[MUSIC] >> Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders or in the front lines building it. In each episode, we'll speak with a visionary founder who's building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We'll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I'm your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Frontlines Media. Now, let's dive right into today's episode. [MUSIC] >> Hey everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today, we're speaking with Daniel West, CEO of Prospection, a patient-centric intelligence platform that raised over 36 million in funding. Daniel, how's it going? >> Hey, Brett, good to be here. Thank you for the opportunity. >> Not a problem, I'm super excited to have you. So I see you spent 17 years of your career here in Silicon Valley, and then you left, you went back home to Australia. So let's start there. Talk to us about your time in Silicon Valley and what you learned. >> Yes, so I was working for the Australians considering of a US software company called Mercury Interactive in Sydney for about four years and had the opportunity to go to the US. But what was supposed to be a two-year foreign assignment at headquarters? They had that two years turned into 17, living and working in Palo Alto, which I absolutely adore. And had the opportunity to work for some amazing companies while I was in the valley at Mercury Interactive. We grew the business to just under a billion dollars before getting acquired by HP for about four and a half billion. I then went to HP where I stayed for a few years, moved on to Informatica, then Salesforce, Oracle, Infoblox. And yeah, had a great time and then got pulled back to Australia for an opportunity actually during the pandemic, which for anyone, if we ever have another one of those, I don't recommend a foreign relocation in the middle of the global pandemic. It was not easy. >> Yeah, I can imagine it wasn't. Now, I don't want a fan girl too hard here, but when you were telling me in the pre-interview that you worked with Chris Lockheed, I got super excited. Obviously, I'm a big believer of category design. I've consumed all of Chris's content. I would guess anyone listening to this podcast also is very, very aware of Chris. So tell us what was it like working with Chris and what did you learn about category design and category creation? >> So yeah, I had the opportunity to work with not just Christopher Lockheed, but with some amazing executives and amazing business people during that time at Mercury Interactive and HP Software. Christopher was the architect, I suppose, of a category that Mercury Interactive bought to market, which is what we call business technology optimization or BTO. And that was really a big driver of the value that ultimately HP saw in acquiring that business. In terms of what I learned during that process, number one is you have to be different, not better, right? And anyone who's a fan of Chris's work will know that. And number two is that category design is not just about the product. And number three is getting clarity around the problem you're solving in the market and then being able to really clearly articulate how you're solving that differently, either through the product that you're bringing to market, the business model that you're deploying or the company that you're building are absolutely critical elements of category design. During that period, also I had the opportunity to work with some fantastic sales leaders like Joe Sexton, who went on to have absolutely awesome career, post-makery, and also Subasamian. So I've been very lucky to have some people who are now in the industry recognized as absolutely stellar in their respective fields and be able to have them influence my career in the way that I approach my work. Yeah, that's amazing and you can see the inspiration there. And I think that's a good segue here to talk about the category that you're creating. Before we dive into the actual category, let's just go back a little bit and talk about the company and the platform. What does the platform do? Sure, so preservation has built a patient-centric intelligence platform. So that's essentially a SaaS-based data analytics and dashboard solution. And we sell that to commercial leaders within pharma to address a problem that we call care and surely. So just maybe to explain a little bit about what care and surely is, we have a lot of people within this business, both the founders and the team broadly, who've been working with pharma throughout their career. And what we were able to identify is that pharma has this care and surely problem that has both a significant impact on patient outcomes. So the actual patient experience of what happens to a patient, we tend to work in specialty disease areas, like cancer, immunology, hematology, et cetera. So the nasty things, but also market performance. And what we found was that during the process of a pharma company bringing a new drug to market, they lose market share because of leaps. And these leaps suboptimal care outcomes for the patient. So they might be things like the patient not getting the right test, they might not be getting the right pretreatment in a most timely fashion. They're not actually adhering to the treatment that they're giving. So they get a prescription or they get told to take treatment then they don't take it as often or as frequently as they should. And then that ends up with patients not actually receiving the most optimal treatment. That has impacts, obviously, for the patient. So in research, we identified 40% of patients aren't receiving care in line with evidence-based guidelines. And so they could be getting something that's either not effective or in the worst case could potentially be harmful for their condition. And that not only impacts clearly the outcomes for those patients, it's also a really expensive problem for pharma. So there's some research out there that says that around these issues, they're losing about 600 billion on adherence and about 20 billion annually on failed drug launches. So that's the problem that we set out to solve. Talk to us about the decision to create a new category instead of trying to disrupt or transform an existing category. Yeah, sure. So I think the key marker for knowing when a new category is required is when there's a lot of pain with the existing one. Yeah, for anyone who's involved in pharma, it's no secret that the current category or what's called real-world data in healthcare is pretty problematic. It's messy, it's disparate, it's quite hard to turn that data into meaningful insights that an organization can use to drive changes to