Case studies

Growth problems rarely belong to one function.

Most teams are not short on effort. They are short on alignment. Product is focused on features, marketing on awareness, sales on quota, leadership on the number. Every function can be doing good work and the business can still lose speed, because no one is aligned around the same revenue behavior.

So I start with one question. Not what are we launching, or what campaign are we running, but this: what buying behavior are we trying to change? What does the customer need to do differently for revenue to move?

From there it gets clearer. Who is the primary customer. What economic outcome matters most to them. What is the one value story the whole organization can stand behind. When product, sales, marketing and leadership can all articulate that value in the same language, execution gets faster.

Misalignment costs speed. Clarity compounds. Here is what that looks like in practice.

01 · DriverInsightsWhat buying behavior has to change, and how we will get it there.
02 · DrivenStrategyOne customer, one outcome, one value story.
03 · DrivenTacticsEvery marketing piece and business function telling that same story.
Insights first, then strategy, then tactics.
  • +789%Capital growth, Cantel ASC turnaround
  • $52MMFirst-year revenue, Hearty Slices launch
  • $250MBusiness unit, promoted to lead after eight months

Cantel Medical · Ambulatory surgery center channel · Marketing lead

When someone tells you to cut price by 20%,the problem is usually that nobody has measured the value.

Cantel was the premium leader in endoscope reprocessing, and the ground was moving. Colonoscopy volume was shifting out of hospitals and into ambulatory surgery centers, where a large hospital sales force had almost no reach. The recommendation on the table was a 20% price cut to win cost-conscious ASC buyers. Leadership ran the numbers, saw it would not work, and stood up a dedicated ASC team to find another answer.

I was asked to get a talk track to sales. I said we were going to get a listening track first. An ambulatory surgery center is not a small hospital. The owner is thinking about margin, cash flow and survival, and nobody had asked how our equipment showed up in those terms. So the sales team gathered customer research while I analyzed the competitive set in parallel, and the answer came back quickly: our equipment saved nursing staff a meaningful amount of cleaning time, and that time was worth more than the 20% premium we were charging.

I am an industrial engineer before I am a marketer, so I modeled it. What the equipment did to procedure throughput, to staff time, to total cost of ownership. Insights first, then strategy, then tactics. Running it in that order is the whole trick, and it is the order most teams reverse.

Then I built an audit around it. It mapped every step of a center's reprocessing workflow, found the efficiency they were leaving on the table, and flagged infection prevention and quality gaps along the way, with our own nursing staff consulting on each one. Product, sales and leadership had each been carrying a different version of the value. Now there was one version, and it was the customer's. Sales stopped opening with a product and started opening with a diagnosis, and customers were buying the consultation as much as the equipment.

Corinne asked me about this

Read the transcript

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.

Mayo Clinic Laboratories · Reference laboratory services · VP of Marketing

Mayo Clinic: Amazing brand awareness.But were we easy to order from?

The business ran as Mayo Medical Laboratories, and at nearly every tradeshow someone asked the same question out loud: are you affiliated with Mayo Clinic or not? Sales had been asking for a clearer name for a long time. The change needed approval from Mayo Clinic's brand team and from marketing leadership, and with no chief marketing officer in the seat, the request had stalled in a quiet argument about who was allowed to say yes.

When I became VP of Marketing I inherited the idea, but not a path to it. People had wanted this change for years and nobody had found a way through, because the decision did not sit with us. It sat with a corporate brand team in another building who had no particular reason to want our project on their desk. Past that, the case had to survive four separate approvals, ending at the Mayo Clinic Board of Governors, in front of clinicians and hospital administrators rather than marketers.

So I stopped making the case for our rebrand and went looking for where our interests already overlapped with theirs. Mayo Clinic had engaged a branding firm for a top-to-bottom refresh of its own identity, and ours was the last Mayo Clinic brand that did not fit the architecture they were building. Framed that way, the laboratory rebrand was not a favor we were asking for. It was a gap in work they were already doing, already funded and already underway. I brought them a six-month assessment grounded in subject matter expert interviews, the options with their trade-offs, and a recommendation rather than a request, so that what reached leadership came from them. My COO sponsored it through the rest of the governance process.

Then I treated the new name as the first customer-facing step of a commercial transformation rather than the point of it. We were competing with LabCorp and Quest, where the ordering experience had to live up to whatever the brand promised. We were also selling to specialty physicians, hospital laboratory directors, health system C-suites, pharmaceutical companies and payers moving into value-based care. Five audiences, one ordering experience. I partnered with systems architecture and IT to modernize digital ordering and the MarTech stack, redefined internal roles and responsibilities, and mapped the brand promise to three things a customer actually feels: simpler access, physician decision confidence, and trust at the top.

My team of 45, across product management, marketing communications, creative services, client experience and website management, ran the rollout. The visible part was the website, the brochures, the ordering portal, the tradeshow booth and the signage. The real work sat underneath it: CDC permits, trademark filings, state and county licenses, filings with state departments of health, federal contracts, payer and client contracts, invoices, and eleven separate IT systems from the ordering platforms to the test catalog. We phased every change so that no clinical workflow was interrupted, because in a laboratory a careless rebrand is not an embarrassment, it is a patient safety problem. The new name had to land across a Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology of more than 2,300 people. A rebrand is an internal change management project wearing a marketing costume.

Corinne asked me about this

Read the transcript

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.

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Two of these came up in conversation with Corinne Cavanaugh, Founder & Chief Marketing Officer, Grow & Exit Partners (formerly CAC Media & Publishing). Read her full write-up. More clips on the Conversations page.