Leveraging Data to Target Customers and Optimize Sales Territories
Skylar Talley is CEO of MedScout, a company that provides life science companies data and insights to help sales reps and sales managers be more targeted and effective. In this episode Skyler discusses upstream and downstream marketing, bootstrapping a company, why inside sales is becoming more popular, leveraging distributor organizations, why digital marketing should be moving higher on your radar, using data to design territories and target customers, surprising things medical device companies don’t do that are common in other industries, aligning the sales team targets, and how sharing data to with providers can lead to stronger relationships.
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Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service and is minimally edited. Please forgive the mistakes contained within it.
Patrick Kothe 00:31
Welcome! Some people live their entire lives in one neighborhood without ever leaving. They know intimately how things work in their world, but they never get to experience or learn what's available in that other big vast world. Sometimes I feel we do the same thing within the medical device field. Yeah, it's a specialized industry. But what are we missing out on? I'm always happy when it gets to have a conversation with someone who comes into our industry with different experiences and different perspectives. Our guest today is Skylar Talley, the CEO of MedScout, a company that provides life science companies, data and insights to help sales and sales managers be more targeted, and more effective. Skylar comes from outside of the industry, and he's got some great observations on some things we do or don't do, that we probably should rethink. I think you're gonna enjoy this conversation as we discuss many different topics, including upstream and downstream marketing, bootstrapping a company, why inside sales is becoming more popular. Leveraging distributor organizations, why digital marketing should be moving higher on your radar, using data to design territories and target customers. some surprising things medical device companies don't do that are very common within other industries, aligning the sales team targets, and how sharing data to and with providers can lead to stronger relationships. Here's our conversation, you've kind of taken a different way of getting into the medical device industry. Can you tell us about your journey to become CEO of a company that's focused on life science, when you didn't have any life science background?
Skylar Talley 02:43
I can Yeah, I'll try to keep this brief. My background is mainly been in software startups. So the first job out of college for me, I worked at a self storage marketplace. So self storage facility owners would list all of their open inventory on this marketplace for consumers to reserve. And my first job at that startup was to call 70 storage facilities a day and ask if they had a 10 by 10 available, or if they had a five by five available to kind of qualify whether or not they had excess inventory. And then I'd pass them over to the actual salesperson, once we figured out that they had inventory that can burst on the marketplace. So that was my first job in startups was called a sales development representative, I then moved into a role. That's called product management, where you effectively work with software development teams, to understand what users want out of your platform, and what you should prioritize, to build next to fix next, and how to sort of think about that from a business value standpoint. So you kind of sit in between the business and the software teams and help them the teams actually prioritize what to build, and they're in charge of how to build it effectively. Post SpareFoot took a couple of roles in product management, a product management capacity at an early stage facial recognition company was my next stop, where we were going to build a better photo album where you could subscribe to that album, and we'd get a picture a selfie, a picture of your face, and then start automating all of those photos out of that album directly to you. We're gonna have a brand product, a product for professional photographers, things like that. So that was my second stop
Patrick Kothe 04:29
in the product management roles. Typically they're the they're upstream, where you're doing product definition and designing products and working with r&d and then there's downstream it's the marketing of it where you're doing both or you're primarily upstream at that point.
Skylar Talley 04:44
So this is actually a difference in how the product role looks like within device versus software. So within device because of the nature of device development, to your point, you have the upstream and the downstream, right you have people that are thinking about what are the next two products because that we bring out into market. And then you have people that are thinking about, Okay, we have this portfolio, where's the growth opportunity? And how do we actually execute on that, within software? That is one role. So because you can move so quickly, within software development, you know, you can roll out a change on a daily basis, if you want to, you're kind of responsible end to end with both Where are we going to drive growth? What are the new features we need to think about for later this year? And also, how do we capitalize on the opportunity that we have with the product right now? So it's a little bit of both? It kind of depends on there's obviously like anything else, there's variance at the detail level, but I was, I was thinking about both of those things.
