Do You Need a Fractional CMO? A Guide to Getting Healthcare Marketing Strategy and Execution Right

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
Welcome to our podcast, the Healthcare Success Podcast. I'm the host, Stewart Gandalf, and today I'm interviewing Michael Baer (TechCXO). Michael, welcome.

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
Thank you, Stewart. Good to be here.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
Good. So Michael reached out to us, or I met Michael, I should say, through a mutual client, where Michael was the fractional CMO, and I felt like we developed a relationship since that period of time. And oftentimes, our agency comes across people or companies that feel like they need marketing firepower, but they don't really have internally the right people, and they're not ready to hire a full-time CMO, and so we've developed a relationship where we try to refer to Michael when we can, because a lot of times our clients need help. So, anyway, welcome, Michael.

Michael, actually, I'd like to start by just asking you, it's really funny, the term fractional Chief Marketing Officer.

Back, right around the early 2000s, I was doing that role. I actually was vice president of 3 different companies for marketing on a part-time basis. The word fractional CMO wasn't out there then.

Tell me a little bit about CMOs and what's going on these days.

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
Well, it's interesting. I think you point out something funny, which most people don't realize, that the idea and the term of a fractional CMO has been around for a while, and yet it does seem to be an idea whose time has come.

For a lot of reasons. I think, you know, we've got various socioeconomic factors that are constraining budgets and keeping people maybe from deciding to hire full-time. We've also had this post-COVID effect where the idea of hiring remotely and hiring talent, wherever it is, is… completely accepted, widely accepted.

And I think we also have a lot of early-stage growth companies, you know, that are coming up in various industries. We'll talk, I know, in a bit about the healthcare and kind of healthcare-aligned boom in terms of new company development and growth.
And those are the types of companies that are very open to, in fact, normally seek some sort of fractional or temporary solutions across lots of their functions in those early stages. So, I think there's a lot of reasons why fractional is growing.

I just read some data yesterday that something like the growth in those roles, I'm not sure if it was, you know, postings or people claiming to have those roles, was up 60% last year over the year before, 6-0.

And probably the year before that was another 60 or 70, so… yeah, it is kind of a faddish term. In fact, it's interesting… I decided… I chose when I… when I went to consulting—so I spent about a decade as an embedded CMO at a variety of companies—and when I left and I began consulting, I decided to join a full consulting company, so I work for a company called TechCXO.

And one of the reasons I did that is because I always am a contrarian, and I hate, like, new terms for stuff that just describe something that's always been around, you know?

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
Yep.

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
Growth marketer, and, you know, what the hell is marketing supposed to do? But, you know, oh, God forbid you grow—we need a new term for it, growth market. Like, there's certain terms, so I kind of reject fractional as the term of the moment. And so I joined this company that—we've been around for 22 years—so while it may be some faddish term, I guess at least I was part of the… I’m part of the company that maybe launched it 22 years ago.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
That's great.

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
You know, and so we have 125 partners across the C-suite, so maybe, you know, you're aware of fractional CMOs, but there are fractional CFOs, fractional CTOs, fractional chief operating officers, etc. We even have CHROs.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
Wow, that's very good. Yeah, it's funny, I've talked recently on a… when I was being interviewed for somebody else's podcast, the term content marketing, you know, describes… is certainly something we talk about a lot today, but back in the 90s, we were doing content marketing in the analog world.

Well, let's talk about… your background is in healthcare, med tech, you work for providers as a strategist. Tell us a little bit more about, you know. I guess where you are today, with the kinds of clients you're working, and then we can segue to the whole idea of stratecution. I'd love to have just a quick thumbnail sketch of, like…

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
Sure, sure, yeah. So, I spent 25 years-ish in advertising, you know, running big strategic accounts, consumer accounts, big global businesses, and kind of cut my teeth on that real positioning strategy—rigorous foundation of those kinds of businesses. I'm going to talk about it a little bit in a bit when I talk about stratecution, but I spent a lot of years with Unilever, who are noted as formal strategic marketers. And then I pivoted to B2B CMO roles, as I mentioned before.

