sounds like you're tracking towards a whole lot of functionality that falls very much into the practical, real-world, on-the-go, you know, in real-time enhancements in their capabilities. So I like it. Thanks.

I love that idea too, Kyle. Thanks for that. We'll give that some thought, how we can make that work. And the idea of being able to have an audio exchange is one that we've been thinking about, but you're right, it is a little bit more sophisticated. So we're trying to crawl before we walk, before we run.

Sometimes you can get, sometimes you can get ChatGPT or Siri on your phone only, not through a computer, but you can get them. You can say, read that article to me and it'll, it'll give you something, but not always. It depends on the interface. But I would imagine that the demand on what your marketing team puts out as far as materials to reference, because it's going to pull from this library, is really an important factor.

Well, I was just going to add that we have a client, a podcast client that we're working with, who has created a sort of a— for their sales reps in audio format, a Know Before You Go. So if they are doing a competitive analysis in audio format, well, guess what? We get the transcript for that. So that transcript, if that could get approved along with the audio portion, then that could be a searchable piece of, you know, that the AI agent is going out for. So then you would have an audio, maybe not as succinct potentially as what you described, which I love. But you would, you might be able to, you know, flip, kind of flip that around a little bit too and make it, so, you know, the AI searches, tell me, you know, tell me 3 differences, 3 main differences between the Stryker blah blah blah and the J&J blah blah blah or Diffusynthese blah blah blah, right? As a possibility.

Right. Mark.

Oh, you're on.

You're muted again. Born muted.

Born muted.

Kyle's on the right track. In my graduate program at USC in behavioral science, I, you know, I learned one thing. People don't change. Behavioral change is the way to die a thousand deaths. So you gotta take the sales force as they are. And the, uh, when I took over as director of sales at, uh, this company once called Orthologic, um, I wrote something called the One Minute Sales Pitch and I made 200 audio tapes and every dealer rep got that and they knew only one thing and that was that one minute pitch. But to take that even farther in today's, if I had had an AI agent that said, and I say, listen, I'm getting ready to go in, Dr. Smith. He's using the competitive version from Smith Nephew. Give me a 1-minute pitch that'll turn this guy, that'll get his attention. That's all you wanna do. Get his attention, get his mindshare. And that, if that 1-minute pitch could come in my ear in the 5 minutes of prep, that's all I'm gonna do. 'Cause I'm a crappy rep. Hmm. That would be huge. Nobody has that.

Well, the functionality of that would ultimately replace Jennifer as a resource as well. It wouldn't just be a sales tool for going on a call. It would be the sort of thing that you're actually pulling up in the back room when something's missing from the table. And instead of having to leave the room so you can get cell phone reception and be able to call somebody, they can tell you actually it's an 11:13 taper on that particular stem. Now you have like your product specialist in your pocket. So there's, I mean, there's a lot of different permutations of how that works.

Yep.

Love it. Keep these ideas coming, guys.

I love it.

Yeah.

So, so I keep thinking, and this is kind of with most startups is you, you don't really know what the customer wants yet until you test it. And, you know, and I think what you guys, that's why I want to talk about the business model. Is there any way you can just give this thing out for free to, you know, a bunch of companies and just watch what happens and then just say, okay, nobody uses that, we're deleting it, and they're all using this, so let's invest more in that.

So the business model is very simple. It's a one-time fee to set up and build your, to build your app, and then it's a monthly subscription based on the number of users you have. And each company is going to be a little bit different. So we, based on how much AI they want, what sort of level of security they need and so forth, how complex the app is, how far astray from the platform that we have do they want to go, because we can customize this to a pretty large extent, which I think is part of what makes it interesting. We don't give anything away for free though.

Yeah, but I think that's a missed opportunity. I mean, it's the freemium model. If you could get a few hundred reps just totally hooked on this thing and say, okay, you know, March 31st, we're going to turn it on, we're going to turn on the subscription, and they can't live without it at that point. I mean, we all use, we all, we've all been sucked into the freemium model. It works if, if your thing is good.

Yeah. Well, it should be free to the distributor or to the rep. Okay. So we would not expect the company to charge the distributor for access to their app. It will be free to the app. But we are looking for an investment from the company to utilize this platform for their, for their own value. So it's very affordable and accessible, much more so than, for example, other like-minded tools. I like, for example, some of the big companies use Allego. You may be familiar. Are very expensive, $40 to $50 per user per month. You think about a large Salesforce that can get up into the mid-six figures pretty quickly. The integrations for those are mid-six figures. We can do it for, for much less. We're much more accessible from an affordability standpoint. And the cost of developing software is going down because of AI. And so we are leveraging that and then we are giving our potential clients the benefit of that. We're not, definitely not going to do it for free.

Okay.

Well, have you thought of maybe just working with a, you know, I'll call it a, you know, an early, um, kind of development partner customer, or, or even maybe directly with reps, right? What's the information that's hard for them to get out of the companies that they're repping, right? I mean, I know giving things away for free is never fun, but, but it might allow you to really put your resources where they'll be most used by the sales reps.

Right. Mauricio.

Yeah, I would, I would flip things around a little bit and I know that this might sound a little crazy, but I would create a generic version Make it a completely free but very capped version, like a generic, and try to get the 1099 reps to want to use it themselves. Like, make it, make it useful to them before you go pitch the companies and have them be your advocates with the, with the companies. I think that's the ultimate acid test. It's not whether a sales manager at a company will think this is useful. It's whether reps are demanding it. So if I, if you come up with an MVP that's very simple, generic, that the rep can actually populate with the documents they get over email and like prepare their own kits. Or if it's a, if it's a little bit of a larger distributor that has multiple, multiple reps under them, multiple associates, they can, they can control that a little bit. I feel like it should be, I feel like it, I feel like it will be a very easy sales process to companies with, if their 1099s are saying, hey, like I use this, can you please, can you please put this on your, on your platform?

I, I like that two-tier approach because you got to get, I mean, Laura Lane and I talked about this a few days ago offline. It's all about the network effect. You know, if you have 100 users, you know, it's not worth anything. You have 10,000, it's like super valuable because, uh, the more people using it, the more it gets fed, the more, you know, it just, it just feeds on itself. It's n squared.

Yeah, that's great feedback. We'll have to think how we could potentially execute that and make that experience.

Yeah, I like Colleen's pilot program. Pick a really innovative small company and just say, hey, we're going to— you're the only one that's going to get this, and we're going to give it to you for free. And, but you're gonna give us tons of feedback every day. And we're gonna change the, we're gonna change the software every week until we really dial it in. And then you, then you subscribe that out to everybody once you dial it in. The pos— what people don't realize is the software companies like Facebook, they change, they change Facebook every single day.

Yeah. I mean, they're, they're shipping something new every day.

You're right. Every day. And everybody sees a different Facebook. Book. Yeah.

All right.

Well, we're, we're, we're at the end of the hour. Boy, this is great.

Great conversation.

Yeah.

Good luck to you guys.

Yeah. Hopefully you got something out of it. A lot of good ideas.

A lot of smart people.

For sure. I enjoyed it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mark.

Have a great week.

Have a great week.

Likewise.

And Mike, good luck. We'll have you back in like maybe 6 months and see where you are.

That'd be great. Thanks. Thanks for being, thanks for being so generous with your time, Tiger.

We appreciate it.

We appreciate it.

We really appreciate it.

You're, you're solving a problem and it's just, you gotta figure out exactly what the problem is, exactly how you're gonna solve it. But there's definitely a need.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Thanks. Thank you. Take care.