their go-to-market strategy or to drive changes to subscriber behaviors, to improve patient outcomes or, you know, patient support programs into various locations and so on. And so when we think about this idea of patient-centric intelligence, it really takes that it was really aimed to evolve, I suppose, that real-world data category and by taking that heavy lifting out of the equation. So what we've found is that we haven't actually had to convince people that this category is valuable and desirable, we've just had to educate. And so doing that education process has meant completely rebuilding our positioning, completely rebuilding all of our sales messaging, completely rebuilding our website, all of our customer-facing materials and even changing the focus of the organization in terms of who we talk to within our customers. So prior to 12, 18 months ago, our focus was to go in and speak to the business intelligence analytics teams within these pharma organizations who, funnily enough, have invested a great deal in building capabilities to analyze real-world data. And so what we have found to be effective is not necessarily trying to replace what they're doing but to evolve what they're doing but to start with going and having conversations with the business leaders who actually need more meaningful insights around patient journey, prescriber behaviors so that they can drive more effective go-to-market execution or what we call go-to-market precision. And that's something that they're not that they weren't getting today with the current work that was being done within this real-world data category. This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media, podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, "I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build." Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. Now, back to today's episode. Something you said there that I want to dive into it, which I think is very interesting is this idea that there's a lot of stuff that happened outside of just marketing when it comes to category creation. What I hear and a lot of the conversations that I have with founders and marketers is they view category creation as something that you can just do a landing page and see how it goes. But as I understand it, it's a business strategy and it really affects the entire organization, the go-to-market, every aspect of the business really changes. What were those conversations like for you as you were deciding that this was a category creation play? Because it does require a lot of work and it does change the entire trajectory or can change the trajectory of the company. Yeah, so number one, I couldn't agree with you more. Category design is not just changing your marketing messaging. It is actually changing the way that you execute your business strategy as an organization. So number one is it has to be, for it to be effective. And I've had the opportunity to be in a position at a number of different companies where I've engaged in this kind of category creation effort. And what I have found is that if it's not being led by the CEO, it's highly unlikely that it's going to work. It's either got to be led by the CEO or the CEO has to make it a core pillar. It has to believe that it is a core pillar in their success and the success of the business. Otherwise, it's probably not worth engaging in the first place. So that's the first thing. Secondly, you're right, there are a number of elements to it aside from just the messaging. It's how you go out and it's getting clarity around that problem that you solve and really understanding and being able to articulate how do you define the problem and articulate it in such way that it is different to what else is already being talked about in the market. Then it's being able to build all of your messaging and sales enablement. The identification of your buyer, as I said, we've made that switch from selling predominantly to business intelligence analytics teams to selling to commercial leaders within pharma. It's all of those elements that are required to make a category design process truly work. And probably the next, the big one is you have to stick at it. There's not something that you do and you run it for six months. This is something that becomes ingrained in the business for the foreseeable future. I had another founder on and they were talking about their journey when they were creating a category and they said one of the hardest moments that they encountered was when they started to realize that they were losing business because of that decision. There were deals that they could have taken. They could have morphed the platform or changed the message to capture some of this demand for existing categories and they had to say no to that business and yes to their category efforts. Have you had a similar experience? Yes, we have. We have certainly made the strategic decision to turn away from business, from revenue, but we would otherwise have been quite happy to take because of the decision to really focus on this category around a patience and intelligence SaaS platform. It sounds easy to do that. I think sometimes when someone's listening to you telling that advice, you're going to have to give up revenue, but it's okay because you're creating a category. What's that actually like when you're sitting there trying to grow this startup and build this wildly successful company? What's that like when you are in that seat saying no to revenue? Is that hard? Yes, it's hard because as you can imagine, as early-stage business, every dollar of revenue is important. Every dollar of revenue helps reduce your cash burn, which in this day and age is a very key priority. So yes, it's hard, but ultimately it comes down also to priorities, right? Like everybody, we have limited resources. And if we're spending those limited resources trying to extract revenue from something that is not in line with our overall strategy versus spending our limited resources, trying to extract revenue on something that is in line with our overall strategy, then I know which one of those two options I'm going to pick every day of the week. And as you've proceeded with this category strategy, does anything come to mind that you think you got wrong? And when you look back at it, you think, "Oh, man, I wish we just would have made this one decision or done this one thing differently." Does anything like that come to mind? Yes, I think for me, Brett, as you mentioned earlier, I've got a lot of experience. My whole career has been in software, SaaS, and tech companies. I've had the good fortunes work for some of the best enterprise B2B software