The Next CMO Podcast: From Marketing Manager to CMO, the Remarkable Career of Kaycee Kalpin of Premier

Kelsey: Kaycee, thank you so much for joining the next CMO podcast today. We’re really excited to have you on the show, especially before the long weekend. Love to dig into your story about how you started as a marketing manager and have now become a CMO at Premier. So just tell me a little bit about yourself and your role there.

Kaycee: Yeah, for sure. Thanks so much for having me, Kelsey and Peter. We’re gonna have fun. I’m in a fun mood. It’s the weekend before a holiday. I’m really excited. Again, Kaycee Kalpin, Chief Marketing Officer of Premier Inc. Which is really a company that touches virtually every decision in healthcare.

And I’ll talk a little bit more about that throughout the podcast. But Gosh, my story is kind of a little bit of a Cinderella story, so I hope you bear with me for a minute. But I was working in healthcare and in DC from kind of a legislative and policy perspective, and my husband and I picked.

Like four cities that we wanted to go check out. And we ended up Cho choosing [00:01:00] Charlotte to sort of start a family. And Premier was one of the most prominent healthcare companies in Charlotte. And so I just networked my way in. I mean, shamelessly. Like I met everyone on LinkedIn. I would show up where they were speaking on panels, and eventually got a job with Premier as a marketing manager, which was awesome.

And the rest is history. Marketing manager, director of marketing, senior director of marketing, vice president of marketing, most recently Chief Marketing Officer. I will say that the ceo, Mike Alkire, has been not only a supporter of mine, but really a sponsor of mine. He’s very supportive of women in the boardroom, women at the executive level.

And he has, he kind of took me under my wing when I was a senior director and taught me a ton about the business. And so here we are.

Peter: So that was what, about six weeks? It took from beginning to end.

Kaycee: Oh yeah, six weeks, nine years. Same

Peter: Yeah. Well that is pretty incredible. So [00:02:00] nine years is an incredible run in, in that really pretty short period of time to go from a marketing manager all the way up to to the chief marketing officer and tell people a little bit more about just sort of the overall scale and scope in, in what premieres primary business.

Kaycee: Sure. Yeah. Actually the day after I started, we had our ipo. So we are a publicly traded healthcare company. We have really our main client base, our hospitals and health systems. We work with about 4,400 of them across the nation, which is the majority of all hospitals and health systems in the nation.

We also work across the continuum of care. We work with biopharma and med device. We work with payers, large self-insured employer. Really the entire healthcare ecosystem. The reason for that is, like I said, we really can kind of touch any decision in healthcare from research and [00:03:00] development.

To the actual clinical delivery of care. We have one of the largest HIPAA compliant databases in the industry that is really used every day to identify best practices to refine models of care and to help these customers pinpoint opportunities for waste reduction, which is a big issue in healthcare.

Can you imagine, Peter, if we, and Kelsey, if we had that kind of database for marketing, how efficient we would be

Peter: Yeah, we’re working on that. Yeah. It’s it is amazing. And I’ve got some experiences we talked before in the healthcare industry and in, its messy and complicated, I think, for all the right reasons, because it’s a very complicated kind of thing. Obviously, people’s care and the healthcare system is complex.

And it’s going through a significant transition, obviously and. Talk to me a little bit about how just the rapid acceleration of things like remote care, as an example, some of those things affected a [00:04:00] premier in affected you and your marketing team as the way you started to, to market to these customers in the healthcare systems.

Kaycee: Absolutely. Interestingly, often people find this interesting, maybe 60 days before the pandemic we, I decided to Agile certified my team. And so there’s an agile marketing consultant out there that was just fantastic and we worked on applying agile principles that you usually see in software engineering to marketing.

And really all that meant was doing more with. Getting rid of the waste. Really kind of combining efforts around sprints, getting work done, stacking hands on what is getting done in a sprint and what isn’t. So pandemic hits, everyone goes virtual. And we have this tool to be able to do standups every day and really figure out what’s important and what isn’t to get done.

What I will say about the pandemic [00:05:00] is, in b2b, and maybe this is even true in B2C marketing, Or in B2C in general, the true test of whether you are a vendor or a partner is how you react when your customers are really struggling, like really struggling. And if you think about what happened with healthcare their hos, the hospitals were flooded.