And the last one was… like, a $200 million healthcare media company. And it really was my first full-on healthcare role, and I loved it. And there was something about it—there was a lot about it. When I left it, I knew I wanted to stay focused on healthcare, and there was a lot about it that I found really rewarding and appealing.

One is, I mean, no matter what you're selling and working on in healthcare, at the end of the day, there's a patient having their health affected—for the good—and I do think that rubs off on all of us working on that business.

Obviously, Stewart, you've been in this world for a long time. I do feel like there's something a little bit better than, you know, selling Coca-Cola, when you're helping an oncology company do X, Y, or Z, or even if you're helping a technology company minimize administrative burden for doctors in a setting. You know, all of these things do have some sort of good associated to it, and I think that was one of the things that drove me deeper into it.

And then the other thing was COVID, and post-COVID, there's been such a… I think anybody in healthcare would admit that up until COVID, the healthcare industry at large was a laggard in terms of innovation, in digitization, in being, quote, customer-centric, in leveraging all the advances that have happened in so many other spaces—like on-demand and remote access—and all those kinds of things that we take as kind of table stakes in almost every other category. I think healthcare was delayed for some good reasons. There's lots of compliance and regulatory issues, but on others, it's just… it's just not the way we do things. And I think COVID was a real shock to the system, where, okay, a lot of things that we do—we send out salespeople to the streets, and they go into practices and deliver pizzas, and all these things—that this is how we go to market, this is how we commercialize a product, how we do clinical trials—everything. The way we did anything, we can't do it that way now.

And because of that, I think there was a massive… just a massive growth in innovation. And so you see that, and you see that in investment—in VC investment—in the number of new… you know, the percentage of all VC investment in healthcare has something like doubled or tripled in the last 5 to 10 years. So, because of that, there's just a lot of interesting new companies out there who, A, are doing really cool and innovative things, but B, need help. And so that was what really got me super focused in that area.

And so, the kinds of companies I've been working with… it's interesting, my practice, as it were, has somewhat bifurcated. You know, the typical ICP of a fractional C-suite, CXO, C-suite executive does tend to be that kind of early-stage growth company. I like to say they've gotten somewhere—so maybe it's seed investment, maybe some sales, maybe the founder and whoever have created some sort of revenue.

And even if it could be 5 to 10 million, but they know that what got them here is not going to get them to 2X, 5X, 10X. And they recognize a few things… They have to recognize, one, that they likely need to professionalize how they go to market—make some more systemic and programmatic changes to the way they look, feel, talk, interact, engage with the market.
And two, they also recognize that probably they've been doing everything—so whether it's founder, COO, whoever, you know, is doing, “Oh, I'm doing marketing sort of as a side venture. I'm doing sales as a side venture.” They have to also recognize that they're probably not the best person to be doing that, both because they may not have those specific skills. But even more importantly, their time is more valuable doing the things they are good at.

And so they have to kind of recognize that. But so, you know, those are the kinds of companies, and I've worked with… I've worked with, you know, health tech, digital health, telehealth companies—companies that have technology or services or some combination that they sell to practices for practice management. I've worked in workflow solutions provider-side work.

But the other side of my practice has been a series of literally almost 4 years now—or over 4 years now—of work with doing marketing strategy and marketing, even some implementation and content marketing for GE Healthcare and their ultrasound. So I've got the ultrasound division. So I've got this kind of, like, the zero to 15 to 20 million dollar set of businesses, and this $25 billion global company to compare it to, with the work I've been doing for the last 4 years.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
Sorry. Let's… good. Let's talk about stratecution. What does that mean, and why is it a critical lens for healthcare companies to adopt?

