Why You Should Choose a Marketing Agency That Specializes in Healthcare

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
Welcome to the Healthcare Success Podcast. I'm pleased to have as a guest another friend of mine that I met a few years ago through some mutual friends.

And it turns out, Corey, we know a lot of people in common.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
It's a small world, my friend.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
It really is. Corey is President and CEO of his own consulting company, Corey Quinn, Inc. Corey, you can talk about your background, I'm sure, much better than I can.

So before we dive into today's topic, give people a little bit of an idea about your background.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
Stewart, first off, thank you so much for having me on your show. You have been a two-time guest on mine, and I was honored to be asked to come and join you on the show.

So I'm thrilled to be here. For the audience, a little bit about my background. I'll give you the 10,000-foot overview.

When I graduated my business school here in Los Angeles at USC, and at that time, this is about 20 years ago, all of my classmates, they were going into commercial real estate. That was the cool, hip thing that all the MBA grads wanted to do. I wanted to go back into the internet.

I had a .com back in the late ‘90s… story for another time. But I took a job at an agency at that time. So I went from business school to being a salesperson at an agency and back then we were a generalist agency. We sold SEO and PPC services to large retail brands. And I was, as I said, a salesperson.

I personally sold deals to Lululemon, Remax, Hyundai, the Men's Wearhouse. Turns out I love sales. And I was the number one top-selling producer at the agency for 21 consecutive quarters.

That led to me starting in sales management and then most recently, I transitioned into a Chief Marketing Officer role at a digital agency called Scorpion.

This was a specialized agency. And during my time there, as a result of the specialization and other things we did, we grew the revenue from $20 million to $200 million in six short years.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
It's amazing. It's a great story. Yeah.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
And since I left at the end of 2021 and have— instead of going back in-house and working for another entrepreneur, I wanted to step out and really be working with entrepreneurs directly as a consultant.

I've written a book called Anyone, Not Everyone. It's my five-step process for helping businesses to escape founder-led sales through what I call “deep specialization.”

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
So that's great. And just as a full disclosure, as I got to know Corey, by the way, I’m thrilled to provide input on early drafts of that book. I thought it's a great book.

So I've not only read it, I've provided input on it.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
Yeah, you made it better, my friend. Back at the draft stage.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
So anyway, Corey and I go back a ways. But today, as Corey mentioned, he's been on my podcast a couple of times— or I've been on his a couple of times.

And I always wanted to get him on mine, but my audience is different. We're not helping agencies here. We're helping healthcare entities.

And then I thought, well, we're doing a series right now about how to choose a marketing agency. Corey typically talks to agencies about why it is so important to specialize from a marketing strategy point of view, from a business strategy point of view.

And if you're interested in all that, you can go read his book or go to his website. There's lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of content on Corey's site about, from the agency point of view, why you should specialize.

But let's talk about… I'm going to go into—I have some specific questions for you in a minute here, Corey.

But broadly speaking, let's start with the big picture. What are some of the top reasons why a health care multi-location practice or a device company or a telehealth company or a health system or a pharmaceutical or whomever—why should they even care about choosing a specialist versus someone who's local and they may be just creative or really good at that?

So that's a big topic. Let's start somewhere.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
Yeah, so I think the context here is that you have a health care company across various different domains who is eager to grow, maybe has some venture backing, maybe has some organic.

They're looking to improve their marketing, drive more business, drive more new patients or whatnot.

And when they go to market looking for a new agency, let's be honest, it's not the first thing they want to do. They have to do it. It's sort of a fact of life, right? You have to choose a digital agency, which in itself is a specialist, right?

It's a skill set that you're looking for—someone who can help you as a healthcare company to be able to do the things, make the right investments, deploy the right resources and people and expertise to help you to hit your business goals.

So in that process, obviously, you have an outcome in mind. You want to achieve a specific metric: number of new patients, revenue, whatever that number is.

And anytime, speaking as some common sense here, any time you go to market to hire an expert or hire someone with some expertise to help you to achieve that goal, you're putting your trust in their hands, right?

And so part of the buying process of hiring an agency is trying to decide, do I hire someone who has expertise in my domain, in my industry, in my specialization?

Have they worked with people before? And of course, all these things are important to get to your question because you want to see results quickly and you don't want to have to go through the, let's call it “laborsome” process of finding another agency in three to six months when you realize after you've gone down the road with this potential partner that you need to do it again.

So there's a couple of lenses to look at this through.

Number one is you want to hire a specialist because you want to reduce the risk.