They were dealing with product and supply chain shortages. They were reusing masks day to day. They were. In a really bad place in terms of the global supply chain, they are struggling with labor shortages. They don’t have enough nurses to care for patients financial strain because the entire model by which they built their businesses has completely crumbled.

And everybody’s in the emergency room with this thing that we know nothing about because we have no data. And so, with my team’s newly found gift in agile marketing and with my customers, Newly new struggles. We sort of flipped the script and basically said, We’re just [00:06:00] not gonna sell to them.

We are going to give them every component of information they need to survive this pandemic in hopes that on the other side, they’ll see us as an even more strategic partner. And so we kind of became sort of like central command for Covid communications.

Kelsey: Wow.

Peter: Well, that’s it’s really amazing and it’s a incredible thing that the premier would once see that and see the opportunity. I was thinking as you were talking about this, Wow, that’s a great opportunity to tell people about that. But there’s then sort of this weird sincerity thing that happens.

So how do you think. It, how do you think about communicating what you’re doing to your customers? Or do you just not, Do you just do it and let it sort of, osmotically create brand value between what Premier is doing and what your customers need?

Kaycee: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to explain the level of commitment that the staff at [00:07:00] Premier had during and continues to have during the pandemic. I mean, I’m talking about people that. That were previously at a desk and got badged at hospitals to start providing care or doing, anything that the system needed us to do.

Contacting contacts at an airline that could airlift supplies from one place to the next. I mean, just like really rolling up your sleeves and there wasn’t really time to brag about it, it was just like, let’s get it done. For the betterment of patients, for the betterment of these health systems.

And on the other side of all of this, we will have learned, we will have given what, the shirts off of our back and we will be better partners for them. It just, there wasn’t a time for marketing. I will say, Peter, for some of the, sophisticated campaign marketers out there, we had several.

Products, applications, data and technology offerings that could really dramatically help them that we needed to communicate [00:08:00] about including the predictability of supply shortages, for example, like PPE that we all heard about on the news. And so we got really sophisticated with data to say, okay. In these certain regions, zip codes, states, cities, Covid is surging, right?

It is so hot right now that there is no way they’re gonna pay attention to us. To us. They’re not on social media, so we can’t advertise to them and get their attention. They’re probably getting a million emails a day. And so we sort of used that as a trigger to say who’s in a campaign and who’s out. Because there were some that were more susceptible to tools and technologies that could prepare them for the next wave.

And then there were some that were just so underwater that it would be completely senseless to reach out.

Peter: Yeah it makes a lot of sense and I’d imagine. In, in, in your world. So I think you said you have about 4,400 hospitals and health systems as customers. So that’s a significant [00:09:00] chunk of the US based healthcare system, obviously. So a, as a marketing team, I assume part of what you need to do is basically.

Drive more and more value into the existing. So how much is about sort of getting the base to do more with Premier versus introducing either new hospitals or health systems or as you said it could be it could be employers, it could be, it’s about different segments. So how do you think about sort of the segmenting the marketing opportunity for Premier?

Kaycee: Yeah, if you listen to our investor calls or the messaging around how we talk to investors about growth, it’s a lot about adjacent markets for us. So not being so dependent on revenue from providers, but diversifying our business such that we can do and sell more to pharma, to bio and med device companies, to payers.

But the reality is, We can’t do that without a base, [00:10:00] without our strong base, without retaining our base, without improving the performance of our base. And so I honestly just kind of giggle now that ABM account based marketing is like such a trendy word. And everybody’s like, What is ABM and how do you do abm?

And there are all these technologies cuz Premier’s been doing abm. 30 years . I mean, truly, you know what it is understanding accounts, understanding buying committees, aligning your marketing to a sales account plan making sure that you’re customizing your message based on what the account and the personas within the account need.

Truly that’s 90% of what we do. So that’s a really interesting question. And again, I always just kind of laugh when we’re like, what’s abm

Kelsey: Well, it’s not like healthcare, like these massive healthcare companies and hospitals are popping up on a day to day basis too. Sense to obviously do that account based marketing strategy and that really customized [00:11:00] messaging, especially when you’re going through something like a pandemic. I guess my question for you is, we talked a little bit in the beginning about the importance of being agile, and I think from my understanding and maybe our listeners too, like what can you do besides, take a consulting class to, to actually get your team to be agile and make sure you’re constantly, making those changes in real time that you need to, in order to perform as, as well as you need to.