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
So Stewart is mentioning a concept I came up with, I don't know, 15 years ago or so, that I term stratecution, and as you can imagine from the name, it's kind of obviously dumb, dumb simple. It's a combination of strategy and execution, and you need to have those two together, and they're two sides of the same coin that need to kind of work in tandem.
You know, you get a lot of head nods. Of course, of course. When I launched this idea, it was interesting. I was actually still in the agency world, and I'd been working with companies like Unilever, and what I found was… we would spend a year developing the strategy for some sort of launch. We'd do deep dives, and quantitative research, and concept testing, and ideations, and then we'd get quantitative validation of a concept, of the strategy.

And then we would develop a big idea, like a creative idea that took some sort of lateral leap from that strategy. And it would be a big idea, and then, of course, we'd test that as well. And, you know, we're a year into this. And we have a big idea, and what I would see is… at that point they would almost think, “Okay, we've done it, you know, now it’s just we get to the execution,” as if execution is the weaker part that just doesn't take any effort.
And I like to think it's like they think that it's a snowball—like, we've got the big idea, we've got the strategy and the big idea, all you need to do is just push it down the hill, and it's just going to get bigger and grow and everything.

And what I realized is, no… I mean, the execution—first of all—if you have a brilliant strategy and execute poorly, you're going to fail. But if you have a mediocre strategy, but you execute flawlessly, you'll probably succeed at some level.

And so I realized that thinking about the execution almost as sort of… it's just the arms and legs just running along, and it's really the big brains do the strategy—I thought was really a poor way to look at it.

But on top of it, as you get into the digital world, all the execution needs to be strategic. How do we do these things? How should we follow up? What are the touch points? I mean, all these decisions… we went from a world—you and I both, Stewart, started when you really had TV ads and radio ads and print ads. I mean, digital wasn't even a part of our initial palette, so it kind of was, I suppose, easier. But once you got into a digital world, there were so many decisions that needed to be made to lead to success, and so I called it stratecution.

You needed strategic execution. So I was working on projects that had some strategy, or even a lot of strategy, but not enough strategic execution.

What's interesting is, in the world that I am in today, it comes almost from the other side. There's almost a flip on the idea of stratecution, where… and I think it comes from this… I believe, overly mythologized Silicon Valley kind of ethos of, you know, “move fast and break things,” or “fail fast and succeed faster,” which I just think is kind of the wrong way to think about things, because it leads people to just start doing stuff without a strategy.

So a lot of times, I will go into companies or talk to companies that really don't have strategy. They won't say they don't have strategy, but they don't have strategy meaning they haven't formalized the strategic components that help your execution. And they will, in fact, just start doing ads, creating social media posts, right, doing videos, they'll build their website, and they’ll have it formalized.

Who is their customer? What are their needs? How do they shop this category? What are their pain points? What is our value proposition? What's the messaging? How do we think? You know—none of that stuff has been done. So, in a way, we're just executing without the strat now.

So that's what I find is almost always missing, and this is why one of the things I say is it's almost never too early to start marketing. Naturally, there's a cost and a budget necessity at times that have you not maybe hire me or someone like me, but… but in terms of when is marketing, I mean, marketing is as fundamental as anything at early stages, because marketing is really…

I dumb it down to: it's understanding what your customer needs in a way to frame not just your product, but how you communicate your product so that it's solving a customer's needs. That's part of the strategy work that needs to be done, and if you haven't done that work, I have to believe that your product probably doesn't necessarily… you know… doesn't exactly deliver on the needs of your customer, let alone your actual content or messaging.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
So it's interesting, a lot of times I go back to when we're doing marketing for clients, I start off with, okay, 5… 4 piece… 5-piece… 7-piece. I find that everybody goes straight to promotion—like amateurs do it all the time. They're talking about ads in the first minute or two.

And it's like, wait—what are we doing? Who's our target? What's our strategy? What's our competitors like? What's our unique messaging? What's our value proposition? You know, what is our price place? Price place, product, promotion, people, positioning, and packaging, right? Like, what are all these things?