Patrick Kothe 05:41
Yeah. And within device, depending on the size of your company, there are many product managers who do both as well, when you get larger companies, then, you know, many times you'll you'll separate the upstream from the downstream downstream, but they're two different skill sets, I was just kind of wondering, the skill sets, because we're going to get into your company and you've got some different skill sets that you're going to need as you're developing and rolling out a product, they're 200%
Skylar Talley 06:07
Yeah, I think it's a great, it's actually a big learning for me, too, of how product works within device companies, how marketing works, you know, as I've come up to speed on life science, so I think it's a pretty interesting kind of compare and contrast or to your point where they're the same. I was at that facial recognition company for a little while, and then I went to a cybersecurity company. So I wanted to go learn and kind of discourse, the skill set that I wanted to go learn was how to build b2b software products. So so how do you sell and build and sell software to businesses to be used in their operations. So I went to that cybersecurity company, it was also an interesting space. For me intellectually, it was, you know, obviously, cybersecurity is kind of become part of the national conversation, where every day people are being affected, or at least aware of it. And so I wanted to go learn about that space, joined a company called Alien vault in 2017. And then we were acquired by AT and T in 2018. And 18 T saw the need to really start to be a cybersecurity partner for the 2 million plus at&t business customers that they serve. And they provide internet wireline networking services, all those things. So they wanted to start providing cybersecurity products to those customers as well, to continue to kind of be a technology partner for those businesses. So they bought a platform and a management team in the form of eylea involved and started to integrate that in to a TNT business. I stayed on, because I had the opportunity to kind of work on a new product at AT and T. So we we figured out what the first thing that we wanted to sell into that customer base was, and I got asked to be a part of the team that develop that product and lead the launch of it. And I'm glad I did, because that's where I met my co founder, Casey shadek. Casey had been in the Marines, and had after his time in the Marines in an intelligence role. He moved over into the federal cybersecurity practice at AT and T. So he was his first role was he was in charge of monitoring federal government infrastructure for cybersecurity threats, and then working on identifying and mitigating those threats for those federal customers. So he was kind of a rising star, so to speak, in that organization. And whenever we were launching this new product, they identified him as somebody to lead the operations component of this new product launch. So we got paired up together in 2019, and started working on this, that offer and 2020 got it into the market. And then about eight, nine months into 2020. So November of 2020, he brought, he asked me to go to lunch and said, Hey, I've been working on this thing, would you be up for just hearing about it and seeing if there's an opportunity to work together. And he kind of told me a story about how his dad has spent 35 years in the cardiovascular space across big companies, small companies, companies that were acquired. And his most recent role he had went to a small startup and wanted to get access to market intelligence to figure out where he's going to place his first reps and who the best opportunities and those territories were. But he had been priced out by the existing sort of incumbent market intelligence provider. So he turned to Casey and asked him if he could build something and Casey signed up for it. So yeah, I'll give it a shot. So
Patrick Kothe 09:45
that was hard, hard to turn your head down. Hard to
Skylar Talley 09:48
turn your debt and if you knew Casey Shattuck senior, he's he's a salesman through and through, so he's especially hard to turn down. I feel like so Casey got to work in 2019 And into 2020. And so he came to me in November of that year, and he had three paying customers, which for any sort of early stage company, just getting to getting across that gap, right actually getting somebody to say, Hey, this is worth me willing to part dollars, because you're solving a problem. For me, that was real validation. So he did the hard work to do that. And we jumped in and started talking to a bunch of other people in the space and came up with the sort of business plan for med scout and then raised our first round of venture capital in q1 of 21. So that was kind of the and probably a lot more detail than you wanted. But that was my path into starting med scout. And basically the I, you know, I was going to run all the sort of the business functions. And then Casey was going to serve as CTO and oversee platform development and technical team hiring and things like that. So we just kind of really easy split from a responsibility standpoint to start off with, and just got to work talking to people and developing the first version of the product.
Patrick Kothe 11:04
So Skyler, if I've got this correct your background product management, product definition, working with the technical people to take the customer inputs, and build build solutions for it. And Casey's background, is it on the technical side? Or is it? Or is he just used to working with technical people?
Skylar Talley 11:29
So Casey's background is super interesting. He has a degree in data analytics, and then use leverage that to learn cybersecurity. That was his sort of first role is understanding how to use various platforms to understand cybersecurity risk. In the background, he taught himself effectively how to code in Python, which is used in the backend of our application, a lot of other software applications. And then I think probably the more crazy thing is that whenever we started to build out the first version of Red Scout, he taught himself JavaScript, which is the what the front end of the application is built in. So to answer your question directly, his professional experience last role was in cybersecurity and leading teams, their operational teams, he had not worked as a software engineer in a professional capacity, but was willing to grind and learn and then help get the first version of the product out. And he's still, you know, contributing code today, obviously, within our team. So no, that wasn't his experience, but he just picked up the ball and ran with it.
Patrick Kothe 12:39
Amazing. So let's get into the problem a little bit. So you kind of described what Casey senior brought to you start up company wants to understand where the fish are in the, in the lake. So Where where are the where the hotspots, who are the hot physicians? Pas, I would assume to that, that are performing procedures. So you can deploy your resources and you can get your prospects kind of lined up. So that that came from from Casey, but I'm sure that you talk to some other people as well. Oh, yeah.
Skylar Talley 13:16
Yeah. I think at this point, I've probably talked to close to 500 people within Gulf advice about how they run their sales teams and the problems that they see on a regular basis. So we've talked to a lot.
