Slow Follow-Up, Leaky Retention: Fixing Both in Healthcare

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0:00 You probably heard that saying, you can't out exercise a bad diet. You can't outsell a leaky customer base. Basically, there's a hundred foot chasm and you built the bridge to ninety feet. Can you finish the final ten feet? And they ran it and it was 5,200 names were legitimate. So it's 6,000 bad. If they had to run it, they had a their sender reputation would have gone in the tank immediately. They'd have been blacklisted at probably several dozen health systems.

Second is, I wish much earlier in my careers, this has bit me really hard professionally, is if I find I'm using the word potential to describe somebody, I should fire them immediately. Welcome to Zero Friction. This is Terry Coutsolioutsos. I'm your host today, and I have the honor of having Jeremy Bikman with me today. Jeremy is the president at Reaction, which really has developed a unique operating platform that combines, and I'll let Jeremy tell the story better, but basically it unifies CRM, CXM, marketing automation, all the insights and data that comes into the system that really helps create intelligence and more importantly, actionable.

Intelligence to help organizations operate in a much more efficient manner today. And so we both are very we care very much about our healthcare space and and trying to create less friction in that space. So that's why I had Jeremy on today. He deals with these customers that are helping organizations remove friction from their system. And the topics are going to be really interesting today. So Jeremy, great to have you on the program. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me, man. Good to see you again.

Well good. Let's let's kind of dig in a little bit. Let's talk about your purpose and your passion behind Reaction itself and you know what you do and who you really do it for and kind of give a baseline there because I really want to dive into some of the things that you do around helping take friction out of the healthcare system and and because I think that's a really vital component of what we're doing today. Yeah, for sure. Thanks.

2:30 So I got involved in healthcare back in 2003. I joined a research firm called KLAS, the KLAS, they do the best in KLAS. They have really good reports. and I was hired to grow the company up, and I did that for about seven years, maybe a little over seven years. And I ran all the research teams and the strategy teams and things like that. It was good. and then I left and ran a management consulting firm for About three years. And we it was boutique. We worked with a lot of big investment bankers and private equity firms and big med tech companies.

And we would do due diligence and strategy work, et cetera. And then invariably, people that were paying us a lot of money and the can our consultants and our advisors a lot of money, they said, Hey, you guys seem like smart people, but you better have some data behind it. What's that old saying, like, in God we trust, all others bring data or something like that?

And so I'm like, okay, great. So we started, we were on the other side now. For the first time in my career, I was having to hire research firms. And I just didn't like it. I I I didn't like the how much it cost. I didn't like that it was always anonymous. And so I had to be like, could I trust the data? Some of these interviews don't seem like they're congruent with others. And so it was just the cost and how long it took. And So I'm like, you know what?

Well, I ran it. I don't want to really get back into the research business, but we got to start doing research. We're getting paid a lot of money. And so I hired a couple of developers develop a little research platform for us. and then I built a database behind it, et cetera, of contacts. And then we did that, and it worked really well. And one of our customers heard about it and said, hey. We had one your teams show us the internal research tool you built.

We want to use it for our voice customer platform. We want to y run it. And I'm like, that's weird. It's an internal tool. like, okay, so we had to tweak a few things, they started using it, another company started using it, and it just started taking off as a as a research platform. Cause it was the same thing. We'd send out emails as if it's the client, looks like them. It collect all this data. We'd built our own best practices, things that I'd learned over career that would get customers to respond or get people in the market to respond.

So we kind of baked it in. And it just worked really, really well. And so then customers saying would say, hey, we want to start running market research through your platform, not just customer, because we don't want to spend 20 grand and buying a report or going to some you know Gartner or someone else have drop 50 grand or 70 grand or 100 grand. Like we use our our whole budget for insights in one or two projects. Like, okay, that's kind of interesting. So then we kept building out the tools, Terry, and people started using it more and more.

5:20 And then we had people coming back a few years ago saying, Hey, can you start adding like HTML templates in for emails? And I'm like, Well, why would you want to do research? Well, we don't want to do research. We want to do like marketing campaigns, lead gen. Like, okay, why? Like you already have something from Salesforce or HubSpot. And they said, Well, yours gets better open rates and gets better engagement and more clicks. So that that's all we care about. So like, okay, fine. So we did that.

And then we noticed that people weren't following up quickly. Someone would click and say, I want a demo. Or I want follow up, but then we noticed our customers wouldn't follow up to a day or two later. And I don't know why. And I'm like, that's crazy. And it's because someone was in a meeting or they forgot to check or they're traveling. And so we started doing data and found that if you don't reach it back out to somebody who expresses interest, whether it's a customer or a potential prospect, pretty quickly.

