What PepsiCo, Mayo Clinic and Cantel taught me about growth.

You were promoted to lead a $250 million business unit at Cantel after just eight months in the role and in that industry. So most people take years to earn that kind of trust. So what did you deliver in those first eight months that proved you could run a quarter billion dollar business?

I think, you know, trust, I find accelerates when uncertainty is going down and certainty is decreasing, right? So you kind of come in and it's like, oh, everything's uncertain, but the trust starts to accelerate. When you're, you know, steadfast on reducing people's uncertainty about the market and about how that business unit's gonna perform. And so, you know, in those first eight months, I really focused on the voice of the consumer and gathering, you know, the voice of the consumer.

I'll never forget my superior had said, okay, we're ready, we need a talk track, I need you to get a talk track to sales. And I said, okay, that sounds good. We're gonna get a listening track first. We need to understand the voice of the customer.

This focus on ambulatory surgery centers and needing the business needing to be successful with them was new. We were great at hospital, not so sure about ASC. I hadn't been doing very well. And so I needed that, that the insights, I needed the insights in order to drive the strategy and the strategy to then drive the tactics, right?

And so from there, getting those insights from the voice of customer, it was easier to then decide what the strategy is, get a rapid clarity around the business model and then getting really clear about the trade-offs, being very transparent about the trade-offs. This is the approach, but here are the trade-offs. Not gonna take a 20% price decrease on our products across the board. I think that's a good thing, but the trade-off is gonna be, hey, need some investment over here because in order to not take a 20% decrease, we're gonna arm the sales team with some tools that are gonna really help tell our efficiency story.

And then also just ownership of difficult decisions, right? So like, I know it's a difficult decision. I thought about it this way, this way, and this way, here's what I would recommend, right? And it's kind of being transparent around that.

So for me, it's not about trying to look impressive. It's just more about acknowledging what the risks are and reducing that for the executive team. I like to clarify performance drivers. Here's what I think is gonna make a business perform and make the priorities really explicit.

This is our strategy. These are our doctricks, but these are the priorities. And I guess I'm communicating those trade-offs early. So I think that when leaders feel that the business is more predictable and they feel aligned to the strategy, then the trust really follows.

All right, let's get into the nitty-gritty of health care at Mayo Clinic Laboratories. You led the digital transformation and rebrand with the C-suite. What inspired the change? And how did you connect rebrand to actual commercial outcomes?

We spent a lot of time clarifying our position relative to the competitors' lab core quest. We then took that as an opportunity to say, hey, we got to modernize our digital ordering practices so that we are up there with the crème de la crème of the big guys and redefined the internal tools under the hood as well. So we went through digital transformation related to our Mar-Tech stack, looking at the IT systems underneath as well. And I partnered closely with our systems architecture and IT teams to define that and to realign it.

And then we aligned our brand narrative with those measurable commercial outcomes of really, really driving revenue and having better customer experiences and measuring that. Because again, brand changes and brand name changes is just commercial architecture of being expensive. It could just be viewed as expensive art or revamping the Mar-Tech stack. That's just really expensive spend.

If you are not also taking a close look at revamping your internal roles and responsibilities. So what we did was really map that brand promise very directly to simplified access for our customers, physician decision confidence, as well as the executive C-suite of these big health systems, kind of seeing that our tools are top of the line, our brand is top of the line and being able to get to that clear value architecture and be able to articulate that. And the goal wasn't about awareness, right? We already had a ton of awareness as Mayo Clinic.

It was truly the revenue conversion by having better clarity, better tools, better access, and a brand that really stood for confidence and for trust like Mayo Clinic does. I love that you took the time to reduce the friction, right? That if the customer experience and so working on that under the hood stuff within the company, right? Like once we get an order, how do we make this best in class?