Patrick Kothe 13:28
So you came into this in 2019 2020, kind of in that in that area. COVID kinda got raging at that point. And at that point, there were a lot of lot of changes going on in terms of market access for sales representatives, in terms of of sales, sales and marketing strategies that have been kind of turned on their ear, from what they've been in the past traditional medical device. So what what did you learn? What are some of the trends that you picked up? During that turbulent time, when people were starting to look at things a little bit different?
Skylar Talley 14:13
The main three things that sort of stick out from a trend standpoint, that that kind of you can tie into how COVID affected the market, and they're sort of some overarching ways that the industry was changing before COVID, I think but the COVID accelerated those changes. So if you talk to any sales leader, they would tell you that now compared to the call it early 2000s, getting access into the operating room or access within the hospital itself in any capacity is was started to get so much harder over the past five years and then COVID was used. So not necessarily as an excuse, but it accelerate the trend of getting the rep out of the sending of care, right. So those sorts of things. Think had been interesting to kind of grok and understand what was happening before COVID? What COVID accelerated. I think in specifics related to COVID, I've seen three things, I think I've seen more companies considering the addition of an inside sales team, people that aren't in the field, that that are responsible for enabling the field reps are creating pipeline for the field reps in some way. And I think that that's obviously going to be a better fit in sort of specialty areas where there's a lot of addressable market, so to speak, and a lot of physician champions do that to try to get in front of the other thing, I think in any sort of environment like that, as you start to look at how you can leverage distributor organizations in combination with your direct reps or in lieu of direct reps. And so I think that sort of obviously been established as sort of how you scale up a commercial team in certain subspecialty areas, take it spine or things like that. But I think more companies were considering a utilizing distributors to have sort of the ability to turn it off and on and with flexibility, or maybe even to get access to relationships that could stand the test of not being able to be in the operating room. And in sort of turnkey in that sense. And then the last thing, I think that that I've seen that I think COVID kind of brought to the fore is sort of developing more digital marketing maturity. How should you think about investing in webinars as a physician engagement channel? For instance? How should you think about running a more modern email campaigns and physician education consistently to create pipeline for your reps and inbound interest? And I don't know, you know, obviously, I wasn't in the industry. But that feels like it was a response to COVID and having more reps at home. So those are the three things that I think if stuck out as sort of things that sales leaders and commercial leaders are considering as a consequence of COVID and started to integrate into their motion at an increased rate.
Patrick Kothe 17:00
Were you surprised by some of those things coming from the software background and to other industries? Were you surprised that medical device was that much different?
Skylar Talley 17:11
Very surprised. I think the first thing that stood out to me during the sort of research phase when thinking about founding the company, and this is a you know, a stat that's out there, but a lot of software sales teams have 10 different tools that they have access to to help them make them more efficient. And so whenever I did the initial research and talk to you know, 20 to 30 people in the space, sometimes they would have a CRM, a lot of times in early stage companies they wouldn't. And so there just hadn't been the investment and then call it tooling that I had seen coming from software sales teams. And a lot of the onus of sort of running and effective sales processes placed directly on the reps, they weren't being handed a whole lot or had software to kind of guide workflows or automate things sort of that nature. So that was a big surprise for me. And but you know, kind of something that we view as an opportunity that it doesn't, it's not really out there today, because nobody's really sat down and I think done the hard work to understand what sales teams in this space need to solve their unique problems. And I think that that's something that we're excited to build. Right. So that was a big surprise for me. And then all the other stuff that I ran through previously with the addition of inside sales distributor network sort of investment in digital, kind of lagged behind that from an understandings or from a surprise standpoint, that once I kind of understood how sales teams had traditionally been run in this space, all that other stuff sort of made sense. But I think the lack of tools was sort of the biggest surprise for me that once I heard that 20 times, I was like, Okay, there's something here to be done that we can help a lot of people with,
Patrick Kothe 18:56
are you also a little bit surprised with the complexity of sale, because they're every industry thinks that they're, they're unique. But when you've got a regulated marketplace, you've got ID ends, you've got different decision makers, you've got different call points, you've got all of these multi levels, and multi customer groups, it becomes a little bit more complex, and really getting to who the decision maker is, is on these things that kind of feeds into the channel and what channel you're going to use what sales channels you can use. So the the sales process, surprise you
Skylar Talley 19:37
100% I had no idea what a value analysis committee was. I'd never heard that term or I didn't understand really, how medical systems thought about a valuation of new technology and how sort of the company has to present the winning case, so to speak of how it's going to affect patient lives and system. What is the ROI going to be on bringing this at all? Have those sorts of things. So that was, once I started to hear that and sort of wrap my head around, you know, the fact that the physician isn't the buyer. They're your champion, often, but they're not often pulling out their checkbook, so to speak, to pay for it, there's a lot of other steps that goes into bringing new technology into a setting of care. So yeah, I would definitely say that was a big surprise for me to kind of understand how healthcare purchases effectively, because
Patrick Kothe 20:29
that kind of goes to your product. And I want to talk about med scout and kind of what the what the product is, because your customer needs certain things, as you said, they need to know where to deploy. But it also needs to be friendly to take on this multi level sales process too. So it's not only which doctors are doing the most but which ad ends are doing most which hospitals or two, and, and most all of those things, and using that information to really set your sales strategy as well. So let's talk about med Scout, and what exactly we're talking about when we say, you know, given giving more information, what is the information that you're supplying?
