Tiger Buford, an orthopedic recruiter, identifies six red flags that mean you should replace your marketing leader: misalignment with sales, skipping R&D collaboration, ignoring digital channels, avoiding metrics, lacking creativity, and wasting clinical data. Most orthopedic firms still market like the 1990s.
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Brought to you by Tiger Buford. Hello, orthopedic friends. Welcome to Inside Orthopedics. My name is Tiger. I'm an orthopedic industry insider and retained recruiter for early orthopedic companies Thanks for listening. This is episode number 9. The title is "Why You Should Fire Your Marketing Leader." So let's get into it. So great marketing is like pornography. It's really hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Great marketing can really change the trajectory of an orthopedics business today especially. Today, very few orthopedic companies are executing great marketing. Most companies are marketing the same way we did back in the 1990s. When the company is small, the salespeople do most of the marketing. As the company grows, the first real marketing person is hired. Then over time, a marketing department is created. If the marketing strategy is not building brand and bringing new sales by then, then the marketing leader really is to blame. Period. So let me share 6 red flags that I can tell you about that you should consider making a change in your marketing leadership. I've seen all 6 of these shortcomings in marketing departments. So let's get right into it. Flag number 1: Poor alignment with sales. So this is simply your marketing head is not in sync with your sales organization. When the marketing VP and the sales VP don't work together or see eye to eye, it's a big problem. It sets up a dysfunctional tone for these organizations, and you commonly see one of these symptoms with a misaligned sales and marketing. Symptom number 1 is marketing campaigns that just aren't utilized or helpful at all. Symptom number 2 is rogue behavior from the sales team because they just don't believe that marketing has a clue. And then symptom number 3, marketing is not listening to important sales feedback because they just think they know better. So this— so flag number 1, poor alignment with sales, is— can be devastating. Flag number 2: poor alignment with R&D. Your marketing leader is just not engaged with R&D. Marketing should be an integral part of new product development, uh, to the point of leading the process even in some companies, instead of just being handed the finished product to sell. One of marketing's core functions is the identification of the unmet clinical need and the voice of the customer. During the development process, marketing should be side by side with engineering in validating designs. If not done well, a product redesign is inevitable. This flaw can be magnified even more when marketing and sales— marketing and engineering, sorry— are based in separate cities or countries. So that's number 2, poor alignment with R&D. Flag number 3 is no digital execution. So this is when your marketing leader is not leveraging digital marketing or social media. The majority of the orthopedic marketing could be for physical things, not digital things. Hey, it's crazy. It's 2019. It's time to wake up. Everybody lives inside social media. Your digital marketing campaign should be targeted direct to patient and direct to surgeon. Digital marketing is just better, cheaper, and it gives you mind-blowing metrics. For a deeper look into digital marketing, just Google "The Future of Marketing in Orthopedics by Tiger Buford." So that's number 3, no digital execution. Flag number 4: Little use of campaign metrics. So this is when your marketing leader is just not using metrics. Ask your marketing leader, "How effective was the marketing campaign?" If he or she has no idea how the campaign worked, then this, this is a red flag. Most people believe that marketing is simply a creative function. But today, marketing should be guided by analytics. If a marketing leader doesn't have access to the right numbers and trends to base decisions on, for example, things like demand forecasting, ad dollars, promotional programs, headcount, then how do they know what's working or what's worse, what's not working? Furthermore, This analysis needs to be reviewed regularly with the team, and future decisions need to be based on analytics. So Flag #4 is little use of campaign metrics. Flag #5, and I've seen this, is a lack of an entrepreneurial mindset. Your marketing leader is simply not creative. This, this can happen. This may be the result of time pressures or a mindset of avoiding mistakes. It seems obvious to say, but what is someone doing in marketing if they can't think out of the box and creatively? It's basically the job description. When the leader in marketing is the least creative person on the team, there's a problem. The lack of creativity in marketing can be a result of leadership that was originated in a technical field like engineering. And migrated their career into a creative field like marketing. The reality is it's a very different skill set and a way of thinking required for marketing versus engineering. And today you can actually do personality profiling to test for creativity during the hiring process of your marketing leadership. So Flag #5 is lack of entrepreneurial mindset. And lastly, Flag #6: Not leveraging clinical information. So this is when your marketing leader is not taking advantage of clinical data that you may already have. Your leader may be underutilizing the available clinical data and have no plans to even get it. Though this seems like it could be the clinical department's issue, it really should be driven by marketing. The clinical data used to gain FDA clearance can also be used to sell product based on better outcomes. The bigger the effort on clinical data mining, the more important this marketing tool becomes, especially with game-changing orthopedic technologies. Surveys with surgeons say that clinical evidence is the driver for trying new products and technologies, which means this isn't just a clinical department issue of running a study. It's a huge marketing issue to collaborate early and often on getting the right data and then using it, or better yet, revisiting the data that could still be captured through repurposing of existing data using meta-analysis that can be done maybe and/or shorter pathways to more meaningful data, post-market analysis, for example. Your marketing leader should understand the power of clinical data and advocate for it, or you have the wrong marketing leader in place. So that's all 6 mistakes as I see them. Hope you enjoyed the review. Follow me at TigerBuford.com or on Twitter @TigerBuford. Don't forget to subscribe. Be safe out there.