There's two types of risks that I think about in this context. Risk number one is your risk of ending up wasting time and money with the wrong partner, right? Obviously that's going to cost—that's a business cost. There's an opportunity cost there for you.

The second kind of risk, and this is true for some industries, not all of them, but certainly for healthcare, is that there are a number of regulations. It's a highly regulated industry.

And if you hire someone who doesn't have enough experience in serving businesses like yours, they may unknowingly do things that cause some exposure, some potential liable risk, right?

So an example is obviously advertising on social media, knowing the rules on how and when and what to do, what not to do. So there's some risk there that you want to avoid.

And then I think the other lens to look through is speed of results, right?

If you hire a generalist who doesn't understand your industry and has not done a lot of work in this area, it's likely that despite being well-intentioned, maybe talented people, they're going to be learning on your dime. They're not going to know exactly how to deploy the campaigns and make the investments on your behalf to get the results you're hiring them for.

Compare that with a specialist—an agency that has the signature systems, the resources, the technologies, the processes—all of those things already pre-built out that you could just plug right into and start to get some really short-term wins and see some of the fruit of your investment.

So those are two kind of broad strokes that I wanted to introduce to kick off the conversation.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
That's great. I think one of the arguments that I've heard sometimes—not very often, a lot of the clients by definition know we’re a specialized agency. So we tend to get people who are looking for that.

But there are people who call us saying, yeah, we're looking around between a specialized agency. But we also wonder, what if we got somebody who's just really more into like consumer brands?

Like we're looking at an agency that worked with Fritos as a brand or whatever, like some consumer brand like that. And they think that just sounds very sexy.

Would you urge caution in that case, or what are some additional thoughts there?

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
At the end of the day, it really depends on what, as a business, what are you trying to achieve?

If you have an outcome, what must be true for you to achieve that outcome?

And maybe, theoretically, if you're just looking for more brand awareness, that may be the right path, to go to work with a brand agency.

I would argue today that you need to hire a marketing specialist, in this context, healthcare, who understands brand, but also understands the bottom of the funnel, right? So you could have some return on your investment for brand.

Brand, in my mind, brand-based marketing, pure brand-based marketing, is really only reserved for the largest of the largest brands.

Not every company has enough budget to just have a big brand campaign and not have it directly tied to direct new revenue, the bottom line.

So if a prospect came to me and said, “hey, I'm really interested in branding, I'm thinking about hiring this amazing brand agency,” I would try to understand their specific business goals as a result of doing that brand campaign.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
So it's interesting, Corey, too—like as an agency, for years we were known as a digital performance agency, about right around pandemic and from there we added much stronger branding capability.

And what's interesting is not only did that help us attract different clients in addition to what we did before, the marketing actually performs better.

When we're thinking about things from a branding standpoint, as from a digital standpoint, getting the messaging right from the beginning to the end.

So I don't look at it as a choice, ideally.

The thing about it is—and we'll talk about this in just a moment probably—it's hard to do both well. It's hard enough getting a really good digital team. Building a branding team is like a whole different expertise and it's a whole different thing.

And I tell people, you know, fully integrated agencies are hard and rare. And I mean, truly, they all say they do it. But very few actually do. It only took me 20 years to get to this stage where we really have expertise on both.

So one of the things I want to talk about, though, that you'd mentioned in some of things you talk about a lot is that vertical specialization helps agencies grow at a 10 times faster rate.

But how does that extra scale and better systems help the client? Like, how does that help innovation from the client's point of view?

I mean, obviously, again, you talk about it from the agency standpoint, but from the client point of view, why should I care about the operational side of it, the system side of it?

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
It's such a great question. It's a little bit nuanced and I don't get asked this very often. So I'm excited to share with you my thoughts on this.

So when you have a digital agency that has a vertical specialization, that means that they work with a specific client, and through that work of working with that specific client, they get a lot of reps, right?

They do things over and over and over again, not necessarily the exact same thing, but the same type of things for the same type of clients who are trying to track the same kind of outcomes over and over and over again.

And it reminds me of the old Bruce Lee quote, which is, “I fear not the man that's practiced a thousand kicks once. I fear the man that's practiced one kick a thousand times.”

Of course, what we're talking about here is building true expertise, and as a result of expertise, you're able to build— that agency's able to build better systems, internal systems, right?

The challenge with a generalist is that every time a new deal gets sold is that that new deal represents a new type of client from a new industry that the agency has no understanding of. They've got no systems, they've got no processes to deal with this specific client.