Skylar Talley 21:15
I think about it at a high level, we'll start with sort of what we help companies do and then get into the how we help them do it. But we effectively help companies create better territories and think through hiring plans where they need to add reps, how that changes or existing territory model. So we think a lot about sort of mapping, use cases, and territory optimization. The next thing is that we want to help align the team on the correct sales prospects are going to have the biggest impact. And so the how we do that is actually developing targeting criteria using a lot of different things. We can use CPT codes, we can use ICD 10 diagnosis codes, we can use prescription drugs, DRGs ABCs, we can target in the system, that you're already on contract at your point. But all of that is sort of developed as we start to get to know a customer and onboard them. So that we can within one click within a reps territory, start to align them against the targets that are going to be you know, to use this overused this word aligned to their sales goals directly at how they think they're going to grow in territory. The next thing that that we do, and then want to enable reps to do is to use this data to actually become a partner with their actual provider to say, Hey, did you know that you're in the top quartile in this market, and here's how other people in this market are thinking about bringing this in. So we want the reps to be able to use the data in the field to become a partner with their physician champion or back to the earlier part of the conversation, to use the data to actually quantify the impact of bringing in the technology into the system or the hospital. So that's a core part of the platform. And then the last thing is we want to help sales management teams and commercial leaders understand what's working in certain territories and what's not working and lean into coaching, where it's not working and help the reps that are struggling a bit focus, get back to focusing on the right opportunities. So we have kind of workflows built out around all those four sort of key pillars, happy to answer kind of specifics and in what that looks like within the platform. But that's how we think about sort of the jobs that we do or the jobs to be done for medical device sales teams.
Patrick Kothe 23:47
So within those four things that you laid out, I mean, the summary stuff is is is really important. But you can't get to the summary stuff until you get to the details of it. So you have to have all of the details, you're dealing with a tremendous amount of information. If you're looking at all of the ICD nine codes, ICD 10, all the codes that are out there DRGs, all of the physicians that are out there, all of the health care facilities that are out there, where does all of that information come from? We have
Skylar Talley 24:18
a for profit license with CMS to purchase medical claims data. So that's one part of it. We every time they release new datasets, we purchased that and integrated into the platform. And then we've used kind of our cybersecurity background and software development background to also make sure that we're looking out in public domain, so hospital websites and other things like that and integrating that into the platform as well, to understand affiliations, contact information, all of those sorts of things. And then the last thing that I'm pretty excited about is that we are actually setting up integrate Asians with company CRMs to help them use their current account data better. So how can we go for instance, you know, simple use cases, hey, we're here's your top five accounts, let's build a lead scoring sort of algorithm that helps you find more champions like your top five accounts, things like that. So those are the three main sources of information, you got Medicare claims, right now, eventually, we're going to bring in private claims data as well, you have public domain scraping, and then what we kind of call first party data, so company data that's coming directly from the company, and that we use to augment the platform.
Patrick Kothe 25:38
So you're organizing the data, by hospital by physician by PA by ID N, by codes, who's doing the work, and, and, and by geography. But you mentioned that you've got your kind of different customers within that, too. So you've got the sales rep, the sales management, the marketing team, the strategic strategic groups, and I imagine the interface is going to look different depending on what the use case is. So let's talk about the interface a
Skylar Talley 26:10
little bit. To your point, I think, eventually, there will be some sort of deviation and user experience to meet different use cases. We're still early as a company, right, and so you have to focus. That's the only way you're going to get any sort of meaningful work done. So we really focus on building directly for the individual sales rep. A lot of them, if you ask them about their CRM that they use, they feel it is completely sort of value extraction, they don't get a lot out of interacting with the CRM, it's just taking information and sort of forced data entry at a high level. So we wanted to design something that once we understood your targeting criteria, that again, within a couple of clicks, starts to push information to you provides you value saves you time, things like that. So that's what we think a lot about is how to design the interface directly for the individual sales rep. And our kind of hypothesis there is that if you design for the individual sales rep, and you get them to the point where they're getting a lot of value in interacting with a platform, that consistent basis, then you can start to think through what does the leadership of that team need from an analytic standpoint, over the past six months or so we've started to integrate our first versions of chi or build our first versions, I should say, of sort of territory dashboards that give you overarching statistics on workflow and the territory and number of procedures and things like that. And now we're, we're starting to really kind of lean in there. But short answer your question is, we're not really thinking about what the product management person are focused on what the product management person at XYZ device company needs out of a platform like ours, we will get there. I'm confident, but right now we're designing for sales teams. And we want to be the place where sales teams are logging in every day, every week and getting a lot of value from
Patrick Kothe 28:05
you've got kind of two separate systems there, you got a CRM, which is going to be able to track your activities through that CRM, your system is more of a targeting system. Is that pretty much it.
