Why you sometimes need to put your marketing hat on

Why You Sometimes Need To Put Your Marketing Head On

[00:00:00] Alexander: Welcome to another episode of the effective statistician. And yes, this is another Friday episode. So it is just [00:00:10] me talking about a couple of different thoughts I have about how you can become more effective. In last [00:00:20] week’s episodes, I talked about what you need to do to create value. And I talked about a couple of different roles [00:00:30] you need to have.

[00:00:31] Alexander: To actually drive value, create value. And one of these roles is [00:00:40] marketing. And you may think like, well, marketing? Well, I’m not doing advertisements. [00:00:50] Yes. And this is where a pretty big misunderstanding is about marketing. Marketing is [00:01:00] much more than advertisements. Advertisements is what you see as a consumer as one of the [00:01:10] outputs.

[00:01:10] Alexander: of marketing. There’s much more to marketing than the advertisements. And some people even say marketing is too important [00:01:20] to just leave it to the marketeers. And I completely agree with this. Now, marketing is let’s kind of [00:01:30] First discuss how it is different from sales. And here I have my very easy, my own solution here.

[00:01:39] Alexander: And that is [00:01:40] just by the number of people that you talk to. Sales is one to one. You have one person that you want to convince. Marketing is one to many. You [00:01:50] talk to a whole Market. Marketing. Yeah? Very easy. Now, what also is included in [00:02:00] marketing? First, marketing is also a lot about listening. Not just speaking.

[00:02:08] Alexander: You need [00:02:10] to understand the needs, the pain points, the challenges of your stakeholders. That you want [00:02:20] to market to. So, in the last episode, we talked about who are your stakes, stakeholders. So, this is also people [00:02:30] in your direct line of management. But also, also people that you help with your studies, with your analysis, with [00:02:40] your trainings, with your communication, all these kind of different things.

[00:02:46] Alexander: You need to understand their pain points. You need to [00:02:50] understand their constraints that they work in. There are time limitations, there are budget limitations, there [00:03:00] are goals, there are incentives. How do they work? What are they allowed to do? What aren’t [00:03:10] they allowed to do? All these kinds of different things.

[00:03:12] Alexander: You need to understand that. And that is very, very different from stakeholder to stakeholder. [00:03:20] That is also something that good marketing helps you understand, you can segment your market into, okay, these are the people that [00:03:30] want high quality for a reasonable price. These are the people that want to have speed.

[00:03:38] Alexander: Cost isn’t [00:03:40] a problem and yeah, quality is just a given. And then there’s others that completely think differently about. What [00:03:50] you need. So the other things that marketing has is you need to have Competitive [00:04:00] insights and when you know think like well, I work as a Within a company. I don’t have competition.

[00:04:08] Alexander: Well, actually [00:04:10] you do So first of all, you’re probably not the only statistician. The second thing is, [00:04:20] you probably have competition from other functions. Who else could do certain things? [00:04:30] Yeah, maybe you say, well, I, I’m the only one who has access to these data. So that is, I have a monopoly [00:04:40] here. Yeah.

[00:04:41] Alexander: That is for these things, but of course your customers probably want a lot of more [00:04:50] things than just the analysis of these data where only you have access to. Maybe they want to understand what the [00:05:00] competition is doing. Do they ask you about it? Or do they ask someone else about it? Maybe someone, maybe someone even outside of your [00:05:10] organization, outside of your company.

[00:05:14] Alexander: These are competitive insights. Understanding what are all [00:05:20] the problems. The pain points that your stakeholders have, that are [00:05:30] fulfilled, that are serviced by people other than you, that maybe have similar skill sets to you. [00:05:40] And maybe they even charge much more than you. And maybe even they deliver less quality than you, at a [00:05:50] slower speed than you.

[00:05:51] Alexander: Oh, I see that all the time. Yeah, that there are certain parts like, let’s say marketing and [00:06:00] they spend a lot of time. money on understanding why the other study is different from the competition is [00:06:10] different than your study. And they don’t ask you because they don’t even know that you exist. Or the [00:06:20] Rural evidence department, they might outsource all kinds of different analysis of observational data [00:06:30] just because they don’t think that you can do that as an organization.

[00:06:36] Alexander: Or maybe they have some bad experiences, or they think like, [00:06:40] well, I’ll always be treated last because you, you know, your stats organization always focuses on clinical trial data. And whenever there’s some kind of [00:06:50] pressure, well, you know, the observational data falls over and therefore the real world evidence people always outsource their work.[00:07:00] 

[00:07:00] Alexander: There is competition. There is definitely competition for you, unless, yes, for some areas where you have a monopoly. [00:07:10] But if you just want to work in this monopolies setting, well, you can’t create more value. [00:07:20] You restrain yourself. Now. As we are talking about marketing in this episode, I want to talk [00:07:30] about some great quotes by one of my favorite marketing gurus.

[00:07:36] Alexander: And he’s also probably one of the [00:07:40] most famous marketing gurus in the world. And I’m talking about Seth Godin. If you have never heard about Seth Godin, that’s completely fine. You [00:07:50] don’t work in marketing. If you work in marketing and you have never heard about it, That would be a little bit strange. That is like being a [00:08:00] statistician and never have heard about Fisher or Gauss or.

[00:08:05] Alexander: Some of these guys. Yeah, so it’s that kind of level. So, [00:08:10] Sesgo then has a couple of different quotes that I want to talk about in this episode. The first is, if you can’t state your position in eight [00:08:20] words, you don’t have a position. If you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position.

[00:08:28] Alexander: And here position means, [00:08:30] your position compared to your competitors. What kind of [00:08:40] value you create better, faster cheaper than your competitors. And [00:08:50] there you of course need to understand who are your competitors and what is the market that you are in. And so you [00:09:00] need to understand what value you create and which markets you operate and what is your unique position [00:09:10] there.

[00:09:11] Alexander: And that is of course something that you choose. That is not something that is God given. That is something that you can [00:09:20] design. The second really interesting quote is people don’t believe what you tell them. [00:09:30] They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell [00:09:40] themselves.

[00:09:40] Alexander: Yes, just because you go to someone says, and you say, I’m right. I know how to do these kinds of things. [00:09:50] Doesn’t. Convince the other person,

[00:09:53] Alexander: they might be more convinced if you have a track record, [00:10:00] they might. And then they will be even more convinced that you can do these nice cool analysis and you can do these great presentations [00:10:10] in front of key opinion leaders. If. A colleague of them, a friend of them, tells, hey, I love to work with Fred [00:10:20] the statistician because he’s always a great presenter and he interacts really, really well with key opinion leaders, with the FDA, with the EMA, with [00:10:30] senior management, whatsoever.