Because everybody jumps to the ads, and I think… we talked offline a little bit… is that where you feel people are going wrong—is just jumping straight today, the opposite problem, instead of spending all their time on strategy?

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
Yeah. I was just thankful.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
…on tactical execution.

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
Absolutely, that is one of the biggest things. They immediately say… they immediately jump to tactics and action. And I think, like I said, part of it is this idea of “we’ll iterate”—like, put some ads out, or build your website, and finally the internet will tell us what's right, which… the beast just is such a silly waste. I can't imagine doing it that way.
I like to say it's sort of like: can you imagine getting in your car and starting to drive without knowing where you're going? Like, you may end up where you wanted to go, but you're gonna burn a lot of gas and waste a lot of time. And that's, to me, what… just starting to do ads and expecting some performance marketing algorithm to get it right.

But I also think there's this crazy drive towards action in a startup world. Like, we just need to start doing things. So I think people… when you want to get to action, your action… it feels counterintuitive to start acting by thinking.

You know what I mean? I think that there's this belief that doing strategy is like a luxury—like, “Oh, that's time intensive, and it's keeping me from doing and acting.” And what I always tell people is that, actually, taking a moment… and by the way, I'm not like Unilever 1988, where we would take a year to do strategy—I mean, we could be unbelievably scrappily nimble.

But I always say, spending a minute or two thinking and then formalizing our strategy, we will go so much faster, and we will avoid so many missteps and wrong turns, and it will end up being incredibly efficient.

Even if it's: let's just spend two weeks to actually write down who is our customer. Let's write down the various… maybe some basic stages of some sort of path to purchase, because we know, in most of these areas you and I work, people aren't buying on the first time they see you. It's not like a knee-jerk impulse buy. This is generally something that takes a number of touches, might involve the sales force, etc. So these are things that I should be thinking about.

It doesn't mean they're in cement and we can't iterate, but it's important to… like getting in a car… it's so important to know which direction you're going.

And one of the things I find a lot is that because there isn't anything written—there isn't anything foundational—strategic foundations aren't in place.

You're also reacting to everything in these companies. Like, any inbound lead, or anybody… it's because it's not, “Oh, this is who our customer is.” And while somebody else who doesn't look like that might buy us, going after them will take our eye off the strategy, and we'll end up going down a different rabbit hole that could lead to maybe one small sale, but is not a good use of our time.

And that's the other thing I always say: while budgets are in scant supply in early-stage companies, your time and attention are almost more valuable. There's only so many people working at these companies, and there's only so many hours that they can work a day, and so wasting time is as… sad and bad of a situation as wasting dollars, and I think they forget that sometimes.

So spinning out on unstrategic efforts and tactics that aren't, well, at least aligned with the direction you want to go… is a real drain.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
So, can you think of a… just to make this more real and less theoretical, perhaps… a case study of a client you came in where they either jumped to one or the other? And because I could, by the way, I could see how that happens today. If you've been brought up in digital marketing, and let's say your background is largely pay-per-click—you try something that works or doesn't, and you try it again, and you iterate. And so the difference is, like, back pre-digital, you know, to do a new TV commercial might be $50,000, half a million dollars, and it either works or doesn't, it takes months.

Whereas, you know, paid digitally can move really quickly, so I can see why that happens, but any interesting anecdotes? I'd like to have that to kind of make this bring.

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
For example, one of the companies I worked for was similar to the one that you and I overlapped on, in that it was offering telehealth therapy. So we had a provider who had clinically credentialed providers in a specific area, covered fee-for-service, similar to the one we talked… you know, we were working on.

This was actually in diabetes education that I'm talking about, and initially, when I came in, they hadn’t done any marketing, but there was some momentum amongst the founder and some of the folks to do direct-to-consumer advertising—meaning the consumer could raise their hand and say, “I want this therapy.” It was likely to be covered, it was 100% covered by Medicare and Medicaid in its region, and they were ready to consider doing that, and I said, first of all:

If we did get consumers coming in, we'd have to validate their insurance, we'd have to go through some hoops. Again, very lean team.