And I don't mean like later in the day. I mean within an hour, half hour of late. It could be five minutes. Yeah, exactly. you you're telling them they're not interested. So then we had to build in automated triggers and automated messaging. So it looks like it's that sales rep or account manager or head of marketing. So it looks exactly like it and it's timed so that it isn't too quick, because then it looks automated, but it's you know, it's three minutes later, four minutes later, usually is what it is, and it links to their Calendly or whatever it is.

And then people said, Hey, we want to kind of start nurturing things in your system. Like, well, no, our system will integrate the Salesforce. Like, that's what Salesforce is for, HubSpot or Dynamics. Like, what you doing? And then they'd say, Well, no, because and they started to describe friction, themes, handoffs that weren't happening. We're like, okay, so we stood develop started developing that la end of last year. Went really well. All our customers adopted it. And then a couple of them came back and said, Hey.

Basically, there's a hundred foot chasm and you built the bridge to ninety feet. Can you finish the final ten feet? Like, well, what do you mean? Like we want to track pipeline, putting contracts, all these other sorts of things. Like, why just do it? Just finish it. You're so close. You have the database, we have our contacts in there, we got sales prospects in there. Finish it. And so we we did, and that was in early July. And then since there it's just it's taken off.

7:56 Like we're signing up new accounts or migrating people away from the current CRMs and marketing automation. And one of our customers just put it best, and they used the whole thing friction. I said the reason we love your system is you've eliminated all the handoff problems. It's just one flow all the way from getting insights from the market or doing a marketing campaign. They get interested and it's just handoff is seamless. Notifications happen, the internal teams know exactly what's going on. There's no meeting that has to happen.

They can see every single thing about a prospect all the way through. And same thing with customers. And it really, you know, as your podcast says, it just eliminates all the friction. And it makes things better for their customers. It makes things better for the market and prospects because there's just no excuse for not following up because it's automated and it's right there in front of them. So that's That's kinda who that's how we got there. It's kinda odd. I don't know another CRM company that came from the research world.

Like it's and we're just healthcare. We don't do anything outside of healthcare. So we built the system for the nuances of the healthcare industry. Yeah, it's really interesting 'cause I I talk so much about like all these little handoffs and I actually have visuals where like From the very top part of the journey when the the lead comes in, the very top part of the funnel, which is the lead acquisition part all the way to the bottom, there's like there's seven significant points of friction or opportunity to leak.

So, you know, what happens when the lead comes in versus converting it to an appointment? And then what happens from when the appointment's booked to actually the appointment itself? And each one of those things has nurturing, building authority, building trust all along the way. And typically you're using disparate systems to do these things. And I think that's where your customers are coming from is that, you know, my leads are coming into, they might use Salesforce, but the leads are coming into HubSpot, right? Yeah. So they have a marketing funnel platform that, you know, kicks in the gear and then they it transitions in the sales force when the sales motion actually begins.

And so, you know, and then now you have contact intelligence, you have analytics, you have data enrichment. These are all things that like, you know, I use today. I'd love to sit down and talk to you about what these are because I have workflows from LinkedIn that go into clay, that get enriched, that come back in and, you know, go back into, you know, a a cold email system that's designed for high volume work, not like a CRM, but like you know, sending 30, 40, 50,000 emails out a month.

10:39 But those are all things that that a lot of marketing companies are challenged with and having an ecosystem that sort of is built around all of that being self-contained, where the friction points aren't clicks and technology and and things that like they're uncontrollable things. Anytime you move data from one system to another, you've offered you've you've offered yourself up to lose stuff, right? And now you have integrated closed systems that that's that's a pretty sweet deal. Yeah, and I I like the way you put it.

So the thing that when we built the system is we f we built it for us first. So as we said if we're gonna do this, we're gonna need what are we gonna what would we use, right? And how do you make it easy enough to use that it doesn't require much training, which is very, very important because we're not in I don't wanna be in the making a bunch of money off implementation or data migration. So we we spent a lot of time going, well, that's a big pain point.

We don't wanna be in that business and they don't wanna pay the money. Why why in the world would you wanna pay money? And we looked at other things too, such as so you're gonna send a bunch of emails out, right? So our system has a bunch of things like a four strip. You can't blast. Like literally won't let you do it. You'll say, well, I want to send these thousand out right now. Like you can't. Our system's gonna drip it over fifteen minutes or twenty minutes.

Or we've got some pretty advanced algorithms. You can pick something goes, this is kind of optimal sending. It'll drip it out to this audience over the week. It's gonna pick very precise because we d we don't want anyone to send a reputation to get hit. We don't want people we don't want Health systems inboxes to get blown up. Like the whole thing is how do you preserve that relationship? How do you make it as seamless as possible?