When you work with a specialist agency, you are working with an agency that has built what I call operational leverage. They're not dependent on any one superstar employee to help save the day.

They've operationalized the business. They've been able to bring in experts, but they haven't built a business around bottlenecks and heroic efforts.

Of course, when you have operational leverage in an agency, that results in being able to have consistent results in an industry like healthcare.

When you provide great results over time for a specific industry, you build your authority. And when you have better authority, frankly, you can charge more prices.

And when you have premium pricing that allows you to have, as an agency, better margins.

Well, what do you do with those better margins?

You reinvest those margins back into the company in things in terms of marketing and sales, but also in the infrastructure that you're building out, in the people you're building out.

You build better systems, better teams.

The client benefits at the end of the day from all this because they're going to get access to a really elite, well-run system that allows them to get to their results quicker than just a generalist agency that, frankly, is full of bottlenecks and scope creep.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
So that really makes a lot of sense.

And for people that aren't familiar with the inner workings of an agency, there are agencies out there that view themselves as, “we love doing different skills over different segments.”

“Today we're working with a bank, next week we're working an insurance guy, the next day we're working with this or that,” which is incredibly inefficient.

And it goes back to what you just mentioned, the hero culture. Now that that one person who understands your business leaves, you're kind of screwed because they don't understand even the industry, that's like you're starting all over again.

So it's a double whammy.

Another thing that you said there is something—actually I'm just about to do a video on—which is it is counterintuitive, but you want your agency to be successful and to have a margin.

There are definitely people out there that have sort of a win-lose attitude about pretty much all business transactions and the goal is just to grind and grind and grind. The problem is at some point the successful agencies will pass. They don't have to take unprofitable business.

So what are you really winning if somebody's desperate to take an account that's going to lose them money? They're doing it because they have to. You're not really going to get the service that you need.

And our mutual friend, Brett, talks about that there has to be enough money to service the business.

So I'm curious if you have any additional thoughts on some of these issues, because it really does take—there's people that do all this stuff out there on the back end.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
Right. Well, I mean, there's an old saying from, actually, my wife's old employer. He used to say—or he says—“if there's no margin, there's no mission,” right?

And so every well-run business needs to have a margin. That's how you're able to grow a business and continue to improve over time.

And so as a buyer of an agency or any client or any service provider, I want to work with a company that is profitable, that's going to make money from me because I know they're going to pay attention to me and they're going to service me well versus if I come in and I grind them down so that they're not making money, it's likely that they're not going to give me as much attention as I would like.

That's my anecdotal belief.

But I think when you have been able to establish yourself as a proven expert in a market or let's say as an agency, that elevates you out of a sea of sameness.

You become different and you become unique and hard to find.

It's people who have this true expertise in solving hard problems that are nuanced for a specific audience who are really good at that— that's very rare.

And of course, when you have a limited supply of things that are rare, the price is just going to go up. And that's the reality of kind of the supply and demand curves, if you will.

And so obviously, as a company that's hiring an agency, my advice would not be to go with the lowest cost provider.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
So let's talk about this. I understand. And I know that sounds self-serving, but having been in the business for a long time, it may seem like that's the obvious place to go, but typically it's not.

And usually, given that we're a specialty agency, we meet people after they've been through that mistake, right? They've already decided they don't want to do that anymore.

I want to talk about something else. Like what I'm hoping to do today, Corey, too, is to share some of these insider insights that you and I take—it's like breathing air. We just assume them, but they may not be that obvious as an insight to outsiders.

So I want to give you a talk about another insight that I have that I'm pretty confident you'll share, which is when it comes to hiring an agency that has specialized talent, even within the niche, like for example, we both do a lot with digital, I'll put out a hypothesis to me, and think about this, even the people we know mutually, at the high-end level for paid search, for SEO, for paid social, it's kind of a club out there.

The good people know other good people.

And so if you look at it, when you're hiring an agency, I would argue that part of what you're doing is trying to hire the best talent, right?

And so if an agency is truly specialized, not only in your niche, but has the process experts, that you're going to be able to reach talent that is very difficult for somebody from outside the business to understand.

Like, for example, I often joke, what if I had to go hire an engineer for a bridge? I know nothing about that. I'm really worried that the bridge may just collapse, right?

That doesn't mean I'm not smart. I like to think I'm pretty damn smart, but I know nothing about that.

So tell me about your perspective about this idea of specialized expertise within the process experts. And also, is that difficult to do if that's not your gig, if it's not what you do every day?