But also, we'd only be converting one person. Whereas if we instead spent our effort to drive referrals from doctors—so endocrinologists and/or family care practitioners, you know, GPs—we could get them to refer their entire at-risk population, or their chronic population.

Patients tend to listen to their doctors more than, you know, D2C commercials or ads or things. So that was a thing where I went in and said, “This strategy may not be the best strategy,” and “Let’s define who really is the best opportunity,” because you could chase…
I've talked to a lot of companies… I haven't gone in to some of these… some of these conversations I have are at the early stage. One was a company had developed a product in the dental space, and they were going to sell to… I can't remember, I think they were trying to sell to employers. No, actually, first they were going to have a location, and have people come to them, and were going to drive people there. It's like, that's not right, that doesn't make sense.

And then it was like, let's sell to the dentists themselves that we've got a remote… this is one of the issues. I know you didn't ask this here, but this is one of the issues I see of A, not having a strategy, but B, even more often I see this—and I'd be interested in if you do as well.

There are early-stage companies sometimes that are products that are built seeking… seeking a problem to solve, you know what I mean? It’s like, sometimes it's like, I came up with this good idea, we built a product, but there really isn't a go-to-market strategy where the product fits the market need. There isn't really a need. In fact, I was talking to a company the other day.

This leader, this founder, had come up with this idea born out of a personal issue she'd had, and built the product, and then was trying to find who the buyer would be. And I could see how you'd sell it to the buyer, but the end user has never demonstrated a need for it. So it’s either selling in a completely new behavior—trying to teach a new behavior—you know what I mean? Like, sometimes there's just…

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
Good luck with that, by the way.

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
Yeah, good luck with that, exactly. So yeah, so that's another thing I see a lot. And I don't… that's neither strat… I mean, I guess that's sort of stratecution in that there wasn't enough strategy being put into the development of the product and company itself sometimes, I think.

And that happens in this category, where you've got engineers, you've got biochemists, you've got people—really smart people—who come up with a concept, but at the end of the day, the commercial aspect of any product requires an understanding of customer need, and also incentive. Right? I mean, who's gonna pay for it? I mean, and, you know, again, we know this.

And probably everybody listening to your podcast knows this—that healthcare is a very interesting, complex, and perhaps unique category, where often you're selling to a user who has a patient, who works for a company, whose… the payer is somebody else. I mean, who is incentivized to pay it?

And there's a lot of new products coming up—new companies coming up—in areas like proactive health, or how to help keep people healthy… terms that you hear a lot about, but there's really no one incentivized to pay you for that.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
You know, that's really a good point. It's funny, I was just thinking as you were talking, some of the cases that I see right now were early stages of working with a medical device and the memory care, and then you have a whole series of strategies you can do for consumer direct, but then there's also B2B, and those are really… and at the early stage, you don't know which way it's going to go—so where the real pay is going to be.

And then, yeah, the other part you just mentioned is in healthcare, you need to figure out… reimbursement drives everything. Reimbursement drives everything, and so anything that has to do with doctor-required things is going to be reimbursement.

And then, also we've worked with companies, for example, in the value-based care arena, where just… you know, one of the companies that's out there is called Homeward, and they tried a little bit on the consumer direct, but then also to the health plans, because they're trying to keep people out of the hospital. And then another company I was talking to yesterday, actually, is in the mobile health, and same kind of thing, like, who's the customer? Who's gonna pay for it? Start there—before you spend a lot of time developing something, make sure you can sell it.

Because you could waste a lot of money and a lot of resources creating a perfect product that nobody wants to buy. And in fact, I remember my first days… it may have been my first day of class when I stumbled into marketing as a lark—learning about the idea, the marketing concept is: don't build a product and find people to sell it; build a product that people want to buy. It's like the very first thing I learned in marketing class. Yeah.