Skylar Talley 28:23
So what I would say is, we're you know, just just to be clear, we're not building another CRM, we don't want to have the idea of building the next Salesforce doesn't really appeal to me too much where we come in, is we want to sit sort of on top of the CRM as a visual that I like to give and help you optimize territories and build better sales plans that then sync with your CRM. So and then, you know, kind of the virtuous circle there is that as you start to make progress in your territory, and we're integrated with your CRM, we can update those sales plans or suggest updates to those sales plans based on progress. So we're thinking about us as sort of a layer on top of the CRM built directly for the sales reps to run a better territory at a very simple level.
Patrick Kothe 29:12
So the sales reps know where to go. These are, these are the people that are the high volume people, these are groups that have LRP groups, these are the ones that are have higher probability of success. Go to those first.
Skylar Talley 29:26
Where to go, how to open the conversation with them. Kind of the why right? You think that they're a great fit for your company going back to being sort of an ally with them or partner with them that brings data into the conversation? Those are the kind of the top two use cases and then easily communicate your progress in the territory up and down the sales organization so that everybody stays aligned on what is our plan to grow this territory and and what does that look like tactically? Who are you trying to talk to? Who are you trying to get meeting What's What's the status there?
Patrick Kothe 30:01
Got it. So you've got Are you integrated with the CRM? Are you two separate systems? How does that work?
Skylar Talley 30:09
We have Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce integrations live today, and are actively considering others based on customer input demand right now. So HubSpot, Zendesk are a couple that were kind of queuing up at this point.
Patrick Kothe 30:27
So you would be a module inside, they would open up Salesforce or they log
Skylar Talley 30:31
into med Scout to build or modify their territory plan. And then as they basically the way a lot of our customers have wanted to set it up is that they build their territory plan in med Scout, and then they execute using the med Scout mobile app. And as they make they qualify a particular champion or medical center, they'll move it over into a new sales stage. And that'll create an opportunity record within the CRM so that the rep doesn't have to manually enter in all that information, we send information over from NetScout to create that opportunity record. And then as they're sort of doing the quoting and down funnel stuff, most of that is done in the CRM. Again, that's kind of stuff that we're not really focused on right now. And there's obviously a lot of CRM providers out there that have a lot of sort of account related functionality. So it's kind of depends on the stage of the deal, I would say with where you're logging in, and what you're doing. And each platform
Patrick Kothe 31:31
is a database of customers the same are they synced between the med med Scout system and the Salesforce system or the CRM.
Skylar Talley 31:41
So we keep that up to date constantly. So we are updating who your current accounts are, and any other sort of information about that account that you want to integrate it into med Scout, so that as a customer or as a sales rep is looking within the Austin territory, they see who's their current account, and who's not affiliated with any current accounts and sort of is Greenfield. So we keep those in sync, we've invested a lot of sort of development effort and keeping those two systems in sync.
Patrick Kothe 32:12
So you talked about focus and focus being at at the sales rep and sales management level. The other focus is the type of customer. So what have you learned right now is this is this most applicable for large medical device companies, startups, developing companies, where's your where's your sweet spot,
Skylar Talley 32:37
we have worked everywhere from companies that are just starting on commercialization and haven't hired their first reps yet. That was, that's been one customer, we had all the way up to 70 plus reps in the field. That's our largest customer right now. I think our sweet spot is you've established initial commercial traction, often, you'll bring in kind of the first three reps to do that. And we can help you with those first three reps. But then as you're thinking about what does growth mean for us? What does that look like tactically? What does that look like from a territory focus? What does that look like from a targeting focus, all of those sorts of things. So call it going from three to eight, and then eight to 1616, to 30, something along those lines, that that is, those stages of growth are really our sweet spot that we can take so much manual work and guesswork out of the equation, and actually help you do that via data in a very quick manner. That's what I've seen is really been the kind of the biggest drop in the market. So far, we're not really putting active effort and going after sort of mid market to enterprise companies right now. We want to work with smaller companies to continue to iterate on the product, and then expand into larger customer, the larger customer base at that point. But that being said, I think that there's a lot there's going to be a lot of alignment within those sorts of larger companies to help them get the insight that they need to make decisions about how to deploy those, you know, 100 reps in the field, and the analytics that they're not getting out of their CRM today. So I'm excited about that. Basically, the company is sort of a next step.