And other things too, where you can kind of set parameters. We also looked at it and said, well, what is really annoying to people at a hospital or at a payer at a med device company or pharma? It's what a lot of times what happens is their vendors that will step on each other's toes all the time. So someone who's like a CIO at hospital will over a three day period get five emails from their EHR vendor and they're like, holy cow, knock it off. Or they're they're yeah, time out.

Or in the they're in the middle of a a really difficult support case and all of a sudden legal or finance sends them, hey, you're late on your payment. Well if you want to just send a customer through the moon Do that. And so in our system, we looked at that and said, what are all the things people do, not on purpose, that piss off customers, that tick off or hurt the things that they're doing well from a marketing or sales perspective? We're like, well, why don't we have a traffic cop?

13:32 Why don't we have our system active traffic cop that can set a rule and say, hey, we don't want any customer. To get more than one communication from s anyone in our company every two, three days. Like that's just the rule. And so you set the rule in our system, it doesn't matter if it's sales, marketing, product, legal finance, it blocks it. Or if there's certain things like they're in the middle of a major upgrade, don't bug them. They're in the middle of a nasty support ticket for the love of Pete, don't love them, because then our customer team, account team's gonna catch hell.

But then also the same thing in the market. Like Sales and marketing and strategy, et cetera, you know, they'll step on each other's toes as well. And you say, hey, out in the market, someone who's not a customer, our rule is every 10 days.

So rather than have meetings, our system just makes sure it goes, Nope, marketing already went out or sales already went out. Sorry, product team, you have an overlap of a thousand people in the in your audience, it'll go to this group, but this other thousand, it's an overlap, that's gonna get 10 days from now. You just can't, So you can't. you have a governance application in there. correct. Yeah. Cause it and it all but all comes from, yeah, so governance people, legal people, they're all your system would they love it.

Like, we didn't think about you. You're right. Our thing was, what are you doing to the customer or what are you doing to the people that you want to become a customer? And then how does that reflect on you? Right. So that's the thing that we try to do is how do you make that smoother without having to coordinate it? Like coordinate it in a team's channel, have separate meetings about well, who's going out. That just sounds but you got better things to do than that, right?

So just automate it, fix it. And it doesn't mean you don't hit a override button. So if there's some legal thing that comes out or there's gonna be some scheduled outage, course, press the override button, push through. But you know, let's be honest, that's the very rare exception, not the norm. That's pretty cool.

And you say healthcare, so like who would you frame as like your your ideal customer profile? Is it is it healthcare providers, is it manufacturers as well and device companies? It's the vendor side. Oh okay, so you're looking at vendors typically, Yeah, because right now our companies, are our okay.

Software companies, med device companies, modality companies. We have an insurance company and pretty a pretty cool new one that uses it. Got it. we'll eventually start focusing on the provider space, more about reminders and and personalization engagement. but We're not gonna do that till next year. We'll we'll tackle sometime late Q one. We have everything ready for it, but it's we've got so much on our on our pipeline right now. And and I don't wanna have to battle with Epic about Cheers for us to say we're not doing what Cheers is gonna do.

16:23 Like just, you know, cool your jets. We're not out trying to become the CRM for hospitals because that's what Epic is, so to speak, or Oracle or whatever. but there's There's certainly personalization and some traffic cop stuff that they just don't do at all that is just gonna help out. So we do we just wanna be a a seamless integration there. We're we are not gonna try to create it like what Epic's doing or somebody else for for hospitals or clinics. Like it's not interesting to us.

Well, tell me a little bit about the data enrichment piece, because I think that's always, you know, a really cool element when you're a marketer and you know, you might have a LinkedIn URL but you got nothing else, or you might have an email and nothing else. And you know, how does that benefit, you know, those teams? Yeah, that's a good point. we kinda From a different angle, we call that the like a last mile issue. So people know if they they have a campaign they want to run or a drip or research or whatever it is, but they just don't have the right contacts or the information that they can't, you know, if you do account based marketing, which I think is really important, I think it's the best way to do it.

Well you need enough information on and to pull an audience, et cetera, a list that you can do that with. So we started building a database. a long time ago, AI's just been super helpful for us to do it so that it can cleanse people's contacts and it it helps them have more intelligence, not just on their customers, but when they're going out to the market becomes really important for that. And so our system just helps cleanse and update where they don't have information. It'll f kind of fill the gaps for them.

It's not like some mega definitive replacement or anything like that because the definitive tries to boil the whole ocean we're not interested in that. Ours is more like a I guess be kind of more like Apollo.io to some extent, but we don't it's kind of weird. We don't sell contacts though. We cleanse. We don't we we just don't sell it. So we we don't like compete against ZoomInfo, for example. Or like a Clay kind of enrichment tool, something I I think yeah it's more like that.