Because I think it is, but I'm curious…

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
If companies are in the market for hiring an agency, they've got a budget of a couple hundred thousand dollars to a couple of millions a year, they're trying to solve complex, difficult problems.

These are not everyday problems that you want to hire the local kid down the street to run your marketing if you want to see results. And so it requires a level of sophistication and experience to see results.

And of course, as we said before, no one's in the business of wasting time and effort and opportunity on longshot agencies, right? You want to be able to find that agency that has that expertise.

You know, one of the ways that I recommend clients buy from an agency is to really understand who else that agency has solved the problems that are like your problems, right?

Like what are the specific clients that they've worked with that look like you that are struggling the way that maybe you are as you're coming in, right?

And to your point, for those elite agencies that have solved those problems for clients just like you, they have a level of expertise through that repetition and through the systems that they've built that is very, very, again, very, very rare.

And the idea of going out and finding one of these PPC experts in, let's say, Facebook for healthcare—or even branding, as we've been saying—like to find these elite experts, very hard to do.

And you probably, frankly, couldn't afford them if you wanted to hire them directly.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
Yeah, that point is we often talk about fractional, right?

So when we work with a client, we're typically—just so you know, Corey, our model—we would have a bucket of ours as an ongoing sort of partnership retainer to allow to pay for all the stuff that happens, like the reporting, the account management, all the tools that are behind the scenes, all those little things.

If we're doing SEO, that's a bucket. If we have media, that's a bucket. If we're doing creative, that's a bucket. So it's done that way.

But ultimately, any of those buckets, typically there's a whole team of people behind the scenes. Like in SEO, there might be eight, ten people touching their account. They all have different areas of expertise. You have the content writer, content analyst, the programmer—

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
—the architecture, the linking, all that stuff.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
Yeah. So you have all these people. So it's instead of hiring eight people individually, you're getting fractional interest in all those people, all with highly specialized expertise.

And that's something that may not be as obvious, right?

It's like, well, it's $10,000 a month for X. Like, well, that's like 10 people. One person would cost more than that if you're trying to hire that.

I know that sounds biased and agencies may not be right for everybody, but in a well-run agency, you're getting fractional interest of all these experts.

Going back to your comment, I say this a lot, but the experience I personally have is because I spent years ago, 10 years on the road, interacting with—I actually spoke at over 200 seminars, and I interacted with a couple thousand individual practices during that period.

That's a lot of at-bats. You get really good if you get to swing that many times, right? Like you just—you get to understand.

I mentioned earlier, I'd like to think I'm pretty smart, but I've also had the experience where I've had thousands of swings at the ball. So I can understand things in a deeper way than you can if you've just done it once or twice.

Today you're playing rugby, next week it's lacrosse, next week it's, you know, hockey or whatever.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
I wrote about this in my book, obviously, in the example I give, which is a different context, but it could be helpful, which is that if you have a generalist agency, they'll work with a lot of local service businesses, one of which is plumbers.

Compare that with an agency that only works with plumbers. Day in, day out, they've got 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 plumbing clients.

And as a result of doing that work, working with plumbers every day, all day, they've built these systems and processes, but they also know something that their competitors don't know, which is that what plumbers really love, the jobs that they want to get from Google and just in general, is re-piping jobs.

And re-piping jobs, where they come into your house, they rip out all the pipes, and they put a whole new set of pipes in, right? It's a great, big, multi-day, expensive kind of thing.

They don't have to worry about dirty toilets or anything gory or anything like that, right? And they love those jobs.

The thing is that if you don't have the reps in the market to know that that is what they care about, you're never going to know that. You're never going to build an expertise around finding the best re-piping jobs for plumbers.

And the same is true for a healthcare specialist agency or provider where you want the agency that you're hiring to already know what that choice job is and have gotten those choice jobs for people just like you versus the generalist who has no idea and is going to figure it out maybe sometime.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
Yeah, years down the road.

It's funny you brought that up today. I was talking to one of our larger clients in the addiction space. And we were talking about residential versus intensive outpatient because it's a lot cheaper to go after the intensive outpatient and everybody else is focused on residential.

Like that kind of understanding is what really makes our clients excited. That we're able to—you don't have to explain what IOP means. We're having a real discussion at the table about what's the strategy as we go forward over these particular issues.

So that's just the kind of nuance that you don't really get or understand until you're in it.

It's always fun when we talk at that level with clients because you see them nodding like, “oh, these guys get it,” right?

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
And their resistance will go down.

