Six Stakeholders, One Message

How Skygen's CMO Turns Branded Research, Buying-Committee Segmentation & a Multi-Channel Mix Into Pipeline

FEATURING: Don Polite, Chief Marketing Officer, Skygen

HOSTED BY: Alison Costello, President, Decibel Media

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION

For Skygen, marketing means winning over an entire buying committee, one stakeholder at a time.

In this episode of the Decibel Impact Series, Don Polite, Chief Marketing Officer at Skygen, joins Decibel Media President Alison Costello to discuss how the dental and vision benefits technology company builds thought leadership, sells into complex RFP-driven buying committees, and turns branded research into fuel for highly segmented ABM campaigns.

The conversation explores why a one-sentence value proposition still has to satisfy six different stakeholders, how Skygen's own primary research became one of its most versatile marketing assets, which channels are driving the most qualified engagement, and why broad brand messaging gave way to a segmentation model built around each buyer's specific pain points.

READ THE CONVERSATION

Prefer to read? See the video transcript below.

00:54   Skygen: A Technology-Enabled Benefits Company

Alison Costello: Do you mind introducing yourself and what you focus on at Skygen day-to-day?

Don Polite: I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at Skygen. I've been with the company for seven years. We fashion ourselves as a technology company that's transforming dental and vision benefits management and administration through technology-enabled solutions that connect and change lives for the better.

We have partnerships serving payers directly, providers and government agencies, and through our SaaS platform, automation, analytics and third-party administration services, our platform supports nearly fifty million member lives.

As the CMO, my job is to help establish us as a thought leader and create engagement with those stakeholders to drive business for the company, while positioning us as an innovator that's really transforming the industry from a technology standpoint.

03:12   Skygen's One-Sentence Differentiator

Alison Costello: If you could distill it to one sentence, what makes you different from other competitors in your space?

Don Polite: It's really around advanced automation, combined with expertise in specialty benefits, to improve the experience for all of the stakeholders, whether it's the provider, the payer or ultimately the members.

In doing so, we're creating better access to care, better experiences and efficiency, which drives down administrative costs for the payer.

03:50   Selling to a Six-Person Buying Committee

Alison Costello: Which buyer roles are you really targeting, and what kind of payer organizations?

Don Polite: We're talking to almost a buying committee that starts with a chief technology officer, someone responsible for benefits administration, member experience leaders, and folks actually running the plan, like a plan president. Then there's the chief financial officer who oversees the budget, and the provider side managing that relationship, so that's six different stakeholders.

It's really important to understand, from a segmentation standpoint, their pain points, their responsibilities, what drives them and what they're looking for, because when you're in front of a buying committee, if you satisfy three but don't satisfy the other three, you're going to lose out in that RFP.

05:37   RFPs, State Carve-Outs & Getting Ahead of the Opportunity

Alison Costello: Is that how most of your sales comes to you, in the form of an RFP once there's an opportunity?

Don Polite: It's all of the above. We support both payers with commercial business as well as government-funded programs: Medicare and Medicaid. A lot of times insurance companies are going to an RFP to try to win a piece of a state Medicaid contract, and we become the technology solution they need.

There are also opportunities to do a state carve-out, where you go directly to the state, that's an RFP opportunity too. But we also try to get out in front of it, selling our capabilities to insurance companies so we could be a solution they're looking for down the road.

07:35   A Multi-Channel Mix: Paid Media, Conferences & Earned Media

Alison Costello: What has been the most successful marketing tactics or sales channels in terms of getting on that consideration list?

Don Polite: We try to have a broader reach across multiple channels. We do a bunch of paid media and create content-specific campaigns based on those different roles.

We're also very present at the various industry associations and conferences, and we put on our own client and partner thought-leadership summit, a great opportunity to combine industry insights and thought leadership with talking, subtly, about our solutions.

And obviously any earned-media opportunities that let us talk about ourselves as a thought leader setting the trends for digital transformation are important for us as well.

08:48   Branded Research as an ABM Engine

Alison Costello: What activations have been the most successful for you?

Don Polite: Paid search has been a big deal for us, and recently we've worked hard on an AI-driven strategy around paid search to show up in a more meaningful way. We also did a lot of LinkedIn campaigns, and ABM has certainly been a big driver.

We've conducted our own branded research for the last handful of years, looking at trends from the provider audience, the payer audience, the broker audience and the member audience, then we leverage that content around ABM campaigns, speaking to the right folks by segment.

It's a good combination of thought leadership with our research, then leveraging that for content in ABM campaigns. It gives us almost like a menu of research that's coming, and now folks are expecting it, it creates a nice calendar of content that's consistent and relevant.

13:01   From Broad Campaigns to the “Five P’s” of Segmentation

Alison Costello: What have you invested more in that you wish you hadn't? What didn't work for you?

Don Polite: Early on, we maybe did some more broad campaigns, they weren't wrong, they were trying to establish who Skygen is and the value we bring holistically, and there's still a place for that.

But there's a need to create a brand messaging architecture that gets down to the specifics of the different stakeholders. Not all payers are created equal, a national insurance carrier is different from a regional player, which is different from a dental service organization.

A lot of our campaigns are now driven to that level of segmentation and personalization, and I think that's resonating.

Alison Costello: You have something along the lines of the four or five P's there: payer, pain points, prioritization... a five-P model.

Don Polite: Yes, I like it, can I borrow that?

16:04   Showing Up Differently at Every Trade Show

Don Polite: Trade shows and industry associations create another opportunity for us from a visibility standpoint, we're at all the biggest industry events through sponsorships, and through those we get speaking-engagement opportunities, whether breakout sessions or panels our subject matter experts sit on.

But some of these events are focused on the payer, some on dental office managers, some on Medicaid directors' associations. For each of them, understanding how our technology supports them as a stakeholder, and really articulating the value proposition from their point of view is key.

Alison Costello: So showing up very differently from conference to conference, based on who the audience is.

Don Polite: Yeah, absolutely. At the high level, it's brand architecture 101, this is who we are. But then understanding their audiences and how we can add value to their specific piece of the pie is how we drill down from there.