And also externally, right? To the customers, how do we make sure we are competing with the other guys out there on our A plus levels so that when we drop the new brand name and people go, aha, this is a company I know when trust and they go to buy, they have a great experience through the whole process. I mean, what an ambitious thing to do a rebrand with an external systems and internal systems at the same time. But what's the outcome?

The outcome is not only do they recognize they start the buying process, but they finish the buying process and you get more revenue. Amazing. Yeah, it's a lot of work, but that's what it takes, right? That's what it takes to really elevate and push the revenue is to that clear alignment from your people, your process, your technology and kind of all in your marketing.

All of it's got to sing off that same sheet. I love this as an example because this is what it takes to go from the messy middle revenue group up to sort of that enterprise grade. These are the types of things you have to be thinking of. It's not a new logo.

A new logo is not going to get you there. You need to think about your brand, your perception, what it feels like to go through the process. I mean, this is just a killer example. Thanks for bringing it, Angela.

You create 90-day growth activation roadmaps that compress time to revenue. So faster to market, lot of accountability, I'm really excited to hear what's fundamentally different about a 90-day activation versus traditional annual planning and why does it drive faster revenue?

We love annual plans, but they're really trying to optimize for predictability, right? And a 90-day activation road map really is optimizing for learning and the velocity at which we learn. So where traditional annual planning locks in assumptions early, it then disperses a ton of resources across a ton of different initiatives. That's fine, it can also mean a delay in course correction and a delay against learning because everybody's still cemented to hitting that annual plan, whereas a 90-day activation road map is doing things just a little bit differently as well on top of that and saying, I want to make sure that we are identifying the highest growth hypotheses and leveraging those.

We want to concentrate our resources on that specific lever for a period of time and learn. And we're going to build in these feedback loops of we are expecting to hear this or learn this and what did we learn? And so from that, you're speeding up that cycle of learning and the intention of course is to compress the time to revenue because you're accelerating that learning and decision cycle. Revenue grows faster when decisions move faster than the market is shifting, right?

And so if we compress it down to 90 days, that 90-day cadence can really force learning, therefore force clarity and give you that focus that you need to really kind of shift the revenue growth.

What's the big difference between commercialization on a consumer product versus a health care product? Is there anything that stays the same or what's different?

Yeah, thank you so much, Corinne. I think to me, the fundamental difference is really the buying dynamic. So in CPG, you're optimizing for velocity and emotional pull. The buyer is often just one person making a relatively low risk decision influenced by the brand, the placement, and the price, the price architecture.

And in CPG, distribution scale matters enormously, right? Like if you're in stock at Walmart and if you're in stock at Costco, et cetera. But in health care, you're selling into layered risk. There are multiple stakeholders there.

There's the clinician, an administrator, procurement, finance, sometimes regulatory, right? So inevitably the buying cycle is the longer and the risk tolerance is much lower. The proof and the credibility that threshold is much higher. But between both of them, the principle that stays the same is this.

Commercialization succeeds or fails based on clarity and alignment. So PepsiCo or leading commercialization at Mayo Clinic Laboratories, the work always starts with defining that one clear problem and one clear economic value story. So if the internal teams like sales and marketing can't articulate the value in that same language, the market won't hear it clearly either. So that's really critical, that clarity, one clear problem, one clear economic value story.

So while the sales motion changes dramatically, the core discipline of marketing does not. You still need sharp segmentation, a unified front around the value narrative, as well as commercial readiness before launch. So in both worlds, I've seen the same failure mode. Leaders get trapped when they believe that the product being done means the market is ready, but it doesn't, it's just, it's more complex than that.

We have to get clarity internally. And the constant across industries is revenue accelerates when the organization aligns behind one clear economic story, a defensible value story. And sales and marketing are singing from that same sheet of music.

So you've powered over 52 million dollars worth of product launches at companies like PepsiCo, Mayo Clinic, and Harley Davidson, big brands. So what's the number one reason product launches stall between development and revenue and what can fix it?