Kaycee: I think that’s such a great question, Kelsey, and also. My opinion here could be really helpful to someone kind of in the earlier stages of their career. , and again, this is only my opinion, but I think we’ve worked really hard over the past 10, 15 years since social media has become very prominent and digital has become very prominent in the sales cycle.

I think we’ve worked really hard to establish centers of excellence in marketing, right? Like automation. You have automation experts where all they do is automation day in and day [00:12:00] out. You have digital experts who know SEO and who. Absolutely can build a digital campaign and deploy digital ads and do that in incredible ways.

You have content experts and you have PR experts, and all across the marketing department, you have all of these, centers of excellence that specialize in what they do. They’re silos. And sometimes one is in that capacity and sometimes the other is over capacity. And so what Agile does is it breaks down the silos and it aligns a matrixed group of individuals to goals to get things done, which naturally requires people to kind of work outside of their comfort zone like.

Me, I’m not a designer. I have no design experience, but, and my team gets a little worried when I do, but I’m in Canva designing social cards. Like, why not? I can do it. I have, I wanna stay fresh on my skills. [00:13:00] And so it really kind of allows people to. Experiment and other verticals to get out of their center of excellence and think more holistically about the goals of marketing, about how to achieve those KPIs in a team matrixed environment.

And I think that’s important for those that are young or in the middle of their career and looking to advance because. You can only get so far as being head of demand gen, right? If you wanna be a cmo, you really have to cross train your mind. You have to know the budget, you have to understand the operations you have to know the campaigns, you have to know the business.

And so I think that is what Agile has really provided for our team.

Peter: So Kaycee, what if you think in your transition from marketing manager to cmo, what was the biggest gap you needed to fill in your experience base as you went through that journey over, over nine years?

Kaycee: It was not, What I will say, Peter, is it was not only the gap in my experience base, but it was an organizational [00:14:00] gap as well. And I think it was even an industry gap, an industry gap, which was attribution. I mean, how hard is attribution, right? Everyone that is a marketer on the call can agree that no one can really nail attribution.

We are pretty close to nailing it at this point. And actually I just promoted someone on my team to a senior director over this division, and I’m so excited for her because I took her under my wing. Early on in her career, and she helped me really solve this problem, which is how does sales use Salesforce?

How do they optimize Salesforce in order to get marketing attribution of campaigns? And why does that matter? Like if I were a salesperson, why would I wanna give marketing attribution? It’s my opportunity to close, right? And, so what’s in it for them? When you start seeing leads, Awareness, influence transitioning into sales qualified opportunities transitioning into [00:15:00] revenue.

And you can put a number on that revenue number in a it, in a, on that revenue amount and impact in a B2B world, people start taking you really seriously. And so I think that’s kind of been my imprint on this organization at this point, but also something the industry as a whole has been going through.

Peter: So one of the things that’s complicated in in the concept that you were just bringing up is there’s always a line between Real meaningful value creation versus credit seeking. And I and I’m a big believer in, and I wrote about it in my book, The Next CMO that I always have to put up here.

The

Kaycee: a great way Peter.

Peter: Thank you, Kaycee. I did not pay Kaycee to say that, by the way. So,

Kaycee: Not yet, at least.

Peter: One, one of the things that one of the things that I’m a big believer in is sort of seeking the truth and looking at things scientifically and actually rather than sort of getting in this mode as marketers, we’re [00:16:00] often focused on sort of positioning and spinning things almost.

And the reality is we need to look at data in a way that is accurate because we’re trying to make meaningful business decisions based on that data. How do you factor that in when you talk about sort of making sure that you’re appropriately identifying sources of value that marketing is creating but not overdoing it and not, So one of, one of my, and I’m moving from question to speech.

I apologize. But one of, one, one of the things that drives me crazy is that when people focus so much of their effort on the idea of marketing influence, As an example versus where you discreetly independently creating net new value in marketing. So it sounds like you’ve got an amazing person at Premier who does this?