Like that. So because some of our customers are pretty big. And their CRMs are hot garbage on their customer. It's ri like shockingly bad. And so we're like, we'll update. Like you just give us the orgs and the titles and then our system will go, All right, let's update these kind of things. but it's just kind of a seamless thing. It isn't like ZoomInfo, you buy a bunch of names and then you gotta dig through stuff. So Especially if you got the CRM system that's kinda getting old and cranky.

19:09 You know, if you wanna preserve your email domains, that's a that's one wa good way to ruin it is to, Oh yeah. you know, start start banging on a bunch of mailboxes that don't exist anymore. So that's a Yeah, and so we we've got our own little kind of like ZeroBounce thing in our system. So before anybody runs anything, so we're always cleansing our contacts, and then our system will cleanse for people before they go out. Cause it'll just say, Hey, you've got ten percent of the emails in this 7500 is utterly wrong.

In fact, we had a really big client a a year ago. they bought a list from some other company. again 'cause we don't sell lists, but it was eleven thousand two hundred names. We just said, hey, before you go out, you know, can you be sure to run? Oh, we're fine. Like so I just told my team, just run it for them. I I I I don't know why they're not going to do it. Just I got a bad feeling. My spidey sense is going off like crazy.

And they ran it and it was 5,200 names were legitimate. So it's 6,000 bad. If they had to run it, they had a their sender reputation would have gone in the tank immediately. They'd have been blacklisted at probably several dozen health systems. So we went back to them and went, hey, FYI, we deleted 6,000 names out of your audience. What? How could you do that? Like, because they all bounced.

Like, what are you doing? So that's another one of these things. We just said, it's not like people are dumb. It's they're insanely busy and something gets thrown on their plate the last minute. Like, our say, you know, like the head of sales goes to the sales ops person. Like, what why haven't we launched this? HLTH is coming up. Or CHIME's fall forum is coming up. We haven't gotten anything out. And it's like, And so they skip a step. Yeah. because they're bad or they're incompetent.

It's they got something thrown on their plate at the last minute. So they skip a step. And with our system, our whole thing is no, you can't skip a step. Like it literally won't let you do that because I don't want it to happen to me. And we try to golden rule our service, our platform, et cetera, to go, well, if I wouldn't do it, we should help our customers also not do that. Because that's a worse practice, not a best practice. Sure. I mean, you know, and today, especially with, you know, AI, the the cold email, you you've got to be, you know, and I do a lot of cold email.

I mean, I I I do a lot of me too. of sending cold email. And so it's a big part of my omnichannel approach. And I spent a lot of time, you know, getting the list right, number one. Like you wanna talk about best practices for marketing and have a lot of guys in the audience, but like Go make sure that ICP list is tight.

21:55 You know, make sure because it's about relevance and not it's not about massive volume anymore, like you know, spamming everybody because the spam alerts are there. And then it's making sure your mailboxes are healthy because a bad mailbox is gonna default your whole purpose. And so there's so many steps along the way, especially in cold email, it's like five or six. If you don't like stack them the right way, you're gonna fail on the on the end that you really want. And so it sounds like you're building all that infrastructure in, which is very, very tasty.

Yeah. So we look at the yeah, well said. So we look at the different channels for business for companies, right? And so then LinkedIn is an important one. As much as LinkedIn has garbage and spam and bots and all sorts of kind of stuff, for certain demographics, they ex they, you know, people if you send a first message in or you put up good posts, et cetera, they engage better that way. So we had to build a LinkedIn campaign in our system. So someone goes to campaigns marketing and they can they can do an email campaign or they can do a LinkedIn campaign, do posts, ads, etc., through our system.

So they can track it, right? And they can they can side by side compare. We did this email that went out and we A B tested that with a normal standard looking email. And they would also build an HTML template right next to it. So we A B test, but then You know, we have a lot of our salespeople, our marketing people are connected to you know, the people on on LinkedIn. We need to be able to have them do posts on this kind of thing or put messages.

And so we're like, well, we have to build that too. We can't we can't forget that. And so that's also why we also built our own version of like Calendly. We call it Book It, because I didn't So our customers, if they have a seat, they can use our system for book it to schedule things at trade shows, for meetings, webinars, whatever it is. And and it it's it's got it's more flexible than Calendly. It's easier to use and it keeps branding really well. So that was a thing I noticed is, and I used Calendly for a little bit, and I would create this great, I think it's great, post.

Or message in LinkedIn or an email campaign. And I and like you, I really care what does it look like? What does my logo look like? Everything in there needs to be utterly consistent because people are looking for reasons not to engage. They're not looking for reasons to engage. But then I'd redirect them to Calendly, and it's this kind of like marshmallow vanilla. It it took them out of the brand I was trying to establish. And so I this was a couple months ago. I went to my team and said, Create something.