I think that's a really interesting way to kind of in a coy way to test an agency is to see if they know the insider lingo.

Do they know what the term IOP is? You don't ask them that, but you use it in a sentence.

“So what's your strategy for IOP?”

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
Yeah.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
Will they say that and tell you whether or not they're an insider? Well—

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
That's actually a great question.

What other questions would you do to test? That's a great one right there. But what else would you do to test specialization?

Let's say we've convinced at least a few people that they want a specialist. What would be some questions?

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
Yeah, I mean, certainly you want the receipts. You want to see what people just like—who people like you that they've helped and what were the results. That's really important.

And the more reps that they have in solving your problem, the less risk that you'll be taking on as a client coming in.

So you definitely want to survey to see whether or not they understand, like I said, what we just talked about, the language is really important.

Some agencies hate this, others like it, I'm not sure where you sit, but certainly understanding what is the makeup of the team when they come across.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
And the pedigree of those folks.

And I would also ask, “what's the onboarding strategy?” Like what's the first 90 days, right?

What you're looking for is a structured plan to get you from when you sign the contract to up and running and starting to see results.

What specifically happens, what's the timeline?

Those things are really important because if they have those things in place, that means that they have a tried-and-true system. They're not just making it up every time.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
So I'll give you some additional ones and see how you feel about this.

Number one, I'm going to go straight back to what you just said there a minute ago.

So one of the things that's good news. I always joke with clients. It's good news for you and probably bad news for us is that I can't imagine doing business any other way. There's a whole lot of agencies out there that really are built solely to scale.

So when you come in, you meet the high-end person, you come on board, you never see them again. Now you get somebody who's just out of school and they're your everything.

They're the ones that will relay the information to the SEO team. They relay the information to the paid search team or whatever else.

And there's a feeling that, “wait, who's behind this? And are they really missing those nuances?”

And so from a specialization standpoint, it scales really well.

As an agency, we choose to do it where we actually have a team approach. We actually meet some of the process experts. Not every day, right? That would never make economic sense for either party.

But that is something to add. I think what you brought there is really good, like who are they actually working with?

They actually meet these people that are on our team that are speaking on the circuits, right? The actual experts.

They won't spend all day with them, but they will meet them and work with them. And so I think that's really important.

I thought your onboarding was great. That's something people really misunderstand and the operational side of that. How do they do that?

Are they figuring this out every time separately or do they have a process that works, right? And that, again, is to your advantage.

I would say the idea of overscaling is another thing that we just mentioned too.

Another thing I would say, the better agencies are choosier. They want to make sure it's a good fit. They just want to make sure it's a good fit.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
Both parties have to say yes. They agree that they're going to help, that it's a good fit.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
So we had somebody call up, keep in mind they're calling us, right?

And one of our strategists called him back and the guy starts the call like, “Ah, you snake oil salesmen are all the same. Tell me why I should hire you.”

He's like, “you shouldn't. We're not snake oil salesmen. Got to go. Bye.”

I'm paraphrasing, but that's pretty much it. That's not who we are.

So I think there's a choosiness there that it's really important to keep in mind.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
And that's also another point that comes up that I coach my agency clients that the client gets a flavor, gets a feeling for what it's like to be your client in the sales process.

So if you come in you experience an agency that's very transactional in the sales process, it's almost like you're filling out a survey and you're having a kind of real surfacy type of conversation, chances are that's what you're going to get on the back end once you sign, right?

Versus if you have a consultative type of approach or the agency you're talking to are asking you deeper questions or understanding the context of the problems that you're struggling with, understanding the things you've tried. What does success look like? And really going deep in that process, that is a way for you to differentiate yourself as an agency from other folks.

That's always the exception versus the norm.

But what you're looking for as a buyer is someone who's truly operating as a thoughtful consultant in the sales process.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
I love that.

And, you know, again, I mentioned my history back when I stumbled into this world where suddenly I was leading these interactive seminars across the country over and over and over again.

And what I learned was my insight from that was the smartest people ask the best questions. It's like it's counterintuitive.

You assume that the smart people are talking all the time. But the really smart ones prove they're smart by asking smart, thoughtful questions. And that builds up credibility so fast.

And even when I think I know the answer, I still ask because worst case scenario is they know I know what questions to ask.

And best case scenario is I get a deeper understanding of the client I'm working with.

So I think that's really crucial.

Another thing you said a minute ago. I love all these things that are just very similar philosophically to where I think.

You used the word “transactional.” And I think it's important to talk about this just a moment.