How do you, And in she think about that idea of making sure that you are appropriately defining sources of [00:17:00] value creation and not overstepping.

Kaycee: Another really good question and I’ll try to answer it. What I will preface this with is I have. Been successful and I have failed. So, , this isn’t like the magic, the magic answer, but what I will say is that you can easily get lost in tracking attribution and easily get lost and miss the point of tracking marketing’s contribution to top line revenue.

Right? You really have to figure out what the minimum viable metrics you need to influence sales behavior, but to also gain a certain level of credibility and trust with your executives so they continue to invest. For us, those metrics include things like a opportunity is 30% more likely to close if it has marketing influence on.

And I don’t mean if it originated with marketing, I just mean if we’re influencing [00:18:00] it in some way. And so I can tell my executives like, I could use a little bit extra funding because it’s 30% more likely to close if we touch it in some meaningful way. And that’s really compelling, right?

That’s not, that comes from attribution, but it also doesn’t necessarily mean that. In the traditional sense, marketing created a lead that turned into an opportunity that turned into revenue. The other thing that I would say is there is nothing more important than a strategic relationship between sales and marketing. We have recently added inside sales representatives to the marketing team because we saw a conversion gap between marketing and sales. And they really exist to help us understand sales, understand their bandwidth, where they can prospect, where they can’t prospect fill gaps. To increase conversion, you have to understand, creating targets in a region, [00:19:00] creating a marketing plan without.

Sales stacking hands with you and saying, Yes, that is what I need in order to meet my quota. And my number is just, it’s for not, Your conversion is gonna suck. You’re not gonna reach your numbers because you don’t have the pull through and the support of sales forming a really strategic, and sometimes that’s dirty work.

Do their slides, understand their customer. Figure out something in terms of like intent terms before they go into a meeting. Figure out some value to give to them so that you are not a commodity, but that you’re really a seat at the table.

Peter: So how do you balance with that in mind, the different. Planning and strategic time horizons that happen between sales and marketing. So sales. There are lots of many strategic sales people to be clear, but the reality is they tend to be very focused on their quarterly outcomes. And as a marketer, you need [00:20:00] to think in multiple quarters, sometimes multiple years.

If you’re doing a brand transition as an example, that’s typically a many year journey where you’re trying to build up significant strategic value, or if you’re doing sort of a market shift or something like entering a new market. So how do you square those different time horizons when you’re trying to create this tight relationship between the marketing team and the sales?

Kaycee: Gosh, that’s such a good question and I can’t say I’ve a hundred percent figured it out. Some of the things that we’ve done to improve on that is just data collection. It takes three to five years to collect the data. You need to demonstrate that marketing is a long game. Otherwise if you’re dealing with one year worth of data, they think you’re just opportunity and opportunity out, right?

And so making sure you’re collecting the data you need to trend and analyze the impact. What I’ll also say is we have different buckets of tactics for different stages of the [00:21:00] funnel, and when we’re talking about awareness and really influence or, adding to the top of the funnel, We’re never saying that’s gonna close in a fiscal year based on the sales cycle of what we sell.

Right. When we’re talking about influencing campaigns in the middle of the funnel or influencing opportunities in the middle of the funnel, Yeah. We’re saying that it’s 30% more likely to close, and we might even be able to give you data that says it could close faster with our. Right. We stand up a webinar, we stand up event, We we geo target, we re-target.

So I think data is so critical in that conversation and that’s not as easy for everyone, especially smaller organizations to, to figure out. What I can tell you is that you can get it most of it from your sales crm, and I’ve seen people do it in Excel. It’s hard, but if you have someone who does excel, you know they can do it for you.

It’s a, it’s, I have been [00:22:00] asked to put together multi-year marketing plans and I have been completely derailed by executives or sales professionals that come in and say, We need to close four more of these deals before the fiscal year. What can you do to help? And so it’s really important as a leader to balance.

What you do that’s short term with what you do that’s long term sustainable.

Kelsey: I think too, with you having these different buckets, right, with each stage of the funnel, you’re also building this trust and rapport with the sales team to help them get those deals across the line, which ultimately is gonna, make that relationship stronger and stuff. Have you been able to identify anything that, in these certain buckets have really helped push these deals across the line?