24:38 I want it integrated into our system and I want it to have that. Someone clicks they want a demo, it's gonna pull up this thing. So we created this book it and then we had our customers that they really like it because it's so easy to use and it keeps the brand. And they're like, hey, you need to have it work with multiple people in a very complex calendaring because we need this for the trade shows. Because booking trade shows is really an very expensive. It's super complicated.

And so that's our next thing. Because that is a massive spend. And I didn't I didn't know how, because I've never, thankfully at marketing people do it, how difficult that was. Ah, it's crazy hard, man. Like you want to talk about friction. That was like beyond anything I've ever seen. It's like herding cats here and herding cats here and herding cats there. And this station can only have this and then It's gonna show these solutions or this you know, conference room's gonna be this. And then the follow-up was horrible.

Like they're missing out, they don't know who to follow up with. They're sending people who came by some schmuck just looking to get a pen, a free pen, and they're getting sales drips and marketing drips. So they don't know how to to actually in in a seamless way and with a high level of, you know, percentage you're capturing, who's a real sales prospect? Who's an actual customer, who's a partner, versus just a someone we shouldn't even worry about. And they didn't, they don't know how to, it's not built to really seamlessly capture and then add them immediately to lists with the follow-up already ready and assigned to the right people.

So we're like, well, if they're using our system, we already know because email is a unique, it's as a finger fingerprint. And so look at it and go, hey. Either that already exists in our database or exists in their database. But either way, because they're there, it'll say, not a customer, that's sales. So it'll automatically put that person in the sales bucket, automatically with an action item, do a follow-up with reminders. So it so it'll happen. So we're like, another massive headache, massive amount of friction.

So we're like, okay, that's a it every one of our customers we went to because I didn't want to expand bucket. And I'm like, I'm not looking for reasons to add more functionality to something. we have enough work to do, but all of them came back and said, trade shows are awful. They're important, but they're so they're absolutely horrible. It costs a fortune. We miss out on opportunities, people don't follow up for weeks. Like it's just and I didn't know. So like, okay, we'll that's so that's our next thing that we're I wish it I wish I'd have it next month, but it's gonna be a couple more months.

27:22 So that piece is that piece is You know, that's a crazy important piece too. I can just speak to my my previous experiences, you know, with one of the large imaging companies, you know, it's you know multi million dollar meeting and you know, it used to just drive me crazy that we would spend, you know, a lot of money And the in the spreadsheet from the leads, the meeting was in November. We'd get a spreadsheet back in February saying, here's your leads. I mean, and you know, and I'm talking you're probably dropping three, four, five, six million dollars just on the Yeah, you have a booth the size of a small city block.

Yeah, for forget all the people that are traveling in for the meeting. And so, like, you look at an investment like that and just literally, you know, and going back to our original earlier conversation, like within five minutes. your the likelihood of you converting that that incoming lead into an appointment goes up nine times if that engagement happens. So why not have a you know a customer experience platform that actually thanks them like somehow you read that they're in the booth and when they leave you thank them with a text message on the way out saying hey thanks for stopping by and Yeah, our s with our system, we our prototype, they just have to take a picture of their card or their badge.

That's it. There's nothing. And then then they then they just it automatically pulls up and they just have to say, Yeah, clarify it's a sales op or whatever. Yeah. Automatically put in and then three days after the show, because you want you don't want to do it too quick because people are No. getting dated, three, four days after the show, then all the follow ups will happen. Like and our system will literally force that to happen because people get so busy. And because you know how it is, it's the same thing.

If you you have a sales prospect or or a customer come by, there's a certain way that you're always responding. Hey, it was great to see you, blah, blah, blah. Have the template ready, have it already built, ready to go, and then have it send a reminder to the person to say, hey, these are the 10 that fall under your care territory or product line from it. You have an By the end of the day, you need to go through and edit it and change and then say that it's good, and then the system's gonna send it out in a day.

So just again, people aren't lazy. Well, I mean, some are. but they don't need to do it, it's just so complicated. It's so complicated. So it's like you have to automate, and that's the good thing about what software is supposed to do, is look for those points of friction, look for those gaps and say. This is gonna fill it in a in an easy way. It's not gonna be a difficult way to do it. And you have to be borderline incompetent or utterly apathetic, you know, to fail when it's when it's done right.

30:10 You know, it's so true. And it's I I I'm glad you brought that whole trade show experience up because that is a major gap and, you know, major leak zone when it comes to investing in in opportunities and failing and capturing, right? That's a probably one of the biggest, you know, aspects of in the med device, med tech space because so much of that so much of those opportunities aren't generated by LinkedIn and aren't generated by websites and aren't generated by cold email, they're generated in these trade shows and these conferences.