sales organizations in the world. And I think, to be honest, one of the things that I needed to do when I joined perspective was, and it didn't happen immediately, that I had to let go of my existing biases from my previous roles. So when I joined, I had preconceived notions on how this is essentially an enterprise B2B SaaS business. We're selling two pharma, long-sales cycles, selling to now to senior decision-makers. We're selling a business solution that has real business outcomes for the customer. And my thinking was, "I've done this multiple times before. I know what a go-to-market model should look like. I know what types of sales roles we need and how to align them to the sales process. I know how we need to incentivize these people." But what I learned is that number one, doing that at a company of this scale versus the scale that I've worked out before, it's quite different. You don't have the luxury of the level of specialization that you might have at an Oracle or a Salesforce or what have you, obviously. But also the type of people that are required in a business that is very focused on a specific industry are quite different. So for people to be successful in this business, you need to have a fairly unique combination of skill sets. You need to have clinical knowledge because obviously understanding the disease areas that we work in and the disease areas that our customers work in is very key. You have to have a lot of what I would call data mastering and deep analytics capability, maybe not to the level of a data scientist, but you have to be able to talk the language of data. And you need to really have a good understanding of pharma and how pharma works. And that is an art unto itself. And so being able to just go out and hire your really effective enterprise B2B software salespeople wasn't really an option. And so the decision that I ultimately came to was that we needed to focus on teaching sales process, commercial foundation, sales fundamentals to the team that we had in place that did have that clinical knowledge and analytical expertise and knowledge of pharma. And that has turned out to be a far more effective approach. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Co, a marketing leader's best friend in these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit globaltalent.co. If we just look at generally go to market, is there something that you see companies routinely get wrong? Is there any go to market advice that you see on LinkedIn that just leaves you shaking your head thinking that this is wrong? It can't be the case. Anything like that come to mind? I think one thing that I've seen on LinkedIn certainly and also recently is the idea that volume, volume is good in terms of like sales outreach and things like that. I think that obviously you have to cast your net wide, but I think more important than quantity, quality of the conversations that you have is always going to be the highest predictor of successfully moving to the next step in the sales process, whether that's the first meeting or the second meeting or ultimately getting to a deal. And quality of conversation in my mind comes down to clarity. It's being really clear around what is that problem you're solving? And then really being able to answer what I've considered to be three fundamental questions in sales, which is why should the customer change? Why should the biggest competitor in any sales process is always the status quo, right? So if you can overcome the questions like, why change now? And then why us? Then that will be a high quality conversation and a high quality sales process. And I don't see enough focus in the market and in all these influences and whatnot around those fundamentals. I want to also ask about the lessons learned as you took over the reins of the company in 2023. So obviously our audience, they're mostly founders, I would say 90% of them now are early stage founders. What advice would you have for them of when they know it's time to bring in a CEO to continue to execute and grow on their vision? Like what are the indicators that that may be time to consider making that type of change? So I think probably a couple of things. So number one, if you just are about to take a significant amount of someone else's money, and that's putting in place a scalable, repeatable commercial foundation is not something that you personally as the founder have done before and have experience in, then I would suggest that either bringing in a CEO who has that experience or bringing in someone who is CRO or COO, the commercial officer who has that experience that can take the lead on that side of the business is probably a good idea because investors ultimately want good custodians of their money. So that would be one of the key indicators. I think the other key indicator is when you get to the point where your solution, you've recognized that you're offering, you know the problem you're solving, you have successfully sold solution to that problem to the point where you can identify a consistent ideal customer profile. And there are enough of those ideal customer profiles in your theatre of operation, if you like, to make it clear that it is a repeatable business. At that point, you really need to bring in someone who can essentially operationalize or industrialize your business and make it repeatable in an efficient way. Founders are amazing at going into a new market, understanding what works, what resonates, their understanding of a particular customer time that you're working with or the industry for whom you're solving a problem for and how the technology that you've built applies to that is an amazing skill set and one that I would never attest to have or will we ever develop. But equally, it's not scaled. And so once you've demonstrated that there is a market opportunity out there that requires scale and repeatability, that would be the time to bring in somebody who has those skill sets. How do you evaluate that? As you're doing those interviews or considering bringing in someone to be CEO, how do you even try to understand if that person's going to be the right fit and has those skills? Well, number one would be demonstrated experience that having done it before, somebody who can clearly and with an appropriate level of detail and specificity, talk about the steps and the foundation stones that they put in place in a previous business and the specific result to build those commercial foundations to make something repeatable, to make a sales process more effective and more efficient and who can then demonstrate or talk to the specific results that that change drove for that business or