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
Well, exactly.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
Yeah, and creating a market you can do, but it's just really hard.

Let's pivot a little bit and talk about your role as the fractional CMO. I'm always intrigued about the kinds of companies you work with. So what is sort of the sweet spot of—when does a fractional CMO make sense for a company to consider, and when do they really need a full-time person or something else? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
I mean, as any kind of big, broad question… it depends. It's a diverse answer, but…

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
I'll make it more real for somebody, and like, maybe it's just, again, some examples.

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
Yeah, a couple examples, yeah. So I have gone in and been the first marketer at a company that had gotten pre-seed funding and had $150,000… $250… $200,000 worth of revenue, but really had just begun. And so I was the first one, and I think that that's one of the places… I don't know if everybody's good at that, but one of the spaces that I am good at is I created the foundational strategic pieces, and then the brand pieces as well. And then built the brand, and the brand is, you know, 7, 8 times that now.

It's still in very early growth stage, but… doing that work: who is the customer? Because again, it could have been, “Oh, we're going to sell…” In fact, you know, as you can imagine, the very first rough website I always see is, you know, “We're… for patients, for doctors, for health plans, for employees…” Everybody thinks that they have a solution for all of them, and we really focus.

In fact, the first thing I did there, which was, I think, interesting and also kind of counterintuitive, but… the best start we had was I began… the only marketing I began doing was to current patients.

You think, well, why? They're already captive. Well, because we found that there was a lot of leakage in the amount of sessions they could take, so we weren't maximizing current, quote, lifetime value.

We also had very soft conversion scores, so we'd get ahold of these patients before they literally became patients, when they were referred to us. And only… I think it was something like 10% to 15% did actually convert.

And by beginning to communicate to them, we got 6 or 7 times that. So doing the foundational strategic bits—what should we start with? Who's our customer? How are we going to grow? What are the… you know, all those pieces.

So that was an example of really early stage. But there was, of course, a budget for me—and that's what I hear a lot: “Yeah, I'd like to do that, but I don't have a budget for you.”
But I've also gone in… here was an example at sort of the other side of investment, where it was a company that was bought by private equity. It had been around for 20 years and had been rolled into… or they’d purchased 3 or 4 other companies, almost the same size—so the total company was now about $80 million.

But they didn't ever have a CMO, and they did some marketing, but it was an old website and it didn't tell the right story. And again, these four companies now were together, and they all had somewhat of a different story. They had a lot of smart people, but they didn't have anybody focused on this issue.

So I came in and I did a typical… a lot of engagements will start with a typical kind of consulting assessment. So I went in for a month, and I said, “Here are the key things I'm seeing across these aspects. Here are the implications and my recommendations and priorities.” And then I wrote the strategy.

Here's your positioning story, here's how to go to market, here's a marketing plan. And I actually ended up bringing in contractors to start doing that work. And then I made myself obsolete, and I went off 6 months after. So that's kind of like… here's an $80 million company that's already gotten lots of places, but they almost needed to kind of reboot themselves.

So generally, it's a company—and usually the common refrain is, you know, “We have stuff, but we've mostly cobbled it, done it scrappily. So we've got a website, maybe some content marketing or some LinkedIn, but we really haven't formalized it. We really haven't created some sort of enduring, systematic approach to going to market. Probably we're doing a lot of cold outbound sales, but we haven't integrated sales and marketing.”

So there's a cadence of: “We know who these people are, we're going to have a nurture plan, we're going to provide tools to the salespeople to reach back out so they're not saying in their email—trying to get another meeting—just reaching out.”

So, you know, those things that take you from one-off email blast, followed by a bunch of phone calls, into more of a cadence of, “This is how we're going to go to market,” kind of thing… and anything in between.