And if you're not capturing the right way, I mean that's a it's a big waste for everybody. And not following up. I mean, how many different I mean, you've probably been in these meetings as well. I I I'd I go and to a lot of trade shows and meet tons of my friends and colleagues at all the different booths. Invariably, half the time, it's like we gotta decide are we gonna come back to this? We gotta decide if we're gonna have as big a footprint. We gotta decide because and and it's not but what's interesting is you look at how busy their booths are.

And it's those same companies that that are complaining about we're not getting the ROI. And I'm like, well, I why are you complaining about HIMSS? Did HIMSS do something wrong or HLTH or HFMA or anything? No, you your booth is busy. This is a process a significant process problem. You were busy. You had a lot of customers there. You had a decent number of prospects there. People say, Well, we never made money. Or we don't make really any deals going to a trade show, we gotta be there.

I'm like, well, probably because you're the way you organized it and followed up sucks. So I don't think it will actually was RSNA's fault or CHIME's fault. I I think you just in I'm I'm not trying to, you know, cast shade at companies because it's it's really difficult. And so that's the reason why we're stepping into it. We're like, this is a massive problem. And and no one's fixed it yet. Like we already we've already thought through this whole process many times. Like we're just gonna had but you gotta you gotta idiot proof it, man.

We wrote a we wrote a book. I didn't write it, but I think I was the inspiration for it. It's called Executives Are Idiots. Just a short little funny ebook. And and the reason is, you know, it basically it's talking about how, you know, executives, if you give them something new, they pout and they'll stamp their, you know, hand feet and like, my gosh. And it's not because they're idiots, it's because their schedule's not their own. Like they go from meeting to meeting to meeting. And this is going on.

32:53 So the the if anything takes longer than about 30 seconds for them to figure out, they're going to pitch a fit. So we're like, we got to idiot proof this thing. Like we're not in the business of trying to create every bit of functionality that you can. We're like, what is the we have to take an 80/20 approach approach. Like what is 80% of what A salesperson or customer person or an event planner, what do they do day in and day out? All right, build the system to do that, make it easy, make it seamless.

And we're almost in the business of saying no, Terry, because everybody wants customization. Hey, Jeremy, can you guys do this? Hey, can you do this? And we run it through. Is that going to meet 80% of demand? No. Can we make it really easy to use? No. Then our answer is no. Like maybe we'll get back to it in three months or six months or in a year, but until there's broad appeal. For that feature, we don't we're not going to develop any Frankenstein code. That's really hard to do, right?

I mean, it's it's super hard to go back to customers and say, Nope, go to a sales prospect and go, Nope. I know there's a massive contract on the other side of this, but we we're not gonna do it because no one else cares. You care, you're the only one that cares, and we can't commit our entire business to adding more technical debt. And supporting something that literally only one customer cares about. We just can't do that. And you're you're you're opening yourself up to breaking something along the way too, right?

Yeah, yeah. So that's something that's working just fine. And you know, anytime you go into the system and you you create Frankenstein, you're breaking something. I mean, there's you know pretty hard not to sometimes. I think those are those are those are really cool things. And and is it like from a sales perspective, how Like from a field perspective and staging, how customizable is it to like, you know, cater towards one sales process which might be like MEDDIC versus you know another which might be a GAP methodology or something like that.

Is it fairly like flexible that way? can yeah, you can absolutely customize the MEDDIC if you want. We we built in all these different fields and workflows and reminders so that you can do that. but that was baked in from the beginning. So kind of the customization I'm talking about is someone will come in and say, Hey, when we log in, we want it to do XYZ. We're like, Why what what? You want it to go straight to surveys. You want us to change the code.

35:25 Like, no, I you know, so we get And it just happens, right? There's something so unique about their business. and we just have to say no. We just we can't. But in terms of we we know, ri it's super customized for fields because there's things our packages. So I went and looked at our sales packages versus our customers, it's just different. Like our the way we do seats and different things is just very, very different. Like our SKUs are very simple by design.

The w we look all the ones that we have approval to go look at, some are customers. I mean they got like twelve thousand SKUs I can't even keep it straight in my head. But they've got to customize it. And when they build their quotes, it's done like this and has to be sent at this time. And they want reminders to go out 120 days ahead with I wouldn't do it with a contract in it. I would want to set up a call, but some people want all the things put in.

I'm like, that's kind of a shock and all I wouldn't do. That's what they want to do. And I can't tell them no. We're not going to tell no. So the customization has to the the the personalization within the system has to do it, but it's kind of within specific boundaries that we just don't go beyond. Like someone may say, Hey, we want the system just to randomly send out pulses to our customers all the time. Based on this kind of thing. And we may look at it and go like that's a catastrophically bad idea.