If you look at it, we talk about ourselves as a partner, a marketing partner. And that's really what we're looking for.

So if somebody comes to us, and you mentioned earlier, some people like the risk of looking for a new agency every year, like blow your brains out fun, right?

From our standpoint, it's the same thing. We really want to find someone that we can partner with.

And there are people out there, and they can make their choice if they want to, but they really are not looking for a partner. They're looking for a transaction as an agency.

And it's okay. I would argue that's not our prospect. And it's not a good match.

And I don't know if you have any ideas or comments about this whole idea of a transactional sort of relationship versus a partnership.

And why would you really want a partner? And, you know, that can break down a lot of ways. So partners, for example, share information with each other in a very transparent kind of way.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
I imagine if someone's coming in super transactional, that means that they probably have some level of capabilities in-house, they have resources elsewhere, and they're just looking for more of a tactical solution to solve a specific problem.

And then as a result of that, you're probably not looking at a full-service agency. That's probably going to be a mismatch for you.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
No, it's funny, because we do have clients, most of our clients hire us in the partnership model.

We do have some that want us to do paid search, because they know we're, for example, we do it really well, and these are big budgets we're talking about, right? These could be hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.

But most of our clients, even if they start that way, do migrate toward a partnership, because they've never experienced what a partnership can look like.

So—

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
Right, they come from a world where they're just used to having a vendor type of relationship.

And I think those businesses that are open to more of a partnership model, you're looking for an agency who will take a seat at the table to help you as the buyer or the client, make you look good amongst your stakeholders, right?

And so you want someone on your team, you want this extended team, these fractional folks who are absolute experts and have a ton of experience doing the things that you've hired them to do.

You want them on your bench, helping you to achieve your goals. And that doesn't happen typically through a transactional kind of relationship where you're just looking at reports.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
I love the terminology you're using is almost mine.

So a word I stole from somebody once years ago is, and we talked a little bit offline about the hospital world. This lady was from a hospital and she was talking about marketing.

“At my hospital, I got there and I was stuck at the kid's table.”

And I love that metaphor. It's like the kid's table. You know, the real decisions are being made in the C-suite. You're over here with macaroni and cheese and hot dogs. You're at the wrong table.

As a partner, you want to, and we talk to clients about this metaphor, like we need to be at the adult table, like we don't—because sometimes the, even a well-meaning, very smart team may want to work with us, but then they delegate us to some very junior marketing person and never talk to us again.

And then we lose that connection with our client that hired us.

Before we get started, I just want you to know that I understand you want to delegate this, but we need to be at the adult's table periodically. It's just really, really important. I think that's fun.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
Yeah, it brings up the idea or concept of QBRs or, you know, having more of an all-hands approach to bringing in the stakeholders so that, number one, they have a voice in the conversation, but also that there's not these, I mean, this is from the agency's perspective, but in fact, there's not these side conversations that are subverting your ability to be effective.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
So, and it's funny too, because going back to that concept of looking at quarterly reviews, I have never seen—I shared this with you on your podcast last time when I was the guest, right? I don't ever remember a period of more change in the last, say, 12, 18 months. It's been insane.

So I was just telling my head of content this morning, our SEO page on our website becomes out of—it's behind us like every couple months.

We've already moved past what we wrote two months ago. We have to keep updating it. Things are changing so fast.

So if you're caught in this loop of not dealing with the experts, and you're just sort of off on a tactical front, it's going to be really easy to get out of date.

A couple more things before we wrap up. I'd love to hear your comments about RFPs.

So RFPs, and there's no right or wrong answer here. Some people have to do RFPs.

From an agency standpoint, you know, I would say, by the way, honestly, we love and hate RFPs. RFPs from one standpoint means the client's serious about this. They put their thoughts together, and it's really great.

What we're not excited about is what's obviously a cattle call with 20 agencies. We will just politely pass, but I'm curious about your thoughts.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
Yeah, I mean, to your point, from a client's perspective, sometimes you need to have an RFP as part of your sort of corporate governance.

That's the way you have to do it, whether you have procurement, a formal procurement process or not, but at the end of the day, if you are going to RFP, one of the things I would recommend is to get some recommendations from an agency on how to write the RFP.

I've answered dozens and dozens of RFPs, and a lot of the questions are—it was clear that it was not written by a marketer or someone who understands the agency business.

So as a result of that, to really get good quality answers from potential agency partners, find an agency that can help you to write the RFP and bulletproof it.