ideally a number of businesses that they've worked at. So that would be one thing is kind of ask performance is the best, best predictor of future performance. And then I think the other thing is asking questions and getting answers that demonstrate that they know what the fundamentals actually are. Amazing. Now, what about for the other side? Let's imagine that you're communicating here to the non-founder CEO who's just being dropped into a company. What advice for them? What's the survival guide look like? How do you ensure that you're successful and the company is successful? Yeah, so I think it probably goes without saying that I think having good relationship with the founders and being able to determine how the combination of your skill sets is, you know, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So I think that's really important. In my case, I've been extremely fortunate. We have two of our three co-founders still in the business. They are both not only amazing humans. Actually, all three of the founders are amazing humans, but the two that are still in the business are not only amazing humans, but they're also extremely pragmatic. And they know what they're good at and they know where my skill set can complement theirs. And so that's been a very overall or fairly seamless transition, which is great. And I think I've been very fortunate from that perspective. In terms of it's more on the relationships side with the founders, I think some of my observations or lessons or advice, however you want to put it for non-founders CEOs, are probably kind of in the following areas. Number one is when I came in, you know, it was really important to create clarity. And there are a lot of cool things being done in the organization and a lot of really interesting intellectual challenges that were being solved. But we weren't clear on what that problem was that we were solving, what was the value of solving it. So I think number one is getting really clear on the fundamentals. So what is the problem you're solving in the market? Who is the ideal customer who has that problem? And what is the value to them of solving that problem? Second is getting really clear around your priorities. So what are the priorities for the business? What areas are we going? What markets are we going to focus on? What are the key metrics that we're going to try and move? What are the priorities for a product roadmap perspective? What are the company targets we're going to set? And what are the incentive structure that we're going to put in place? Because ultimately, priorities, targets, and incentives all drive alignment across the organization. And then thirdly is really getting clarity around what are the processes that you need to establish that will drive repeatability from an execution perspective. Because as most know today, you're doing things on a one-off or a bespoke basis, doesn't drive repeatability, which means ultimately your margin suffer. So that would be the first thing is really create clarity. Second is if you've taken funding, especially kind of series beyond funding, you have to keep part of your role, whether it's as the non-founder CEO or the founder CEO is to be a good custodian of your investors' money. And that means don't invest it too far ahead of the curve. It's a tough balance, but you need to balance the investment in products in go-to-market that you're making to secure future revenue. You need to balance that because the spend is immediate, but the revenue isn't. And the revenue isn't guaranteed. So you can spend all the money and then not get the revenue, and you'll have a set of very unhappy investors. And then the other way is you have to be very deliberate about how you expand. So everyone wants to grow, everyone wants to expand as quickly as possible, but sometimes expanding too quickly can actually be a negative for your business. So you can get take, you can have a marquee customer, for example, that wants to take you into different geographies, and you end up with multiple geographies at the same time that you don't have the infrastructure to support, and that becomes problematic. So it's very much a balancing act. Third, it's never too early to build that commercial foundation that enables scale. So as I said earlier, as soon as you get to that point where you've identified the problem, the customer profile, and you've proven that it is a problem that is occurring frequently enough in the market to make it worth solving in a scalable way, you need to build that commercial foundation. So that's defining and documenting that problem you solve, who you solve it for, and the value of solving it. It's being very clear around what is that core value proposition of your product or solution. So I boil it down to four fundamental things, right? Does it make your customer money? Does it save the money? Does it reduce their risk? Or does it save them time? Or any value proposition in B2B can pretty much be boiled down to one of those four things. As I said earlier, creating a process for answering key questions with the prospect to get them to move forward, so the why change, why change now, and why us. And then you have to capture all of that, what I call value messaging in your sales process, which are essentially your best practices for selling, and how you're going to operate the business from a sales leadership perspective into some sort of document, a playbook, a document, online, whatever, but you need to capture it so that as you hire new people, you have a way of bringing them up to speed quickly and being able to put in place basic revenue operations capabilities so that you can measure progress. Because ultimately, those things that I just talked about is how you industrialize system of work. And that is what creates that commercial foundation and what ultimately leads to being able to scale repeatedly with repeatability in an efficient way. Amazing. I love it. All right, Daniel, we are over on time here, so we're going to have to wrap up. I feel like there's still another couple of hours of conversation that we could have, so we'll have to bring you on for a part two, maybe a part three, sometime in the future. But before we wrap up here, if there's any founders that want to follow on with your journey, where should they go? You can find me on LinkedIn. Awesome. Daniel, thanks so much, really appreciate it. Thank you very much, Brett. It was a pleasure. Good luck. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Frontlines Media, Silicon Valley's leading podcast production studio. If you're a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you on the next episode. [music]