Like I don't know why you'd want to do it. And so if we even even if we and we've had this happen actually, where we got multiple requests from customers, and I can't even remember what it was, but it was last month. And we looked at it and said, that is awful. That is an awful idea. I don't know. Did someone watch some stupid TED talk? Like, where is this coming from? Because there's like three customers. We just said no. So even though we may look at it and go, hey, for some reason, everybody and their dog, like Oprah Winfrey had somebody on and said ever every woman should get a go to a place that has a 64 slice CT and get a virtual colonoscopy twice a year.

I'm like, ugh, no, no. I mean, 64 slice CT at the time is great, virtual is great, but no, you shouldn't be doing it two times a year. Right. So it's one of those things when it didn't matter that a lot of our customers asked for it. I i i that's just a really bad idea that we can see down the road is gonna blow up in their face. So we just said, Nah, I'm not we're not gonna do that. Tell me about this, we spent a little time, you know.

I want to talk about the customer too, because I think we've got a few minutes left. And I think what's really interesting is that you have a sort of a customer life cycle kind of component to it. And that's probably a big piece of, you know, when I think about one of the leaky parts of a customer journey, it's on the retention side. And, you know, what a what a great opportunity to kind of close that piece up.

38:18 Oh, I'm glad you brought that up. I mean, that's in the early days of our company when people when we moved on from management when I shut the management consulting firm down. Well, I I didn't shut down, I just left. And and started Reaction was about voice of customer and customer feedback. That's really where we started. Part of it, it came back to I I remember doing calls with hospital executives about Epic. And then I would call a Cerner shop and an Eclipsys shop and a Meditech shop and whatever it is.

And same thing in PACS, right? You know, GE would complain about AMICAS, how could they be number one? And I just remember going back and and being like, well, why why was Epic's retention so high? Or like these days, like in other like Athena Health retention is really good and Sectra and some others. And so we we looked at that and said, okay, there's certain foundational principles. Like, like one, the product needs to be the product or the service needs to be what you sold it as, right?

Like, is it working? Does it meet the basic requirements or whatever it is? And you know this, you know, your past companies. As long as the product does the basics, it doesn't have to be the most advanced all the time because everybody, you know, competitors, Terry, they'll pass each other up on functionality or features. It just happens. What came down to is the culture of d are you gonna take care of the customer? If something goes wrong and everyone, even Almighty Epic has outages and gets hacked or whatever, but like Epic.

Throws the world at solving the problem, right? Doesn't make a lot of excuses historically, might be changing a little bit now. and so retention you talk about, and I have I've done a lot of posts on LinkedIn about this because I think everybody should share in my mental pathology or defects on this, the locking your customer base down is essential. You probably heard that saying, you can't out exercise a bad diet. You can't outsell a leaky customer base. No. You simply can't do it. You've you and you've seen it with other companies.

They sell, they sell and they market and sell like no one's business. They are selling like crazy, but they're constantly bleeding customers. And so it's are you close to your customers? Do you have programs in place that alert you to real customer issues? Is it raised to people that can make decisions? Is there a churn report built into the into the organization to say, hey, there's a problem. Here's what we're gonna do about it. Well, we heard you, we're listening, we're gonna do something about it.

41:02 Because at the end of the day, the service and the trust certainly mean means more than the product. It does. And and you get people that will say, Well, well, Epic doesn't have this and Oracle has this, or Epic doesn't have this, and Athena Health has this. And I said, Well, The one thing Epic has had historically is if they say they're gonna do something more than any of their competitors, they do it. That trust is a premium and you'll pay a premium for it. So we try to look at in our system as well, like, hey, you're not collecting any feedback from your customers.

How exactly do you really know? our account managers stay in really good touch. I'm like, well, that's like the worst grapevine ever. Like the story, like. Are they going to document it? Are they really going to tell what's going on? So you have to be getting feedback from customers. There's no other way around it. But how are you going close the loop? And then do you have something set up? So when a customer goes radio silent, because a customer going radio silent, like, hey, they didn't come to the webinar.

They didn't come to our event. They're not responding to emails. Like you need something that is looking at that proactively and raising the red flag. You have a problem. We have a real problem. you talk about the ideal customer profile. That is essential. But how do you know which one is you need to have programs in place to f to to hopefully try to get every customer to be an ICP, right? Or at least identify those that really are having great success so that you can hopefully model it across your organization, but also it serves to inform marketing and sales.