And then, of course, like I said, I also do strategy work for bigger companies. And so, for example, with GE Healthcare, I've done everything from provider insights. I've done a lot of research and strategy work with the users of the ultrasound, or even the economic buyers in hospitals, and writing strategic platforms for products and launches and things—to sell into providers, to sell into hospitals, to sell into economic buyers. And that's kind of a different set of work.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
One last question I'd like to ask you, because we've worked… I think both of you and I work in various verticals, right? We work with device, SaaS, telehealth, but on the provider side in particular is a place where… and I don't know if you do too much work there, but…

You know, a lot of times, for example, we worked with a big, multi-location dermatology business, and they had a CEO. It was kind of that stage where the doctors still are not running day-to-day, but they still get a vote, right? And so the CEO had no marketing person at all. And so it's hard, because on our side, as an agency, we love talking to the CEO, but someone's got to do stuff. Someone's got to be able to…

Is that a common, frequent thing that you see—where do you get involved with providers at all? Because there's… or, for example, addiction, and we see that. So it depends on other kinds of companies, and again, we work with all kinds—we’re from VC backed to whatever—but I'm just curious in that particular vertical, have you seen…

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
I haven't done a lot of work for big provider groups. This telehealth diabetes education company is a provider, but we spend our effort marketing toward HCPs to drive referrals versus trying to get patients to know about us.
But I think that's a common thing in many categories, which is… depending on size, but normally, up until a certain size, the CEO will just try to run everything, and maybe put in a junior marketer.

I talk to a lot of other agencies and consultancies, and often they'll tell me, “God, I wish there was a you”—meaning me—“in there to help, one, interpret what the CEO really is looking for, understand the business, and then help give us the direction, versus us trying to work directly with the CEO.” I think that's one of the things you're saying.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
And actually, that's a good way of putting it, because we've seen that. We've seen… so maybe it's not the provider base, but that's maybe the main point today, is that there are companies that, when they're just starting out, there's no room for a CMO.

When they're thriving, they've got many different things—there's, like, the CMO's role's probably over. But it's that stage where… yeah, a lot of times businesses in healthcare—some of them are very consumer-driven, marketing-driven, but a lot aren't. So for example, going back to dermatology.

Dermatology, in many markets, there's a waiting list, so they don't perceive a need for marketing at all. Some people don't. And so it tends to be a stepchild—not really understood what the power is, the value is.

And so if you're working with a CEO who has no time to do anything, that's difficult. Or if you're… I call it—I stole this line years ago from someone—kicked to the kids' table, where you're working with a very junior person who may or may not even have much esteem internally, can't get anything done, and there's just a huge disconnect.

So I think in those categories, that's where a CMO—fractional CMO—could make a lot of sense, coming in and translating between the various levels of the CEO and somebody that's very low level or doesn't even exist, to help the marketing go forward underway.
Any last comments on that? Because I definitely agree—that’s what we're looking for—because there are times where we love that particular practice and that business, but it is difficult if there's no one to throw the ball to. And so we can say we act as the outsourced marketing department for business, but I still need a contact internally. We can't do it all.

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
Yeah, no, no, no, no question. When I'm the CMO, I bring in whoever I bring in, I consider my internal marketing resources—whether they're individual contractors or agencies, or little agencies.

So when we work together, Stewart, I will hope… I will expect that we will act like we're, you know, brethren within the company.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
Yeah, I think so. I think so. It's really important to have that kind of relationship, and it's been fun working with you until now, but as we go forward, there are times for sure where we need that.

So great. Any last-minute, last words of wisdom or advice of what to do or what not to do?

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
No, I mean, I think that, you know, when a company… when the CEO's ready to say, “I shouldn't be doing this marketing bit,” and also is ready to really listen and take input from consultants across the mix for the better of their business, it's a great plus—it's a great multiplier.

And I'd love to hear from anybody listening. If you want to chat, send me an email at michael.baer, B-A-E-R, at techcxo.com, and I'm looking forward to working with you as well, Stewart.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)
Very good. Thank you, Michael Baer. I appreciate it.

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
Thank you.

Michael Baer (TechCXO)
I enjoyed it.