Patrick Kothe 34:20
So Skylar, some software products are off the shelf, and some some are configured based on customer needs. Where does your Where do you guys sit?
Skylar Talley 34:29
mix of both. We have the core elements of the platform in the sense that you can we can help you create territory, you can create territories in the platform, zip code, county base state based, you can draw and things like that. So that that is extensible thing across all customers. We have the full database of all the codes that we can build your targeting criteria on. Really the customization comes in, I think being thoughtful about how you actually They implement your targeting criteria. So how you think about what is the combinations of you know, CPTs, ICD 10, prescription drugs, for instance, that is going to really help us narrow down on the our kind of focused persona. Once we've nailed that there's not a lot of customization really at all to be done there outside of making sure that we do the field mapping within your CRM appropriately. So that's the other piece of customization, I would say. So really, it is kind of the initial implementation phase, figuring out who you're going to focus on making sure that that's available for all reps as they on board. And then the integration with the CRM is a little bit custom. But outside of that, it's pretty out of the box right now.
Patrick Kothe 35:46
What's your business model,
Skylar Talley 35:47
SAS annual subscriptions, as we roll out new features, add new data to the platform, you get the benefit of being your customer. And we want to help you continue to grow your team and hire new reps. So it's a recurring subscription.
Patrick Kothe 36:01
So let's talk a little bit about the learning that you've had and your background in in upstream marketing and doing definitions and stuff. And I'm sure that you've had some learning and pivoting of your platform as you're developing it, what were some of the key things that, that you learn that you blend it into your product?
Skylar Talley 36:22
The answer I'm gonna give you is probably affected by recency bias, in the sense that I've had some conversations do you even today about this, but I didn't really appreciate what goes into maintaining the current territory model for the sales team. And what goes into sort of scenario modeling out if we add five reps, where do we put them? And what how does that affect our current geographies that we have in place today, a lot of that information is still housed in Excel or even PDFs, and not captured in the CRM or ERP. Or they don't a lot of teams don't have tools to think through what scenario a versus scenario B could look like. So once I started to hear that pain point pretty consistently, that affected how we thought about product development. And we've started to put more effort towards helping commercial leaders not only understand their current territory model, but have the analytics available to think through that and those hiring decisions and things like that. So that was a bit of a learning. For me, I would say. The other thing that's been sort of exciting is the importance of the mobile component, I would say we've we put effort towards a mobile app last fall, and saw initial slow uptake. But it continues to be something that reps come back to and that is kind of a key part of our sales conversations is making sure that the teams have access to this on the road. I had sort of a hypothesis around that, I would say, but that's been validated. And, you know, now it's something we're going to continue to work in our product development kind of Q is future mobile iteration.
Patrick Kothe 38:05
Well, it's kind of interesting, because a CRM, I mean, you're in there all the time, you're tracking the activity that that you've got, you know, where they're located all that. But here's, as you said, it sits sits above and they should be a sales rep should know where they're going, so to speak. During the day, they should know, okay, this is my plan, I'm going to talk to this person, this person, this person based on the information I got from NetScout, this is a good target. And this is where we're going to go. So I'm kind of curious as far as mobile versus desktop for your particular application, because I can see people needing the CRM stuff out in the field. But I would, I would think that it wouldn't be as important to have the meds med Scout stuff. So is it Do I have it wrong? Oh, I wouldn't
Skylar Talley 38:57
say wrong. It's just being able to access your territory plan and pipeline information and quickly refresh yourself on the notes that you took on that particular physician in med scout or within your CRM. And do it in a really quick and simple way, has been a compelling use case for sales reps. And then I think the other thing that we built in kind of to your point about knowing where to go in your day, a lot of people would sit and say I'm gonna go at these four conversations, and then try to back solve into where they were, and how to create the best route. And we actually have automated that. So you select hey, I want to visit these four members of my pipeline, and add them to route and then the med Scout app will tell you the most efficient path to take. So it's I think it's just little time saving features. And the ability to quickly take notes versus interacting with some maybe the Salesforce Mobile app that have been compelling for our core users.
Patrick Kothe 39:58
This is really interesting. because it's who's going to own the front end? Is Salesforce going to be a marketing product? Or is it going to be a sales product, and is med Scout going to be a sales product and not a marketing product. So it's really kind of interesting how the two of them are going to kind of evolve.