Kaycee: Yeah, the pandemic was hard because in-person events were really good for us. I mean, we would have a very high potency of prospects and customers at in-person events, especially healthcare. It’s. A big industry, but a small industry. And there are, a dozen or so shows that [00:23:00] everyone goes to.

So I would say now that in person events are coming back, prioritizing those based on who’s there and where you’re, where the people attached to opportunities in your funnel are. We’ve also gotten creative with packaging and pricing and trials. Do this for 30 days free and then pay if it’s a value.

Some people don’t traditionally think of that as marketing’s job. They think that lives in the product management realm, but there’s no reason why you can’t suggest why. If you have 12 opportunities in the funnel that are late stage that seem to be stalled out, try this new packaging, unique effort to get them all easily implemented.

Show them so much value in 30 days that they want to sign up. I think that’s, that shows innovation and partnership on the marketing side.

Peter: Yeah, it’s interesting. One of the things that you were just going through, clearly you have a pretty Evolved understanding of your marketing [00:24:00] conversion funnel reminds me of a launch we did this week, Kelsey, doesn’t it? We, it, it’s funny. We just launched this new marketing Funnel builder tool that allows you to sort of build and model your funnel.

And and one of the things that, that I always found really valuable, and that’s why I said we should build this thing is the idea to and that’s the fun part of being the CEO is that you can say, Yeah, I want to do this thing and then. Make it be so, the but one of the things that I get excited about with that is thinking about, especially with sales cycles like you have at Premier, where it’s a, it’s probably a fairly long, sophisticated sales process.

You have to think about the current. Net present value of the outcome that you’re generating and the, those outcomes have you, you have a way to attribute some value to them. So if you know that, 1% of your leads turn into Opportunities and 20% of your opportunities close. You can do the backward math and say, Hey, if it’s a hundred thousand dollars deal, [00:25:00] then maybe that lead is worth maybe $5,000 of revenue and maybe $4,000 of margin as an example.

In, in that kind of thinking is really helpful to think about. One to sort of get in the head of your marketing managers who are building and campaign planners who are building these campaigns to say, what is the actual business value of this thing that we’re creating? And the unit of value may be an MQL or a marketing qualified lead.

What is the economic value of that? And understanding that is critically important. Because then you can know how much you can spend on it. As an example. And if the economic value is $5,000 and I’m spending $10,000 for it, guess what? You are evaporating money. And so is that part of the way that you think KC about because you’ve got this sort of evolved way of thinking.

About your funnel. Do you think about sort of the value at those stages and does your team have good [00:26:00] enough data to say that, Hey, I know what an opportunity costs or a lead costs and I know what it’s worth?

Kaycee: We’re getting there for sure, and I’d love to see that model. Peter and Kelsey, if you guys can share that with me, that sounds fantastic. And I know a lot of people would get value from that. We are definitely getting there. My C-suite has really challenged me to look holistically at the cost of a sale or the cost of, to acquire new business.

And that doesn’t just include marketing. And so if I come with a, the cost of what generates a lead, they’ll wanna know the cost of what turns that lead into revenue. And so this whole conversion, adding. A value to what we do is just increasingly growing complex.

Here’s what I will say. I have a theory. Maybe we should go ahead and schedule a podcast for like three years from now to see if this proves out. And I’m about to do a LinkedIn article about this. I’m almost done. I have a theory that, sales was very relationship driven for so long, it was all about [00:27:00] who you know and who you’d pick up the phone for.

Right? Digital completely turned that on its head. And consumerism did too. People wanna shop online. Even B2B and B2C are converging. Like B2B buyers want to do the majority of their buying cycle online too. I think we’re gonna boomerang. I think that what is available digitally and through these campaigns is so much information and the market is so saturated with options that relationships are actually really gonna matter.

And so we’re kind of getting ahead of that and creating some really custom experiences that our executives can have with our customers’ executives just to build relationships like. And when you look of that, when you look at that, the cost is gonna be higher because custom really fun, exciting events and experiences that create memories is expensive.

But to retain a customer year after year is so important for [00:28:00] us and for them to see us as a strategic partner, that when they go to someone for something, it’s us first to make sure. We don’t have it before they buy it from someone else. It really pays out in the long haul. So I don’t have a direct answer for, the cost the cost of a.