And the RFP, so in my experience, the RFP is a gateway to get the in-person meeting, right?

And so at the end of the day, do not hire an agency, with my perspective, from an RFP response. You want to get them to your office, you want to go to their office, you want to experience what it's like to be in the room with them.

Do you like them? Do you like their ideas? Are they the kind of people you could hang out with?

So those are a couple of initial thoughts. What are your thoughts on them?

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
Yeah, those are great.

I think, first of all, sometimes we see an RFI and a request for information at the front end, which I think is great, because it helps qualify both sides before, instead of talking to 40 people and asking for an RFP, an RFI is great, saying, “okay, these are the basic things. Are you somebody we should be talking to?”

From our standpoint, great. We want to make sure we're spending our time if this project makes sense for us.

Sometimes we get these things in RFI and it's like, this isn't really a fit. It's not what we do. It's really obscure. It's not a good fit for us.

And we'd rather do that up front. So that's something I think makes sense.

I would say there's, in my experience, there's at least what we're seeing lately has changed probably for the better in recent years.

The whole cattle call, the idea of like, I remember one time specifically, this agency consultant, they go out to clients and say, we're going to do a process for you as a consultant.

And they sent us an 80-page RFI, request for information, 80 pages. They're like, that's not the RFP, that's the RFI.

And they told us that the incumbent was there and they're going to give preference to somebody within two miles of the office.

We just call back and politely pass. You’ve got to be kidding. No, we're not doing this.

And they go, “come on, you should participate.”

No, that doesn't make sense. We're busy. We're successful. So that stopped.

What we're seeing more these days is rather than the sort of blind RFP, and again, some people have to do this, so I get it, but what we see as more effective is before they send an RFP, they talk to us, they understand the business, we help them build the RFP, and a lot of times the person who's in the marketing chair will actually ask us to share the rough draft of the RFP response and make sure that it fits.

That way, when he or she goes to her executive committee, they're confident they've got a product that makes sense, and I'm presuming they're doing it with others as well.

That is so much smarter, in my opinion, because they get the chance to see how we think, how we react, and that from our perspective is much better versus the idea of the old days where, you know, “fill out this 100-page form and send it to us on nice expensive paper and we'll throw it over the castle wall.”

That just is incredibly inefficient. It doesn't really tell you anything, in my opinion.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
And I'd argue that in today's world with AI, your ability, like an agency—I'm speaking generally here—but an agency could theoretically train an AI or an LLM to respond in a way that they otherwise would, but at a push of a button.

Therefore, what is the true quality of the response of an RFP versus, on the other hand, as I said earlier, just getting in front of these people and spending a couple hours with them.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
We totally agree. We think it's a win-win.

We're going to be working with this person for years. We want to make sure that they like us, and we like them, and we think it's a good fit.

And from our standpoint, we're just confident if they spend time with us, they're going to have a pretty good sense of what we can do. And a lot of times, it's things that they didn't even know that we would even consider.

For example, Corey, with our company, they may come to us for, I don't know, digital media, and then we start talking about branding. We start talking about traditional media. We start talking about generating referrals from their referring doctor base. We start talking about value-based care. We start talking about crisis management.

“What? I thought we were talking about pay-per-click. Like, wait, I can't have this all in one place!”

They didn't even know that that was even an option. From our standpoint, investing a little bit of time up front helps.

And I get it if you have to go through an RFP or if you want to. And like I said, from our standpoint, an RFP does show a professional marketer has organized the thoughts.

But just relying on that solely, I think, isn't as ideal as it could be.

So before I let you go, a couple of last thoughts here. I know we both have a hard stop here at the hour.

Let's turn this on its head. Let's talk about a healthcare provider. So it could be a hospital.

Why should we focus on, for example, a certain service line?

Or if we're a multi-location provider, let's say we're a dermatology group, why should we spend time trying to specialize, I don't know, Mohs surgery or the cosmetic side or whatever?

How do these same ideas apply to specialize for a provider?

Forgetting agencies for a minute. Let’s talk about how to help them with their business.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
Yeah, so let's use the example that you shared of a dermatology clinic. Why would they specialize in a specific treatment as an example?

Well, there's a process to go through before you would specialize. And the specialization, the process is you want to make sure that there's enough demand for that, let's call it specific procedure, before you would go down the road and do a bunch of specialization and branding and positioning.

But let's say you had identified that there was a procedure that had a lot of demand, people were paying cash for it, like all of those boxes are checked, right?