Skylar Talley 40:19
Just to kind of comment on that a little bit, I think Salesforce has really sort of evolved into more of a ERP, than it is a direct tool for the rest of us. It's just so extensible and such an, you know, such an ecosystem of capabilities that you can integrate there, that, you know, they're there, they're touching everything, right, related to compensation to back to my earlier point about quoting, and account management, and all of those sorts of things. So, again, going back to an earlier part of the conversation, I think, to own the front end, to use your term of where the rep is spending their time, every day, you can't complicate it too much there can't there. And that's a balance that we're gonna have to walk or a line that we're gonna have to walk with additional data capabilities versus a simplified user experience that gives them the information that they need really quickly. My bet is on platforms like us, you know, across different industries, understood, really understanding what the individual sales person needs, and then designing the interface around that. And that being the front end. And then the more extensible platforms, like Salesforce kind of being the backend, where everything is housed, sort of more of an eventually, like a data warehouse type play than owning the front end interaction for the reps. But that's just my quick take on the space. Well, it's
Patrick Kothe 41:43
really interesting. I listened to a podcast actually today, Becker's healthcare podcast, and what they were discussing is they're discussing how do you take off the tremendous amount of paperwork or data fields that need to be filled in by clinicians at a time when they're overworked? And so how do you how do you get to the important information and take some of the unimportant information out? And when you've got a bunch of data, as you said, it's the editing that makes all the difference? It's, it's what can you sunset, what what can you get rid of that is not adding value and maybe hidden somewhere, and you may be able to get to it on your desktop, when only when you've got time? But the editing of of what is critical information? And what isn't critical information is so hard to do. So how are you? How are you working through that with your customers to say what, what belongs on that mobile app? And what belongs somewhere else?
Skylar Talley 42:49
Talking to a lot of them? Right? It's, it's it's nothing more complicated than understanding how they run their workflows today, what are those core pieces of information. And then just being thoughtful from a UX and UI design standpoint, but I think it's really, we are in the phase now where we need to be talking to customers, you know, and this is one could argue that that is every phase of the company, but we try to talk to customers every day, and get them to use the software in front of us and get their feedback on what they like and don't like. So that's just kind of a core activity for us right now. And we tried to get sort of shots on goal across all of our customers to understand the deviations between customer a versus Customer B, and what's sort of the universal theme. So nothing more scientific than that just outside of making sure that we're doing the doing the hard work on customer discovery.
Patrick Kothe 43:46
But really a fascinating problem, fascinating solution. And I think there's some really great things for different companies of different sizes. So as far as you said that there's some competitors out there that have done similar things. What are you doing different?
Skylar Talley 44:05
I think a lot of it goes back to from sort of a first principle standpoint, I believe that nobody is designed with the rep in mind that started and with that as being the sort of problem space that they want to constrain themselves to is what are the things you need to do to help a sales rep be better within this particular vertical? So that's the first thing it's from a company design standpoint, that is definitely spilled over into the product that we put into market is we get a lot of compliments on simplicity and speed to information for sales reps and sales managers. So that's the first thing and then the second thing I think from a vision standpoint, once we're the place that is solving a lot of the reps problems, then I think that we can give and focus on giving commercial leaders the answer They need to make better commercial decisions. Part of that is sort of the data that we have. But also part of that is how your team is actually deploying and using that data in the field and incorporating sort of key sales metrics. So from a product standpoint, we think that, really, we want to be the revenue technology platform for this sector. And that's where we're going to start to really stand out is that that we are integrating going back to the earlier part of the conversation, the data coming out of your CRM, with this sort of territory and market intelligence to give you the views that life science sales leaders needs, we've kind of validated that to start with and really going to be investing in and moving forward. And that's where I think a lot of the differentiation is going to be driven from
Patrick Kothe 45:49
Well, you mentioned the word invest. So let's talk about that for a minute. So So you raised raised some money to get you guys go on you. I think you weren't you weren't this as a as a side gig for a while. And then for form, the company raised some money there. And you're in the process of doing another raise at this point.
Skylar Talley 46:10
Yes, sir. Yeah, closing it down at the moment.
Patrick Kothe 46:13
And what is this? What is this financing for, continue to
Skylar Talley 46:17
build out the team. That's, the first thing is that there are a lot of things that we want to build. And there are customers to support and marketing of the platform to be done. And we're all wearing a lot of hats right now. So bringing on additional members of the team is part of it. Investing in additional data assets or capabilities would be another use of funds. And then really just starting to focus on brand building as well. We've done a lot of manual things, to market, the platform and have conversations but doing things that are a bit more scaled up to start to build the med Scout brand. But the main thing is just you know, like every company at this stage is just runway to add additional headcount and continue to build out the platform.
Patrick Kothe 47:06
Yeah, and you're not an FDA regulated device. This is our support you're supporting us in in the industry, but you don't have the regulatory piece. That's there. As far as the raise right now, you had initial raise, is this a second raise do you plan to have? What's the financing plan going forward?