I think the number one reason launches stall is companies confuse product readiness with commercial team readiness, so product is ready, great go, but if that commercial readiness hasn't been built out, that's where we get in trouble. So engineering, great, they're done, they've finished the product development, or product managers, great, they've done, they've finished the product development. Okay, marketing, great, you got your positioning down, lateral sales, you get trained at the end, and then boom, you expect great, everyone's ready, revenue should follow. But revenue is not a byproduct of a launch.

It's the result of activation, a lot of activation, and that gap typically shows up in the three key places. First is no clear definition of the primary revenue segment, and certainly there can be lots of revenue segments over time, but to get started, you really have to have clear definition of what is that primary revenue segment that we're going to launch with. The second is no quantified economic case for the buyer, right? So what's that value proposition and what's that economic case that is going to make that buyer feel like, yeah, it's irresistible, I have to buy that product, our service.

And the third is I really like these 90-day activation plans for sales and for sales and marketing to be really tightly aligned to together. The 90-day really allows you to get out there, do something, get some feedback, and make tweaks and changes. And so, when I lead launches, I like to focus on building that bridge from development all the way to revenue, and that bridge includes those things. It includes having that clear target, having a clear use case, having the economic value articulated clearly in a way that sales is not just informed, but sales has punched it a bit and they feel like, yes, I can actually defend this, this is great.

And then pre-launch sales enablement, that you've armed the sales team with not just what marketing thinks is great materials, but with what the sales team is feeling empowered by. And then that 90-day activation sprint with really clear KPIs or really clear indicators that this is adding up to what we're expecting or it's not, and then you start to dig into why. So launch, it's not a date, it's an event, it's a revenue event, it's teamwork, right? And so organizations that treat it that way are really much better at closing that gap between here's a product, here's innovation, oh, and here's income, kind of following that.

They're able to close that gap and then that income comes much faster.

PepsiCo, you launched a new brand into Costco. Despite being told it couldn't be done, it's true that most large organizations move really slowly and they tend to kill innovation. We've heard this before. So in this case, what did you do differently that let you move fast?

Yeah, yeah, no, this one was fun. The large organizations moving slowly, I think sometimes it gets this bad rap that it's like, oh, it's because my people are lacking effort. And I think that's not necessarily true. I think they move slowly because of the ambiguity and the larger the organization gets, and barely it's the telephone game, there's more ambiguity and ambiguity creates friction.

So in this situation, we were blessed to be solely focused on Costco as an account, right? And so in that situation, yes, the opportunity was dismissed as too complex and unlikely to succeed because good luck getting a product to the market specific to Costco within a big company like PepsiCo. PepsiCo's got too many other initiatives going on. But what I really just tried to focus on is we're moving that ambiguity so that, your project gets moved along because it's really crystal clear what you're trying to do.

So we started by defining non-negotiables. We really listened to the customer. We did a lot of intense focus groups around Costco specifically as the buying group as well as Costco specifically, like who shops Costco and what they're looking for. We narrowed the scope to a highly specific test.

We launched just one product with two different flavors inside and we built internal coalition early, right? So I did a lot of internal pitching just to make sure people understood what we were doing and why it was important, not just I'm creating a new product dedicated to Costco to add more to your plate, but hey, did you know the storyline we're at risk of getting kicked out of Costco? If we can't do this and that Costco is actually a really big player for the overall PepsiCo story that contributes this much percent. So pitching a little bit internally as well and then going to the retailer and having that story buttoned up to the retailer that we've done our homework, we met with your consumers who shop Costco specifically.

We've got a risk mitigated data case, not just a pitch deck. And so all of that adds up to a bit of precision. And so speed, I think at scale really comes from that diligence and that precision. So when stakeholders understand the risk, they understand the upside, they understand the boundaries clearly and there's less ambiguity, decisions can accelerate.

So for us, the lesson wasn't pushing harder or pushing louder. It was about structuring the decisions in a way that it became easier to say yes.