Of a lead based on, digital and LinkedIn and and, advertising and email touches and all of those things. But I do think that it’s increasingly going to become more important to be more strategic with those touches because it’s getting really noisy.

Peter: Yeah, I think the idea of orchestration of information and curation is gonna be really important for people because it, you’re right, there’s, we’re all overwhelmed with the amount of information that’s out there and in one of the things that a salesperson can do or a brand can do at scale.

Is curate information and curation is really personalization. So it is [00:29:00] based on your needs, your desires, your wants, the prediction of what would be useful for you, providing that information to you. So that’s one thing. But the other thing that you mentioned, I think I is important is about this sort of relationship building.

And. I think at the end of the day, probably the most important thing to do is what it sounds like you’re board and your management is asking you to do, which is boil it all up to sort of that top level kind of c payback model, right? That says net it all together and say, tell me a hundred percent of what we’re spending for all of marketing and a hundred percent of what we’re selling, spending on sales and a hundred percent to deliver the product.

And in what is the economic equation that says is How much does it cost in total for the business to create a new customer relationship? What is the value of that customer relationship over time? And then with an organization like Premier that has, I suspect, large and very long term, enduring customer relationship.

There’s [00:30:00] probably a tolerance to have a fairly lengthy payback period for that customer relationship if you’re creating a net new relationship truly for the company. But understanding even if it’s at the very aggregate view, is a great place to start. And I think what people struggle with KC is that sometimes things are done at the very high.

Like that, CAC model level in the very, very low level. But it’s that intermediate level where business decisions get made because it’s really hard to say, Hey, my CAC payback is 14 months and I want it to be 12 months. What do I do? What you need to understand is what are the levers in knobs that are a level below that can be changed to actually affect the outcomes in a meaningful.

I’ve now pivoted back into speech mode. I apologize.

Kaycee: No I agree with you a hundred percent Peter and just to close the loop on that, it is our responsibility. I also think that our media partners can help [00:31:00] us by collecting and giving us better data about what we’re spending and who’s clicking and who’s engaging. Right? And so I do think that it’s an eco marketing ecosystem responsibility.

The smarter we need to get with data, the smarter our partners have to be with the data they provide back to us for the investments that we make. So that’s kind of, I guess, a call to action.

Peter: Absolutely. Well, that’s great. Well, I’m disappointed of where we are in this timeline, in this conversation cuz it, it means that we need to start to wrap up, unfortunately. And this has been a fantastic conversation. You promised to fund one leading into a long holiday weekend and it was indeed fund for me anyway.

But with that mind I’m gonna hand it off to Kelsey who will ask us our last question here for you.

Kaycee: Perfect.

Kelsey: been a great conversation and fun on my end as well. So I guess we’ll end it with, what advice would you give to those that are CMOs or aspiring to be one someday?[00:32:00]

Kaycee: All right. Great question, Kelsey, and I love this part of your podcast. I do. Before I answer, just wanna say I have extreme imposter syndrome on this podcast. I listen to it. I love it. It’s one of my central sources of truth, and so thanks for [00:33:00] having me on. Peter and Kelsey. To answer your question, So I’ve only been one cmo, which is my current cmo, and I can tell you the advice I would give to my younger self, or I guess my, younger career self, which is learn the business.

I think a lot of us are trained and understand and know. Marketing, right? We read every day. We’ve got eBooks and 10 top 10 lists, and we know digital and we know all the crazy buzz terms there are to know as marketers and we love networking with each other. The magic is really applying that to your business and your customers and the message that you have to bring to market.

And so what has been successful for me is spending the time to sit on customer calls, to understand the business, to understand the financials, to understand the pains that we are solving in a pretty intimate. In order to better simplify the complex. So I think that would probably be my one piece of advice to [00:34:00] all the aspiring marketers out there.

Kelsey: Well, Kaycee, thank you so much for joining the next CMO today. Make sure to follow the next CMO and Plannuh on Twitter and LinkedIn, and if you have any ideas for topics or guests, you can email us at the next CMO Plannuh dot com. Have a good day everyone. Thank you, Kaycee.

Peter: Great. Thanks Kaycee.