Skylar Talley 47:29
So this will be the second raise. And then we will most likely do at least one other round, whenever we hit a few other sort of larger revenue milestones, which will be another kind of injection, that company probably single digit millions at that point. And then we'll see from there, what it looks like if we're able to grow profitably without outside capital injection, kind of just depends on market traction, how kind of average contract size all those sorts of variables to whether or not we're gonna continue to need some form of outside capital. Or we can grow this thing profitably,
Patrick Kothe 48:07
is your milestone off of this raise just a financial milestone, or is it a technical milestone as well,
Skylar Talley 48:14
I would say financial and then related to the types of customers that we're working with. So in making sure that we can demonstrate that we can continue to sort of work with larger and larger companies and solve bigger and bigger problems at scale. That's going to kind of be some of the things that some investors want to see. And to ultimately make sure, or to get to sort of belief that this is, you know, potentially be $100 million year plus company. That's kind of the very simple venture math framework that a lot of investors uses do, I believe, at this stage that there's a straightforward path or a sort of a 10 year timescale for this to be $100 million, your company? So yeah, revenue and customer size would be the two major milestones.
Patrick Kothe 49:03
So you're helping people target who's helping you target How are you targeting the company's.
Skylar Talley 49:08
I'm at a medical device conference right now, or it was Monday, Tuesday, I'm gonna go to another one Thursday, Friday. So I go to these conferences and just talk to VPs of sales about how they're running their team today. We just brought on a our first VP of Sales name's Mark mesure. Incredible individual that has experienced both in digital health and software. So that was kind of the big investment for us is to move sales for me. I'm not a salesperson, I wouldn't call call myself that over and do somebody that's been there done that knows the industry really well. And he's, like I said, been an incredible addition to the team.
Patrick Kothe 49:49
Well, we're gonna have your information in the show notes. So anyone who's interested in learning more, I'm sure they can get a hold of you through your LinkedIn page and Your your contact information that we'll have in the show notes. Kind of to wrap this up Schuyler, one of the things that you talked early on about was your experience outside of the medical device industry. And most of the listeners here are people that are in the industry, but they're all always trying to pick up new things that that can help them. So considering where you came from, are there a couple of things that you can think of that would be good practices that were done in the other industries that you were in that that we can import into the medical device industry,
Skylar Talley 50:39
I would say, the willingness to consider bringing in software to solve problems, I think, going back to the earlier part of the conversation, where, you know, I compared software sales teams to how I saw medical device seems being run and the sort of tools at play. And so I think that life science can probably particular device, compared to pharmaceutical is sort of early in the adoption of SAS. And so that's the biggest thing for me is that software companies, by their very nature are willing to consider working with other software companies to solve their problems, right. And so I would just say that if there are things that are being done manually today, or you know, just any sort of thing that you feel like could be modernized that it's probably worth doing a quick market scape, either, you know, companies like GE to crowd or TrustRadius or things to understand what some of the innovative software companies within that particular focus area are doing and how they can help your company. Because it can avoid, you know, spending money on headcount. And it can help you help you retain employees if you automate manual tasks, things like that. So that would be kind of, I think, the thing I'd add, take away coming from software over into devices that there's probably stuff out there that can help you run a more efficient company, across a variety of different use cases.
Patrick Kothe 52:06
It is just so interesting, to see our industry from a fresh set of eyes. Let's get out of our old neighborhood, as we discussed earlier, and start to look around a scaler gave us a few things to think about. Because there truly is a big vast world out there. Let's make sure that we're open to learning about it. A few of my takeaways. First, keep your eyes and your ears open and take a chance. As Skylar mentioned, Casey's dad had a real need. And Casey said yes. And Casey not only said yes, but learn Python learned JavaScript, and really went outside of his comfort zone to be able to develop this something that's that was needed in the marketplace. The second thing that jumped out to me was focus and Skyler talked about a lot of different areas that this product could be important to. But what they're doing is focusing on making it a sales rep tool, making sure that it's not a CRM, it's something that's dedicated, not nor they're not working on the marketing portion of it right now. It's a sales rep and it's a sales management that they're focusing on. And that's how they're going to build a solid foundation and move on, on to other things. The last thing is and it kind of comes down to us and what what we can do and what Schuyler discusses, you know, we don't use electronic tools like other industries do. And we're behind the times when it comes to, to using these tools. And you know, why is that? You know, well, we've been to one on one sales oriented for yours. And if we're able to open our eyes up, right now, what we're going to see is the time for marketing and software is fast coming into medical device, and don't be left behind. Embrace the change, get in front of it, and start to implement. Thank you for listening. Make sure you get episodes downloaded to your device automatically by liking or subscribing to the mastering medical device podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Also, please spread the word and tell a friend or two to listen to the mastering medical device podcast as interviews like today's can help you become a more effective medical device leader. Work hard. Be kind