The benefit of specializing as a dermatologist who specializes in this specific treatment, I'm not sure what that might be, but let's just call it some kind of facial treatment, let's say.

When you specialize in it, when you focus on that in your, let's call it positioning—meaning we are the best dermatologist in Beverly Hills for this specific thing, right?

That type of positioning, the messaging, the things you say on your website, all signals that you understand how to do this procedure in an elite way.

Again, from a consumer's perspective, they're trying to determine, who do I choose? And the ones that are happy to pay a premium are the ones that want the best.

And so you want to position yourself as the best for this specific treatment.

So there's benefits to doing that. You signal the market, attract great, great patients who are happy to pay cash, happy to pay a premium, refer your business as a result of that specialization.

These are broad strokes.

And then from an operational perspective, if you get a lot of this type of business coming in your door over and over again, sure, maybe when you start, you're figuring it out, you're working out the kinks.

But after you do 10, 20, 30, 100, 1,000 of these procedures, it becomes like clockwork.

The operational kind of drag drops. You're able to build systems around that.

And it becomes much more of a, not only a revenue driver, but a profit driver for your business.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
Great. So I'm going to ask you for any final thoughts in a moment, but I'll share my own anecdote from this.

I'll give you a chance to think about it for a second.

In our experience in my career of doing this, the biggest example of this would be ophthalmologists doing LASIK.

LASIK is a refractor procedure. And so I was actually doing this back when this first started off. And what happened was most ophthalmologists thought LASIK was scary. They decided to share a laser because it was too expensive to buy it. They thought they would dabble. They, you know, they would do a couple cases, you know, a month at best.

They went very slow. And I understand that, you know, as a doctor or as a surgeon, they wanted to be very conservative.

But there were some ophthalmologists who understood the power here that, ‘wait, I can make $5,000 in a couple minutes. Are you kidding?’

And this, by the way, is the 1990s money.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
So that's good money.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
They, on the other hand, bought their laser. They, on the other hand, they didn't know anything about marketing, but they figured it out fast.

So soon, these guys were selling, Corey, in 1990s money, a million dollars a month or more of LASIK. And so what did that mean?

Well, that meant that they were building a war chest. They learned about marketing. They were able to position themselves as the expert in town.

They got much better at doing LASIK. And even quite—yeah, go ahead.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
And they're able to out-market the competition, who's only doing, you know, $10,000 or $20,000 a month in this.

Like, they're able to blow the market away because they have all this revenue and presumably profit that allows them to be much more aggressive from a marketing perspective.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
And, Corey, expertise, right?

Whose eyes would you trust? Some guy who's done a dozen or two or somebody who's done thousands?

If you're talking about your eyes, who are going to trust?

The last time I spoke at the American Academy of Ophthalmology, I asked, how many of you guys were actually doing any significant LASIK share. And about four hands out of 200 went up.

So in the world of ophthalmologists, in most markets, there's a handful of doctors that are doing almost all the work.

And the revenue means that they're making, you know, 1% of the guys and gals are making half the money. So there is an example of specialization that just went crazy.

And to this day, most of those practices that built that kind of reputation are still strong on their market many years later.

So you can just see the impact of that.

Corey, any last thoughts before I let you go? That's a fun one that just occurred to me while we were talking.

I've written about that one forever, but that's just a great example.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
Yeah, I mean, from a philosophical perspective, for those businesses that are struggling with getting some traction and growth, because maybe it's possible that you're trying to serve too many different types of patients or populations with too many different types of services.

One of the benefits, of course, with specialization is that it gives you focus, allows you to put concentrated effort behind a specific path.

Everything becomes easier when you specialize. You know which populations to go after, which lists to build, which newsletter to write, which ads to run.

Everything becomes very, very clear.

And so if that is you, if you're struggling with scaling your growth, I would seriously look at specializing as a way to break through that.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
And I'd just add, some of our most, I don't want to say who they are on this call, but some of our most successful clients came to us because of our unique specialization, and they are highly specialized in what they do.

And that's magic. So they really go after the specific cases that are very, very profitable, and they wanted an agency that understood that world.

And so that's like double specialization.

Corey, I knew this would be fun. So we'll have to find another time to bring you on, but I told you I'd get you on. I just had to find the right topic, but I thought today would be perfect.

That insider expertise about how do agencies work, how to choose one, why you should demand a specialist.

I thought it'd be really exciting. So thank you for your time today.

Corey Quinn (Corey Quinn, Inc.):
Talk to you soon, Stewart. Appreciate it.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success):
Thanks. Bye.