You were talking about that earlier in the conversation. So to me. An incredibly strong, robust, non-leaky customer base is will have everything. They'll sing your praises. You can use a bunch of them for reference site. You don't have to hide a bunch of customers. They're easier to take care of, right? They don't need as much. The TCO on really happy customers is much lower than TCO on just your own company morale, the teams that are having take place of it. The TCO is just lower. And it serves to embolden.

Your sales and marketing and make it more effective. Cause otherwise, think about it, we got a really well-functioning sales and marketing program and teams, we got a really bad customer team program. They're fighting you. So everything good you're doing, they're constantly undercutting what you're trying to do on the front end of the funnel, right? So to your point, eh it's literally everything. It's the most foundational thing. When we work with a new company, one of the things we I we I talk about is How strong is your customer base?

43:44 Prove it to me. Show me how strong it is. Then it's like, hey, use the system. It's not gonna cost you extra, but run these programs. Start getting this feedback, building these mechanisms, these alerting. If there's an unhappy customer gets alerted, it's follow-up and the right actions taken because I don't even care about helping you guys start building your sales and marketing programs until you you start patching some holes in your ship, right? Well, there's two points I wanna just kind of pull out on that.

Number one is Takes five to six times the amount of energy, time, and money to go get a new customer than it does to keep one. Number one. Number number two is even when you have customers that are unhappy about certain things in time, and this is anecdotal, this is you know, Terry experience, is that My strongest relationships with my customers over the years have been the ones where there were problems that were solved.

And so sometimes getting that feedback is, you know, people always go like, well, at the bad situation, and I always kind of have the fear of having to go deal with the bad situation. I have always just embraced it and said, what a great opportunity to make my relationship stronger with the customer. Yes. Because that that hardship if you come out of that hardship, that relationship is bonded better than ever.

That's that's perfectly said, Terry. That's absolutely right. it's a it's an incredible opportunity. Because as you you know this, bad things are always gonna happen. You can have the best performing company in the planet, like Apple, for example. Mm -hmm. Apple every once in a while stubs their toe pretty bad, right? But their loyalty is through the roof. Why? Because it's the exception, not the the rule. And especially in the B2B space, which is the one we We both work in.

That it is an amazing opportunity. Think I go back to high school. Some of my best friends were guys that actually bloodied my nose, literally got in a fight. Like we just were kind of rivals. We threw down after school or in a pickup game or something like that. Best friends, right? So same thing. So it really, I'm glad you brought that up. That's a really well said. It is an incredible opportunity that people should But now have a color, lean into and embrace. you, but it gives you the signals now too.

46:15 So it gives you the opportunity to kind of say, hey, let's go fix this. And I think that's to me, when you talk about CXM, that's that's a tool that provides for something that not just says, hey, something's going bad, but now you can actually make it better. And what a what what a great tool to do that with.

Well, good. totally agree. One more question for you, and it's it's it's a Yeah, yeah. standard question I ask everybody. And if current day Jeremy could go back and offer 22-year-old Jeremy one piece of advice, what he's learned and over the past years of you know success and failure and challenge, what would that one piece of advice be? It can be personal advice, it can be professional advice, it could be any type of advice, but What would be the one thing that you've learned over time that you go back and say, hey, if you're gonna do one thing, do this?

I have two things actually, I'm gonna say first is having humility to say you're sorry, personally and professionally. Like get the ego out and just be like, I'm sorry. Like no ego in it. Why am I trying to defend my actions? Stupid. Should be able to pull myself away with the situation, like I was wrong or we were wrong, right? Say sorry. Second is, I wish much earlier in my careers, this has bit me really hard professionally, is if I find I'm using the word potential to describe somebody, I should fire them immediately.

Because if I'm using the word potential, it means they're not doing what they are. I should have been much better at hiring for the intangibles, not the tangibles, not the experience. So for me, it's what are the intangibles? It's work ethic, it's personal integrity, it's intelligence and passion. You can't, there's no incentive plan that can make someone consistently do that. And if I'd have done better in my career earlier, At doing that and then acting when it became patently obvious that whoever's in the company or in the team isn't not angry at them.

It isn't like, oh my gosh, I hate these people. They didn't do anything wrong. But that's where there's so much friction in the business is when I hired someone or someone in my company hired someone because they had a great pedigree and they didn't hire for the intangibles. Because it's you can give somebody experience, you can't make them smarter, or you can't make them naturally harder work. or a more creative, right? So those would be the I know you asked for one, but those would the two things I wish if I go back to 22-year-old me to say, hey, buddy, look into these.

49:09 Well, we'll just call that a a mic drop right there. Jeremy Bikman, A pen drop. yeah. president at Reaction. What a great conversation today. Totally enjoyed it. And I can't wait to learn a little bit more about the system because I think it has a lot to offer. Well, thank you so much. This was awesome. I appreciate the time.