Right People, Rights Seats: Building a Modern Healthcare Marketing Team

Jenny: Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m excited to be here chatting with you today about right people, right seats: how you can restructure your marketing team for today’s marketing demands.

I have had countless conversations over the last four months from marketing leaders at different systems of various sizes across the country, and they’re all struggling with the same problem. So I thought I’d record a podcast today to chat about it and give you a little food for thought if you’re dealing with something similar. Everyone knows all of the various pressures that have been pushing down on healthcare marketing teams.

We’ve had to pivot with positivity and get really good at compliance, which means our analytics technical skills have had to really improve and deepen over the last few years. Now we are learning new technologies for those groups that are looking at moving over to the Epic suite of tools for marketing technologies and CRMs. It just never stops, right?

The minute we feel like we have all of our marketing programs under control, a new change happens and honestly, that’s one of the reasons I love this industry. I think that it is a really big responsibility to have to make sure that we are staying on top of those trends and the shifting demand so we can help patients get access to care.

But I’ll tell you, as a marketing leader, when you have a team that you’re trying to manage, it can be really hard to figure out how you can continuously make sure you have the right structure for your marketing team, make sure you have the right people and they have the right skill sets. So it’s really a combination of decisions that have to be made.

Here at Hedy & Hopp, we have been an EOS organization for about five years. So EOS stands for Entrepreneurial Operating System. It is based off of the book called Traction by Gino Wickman. Phenomenal read. I strongly recommend it when people begin working with us. One of the things they often say is, oh my goodness, you are so organized for a marketing agency. This is typically how I feel agencies run, especially agencies that are run are started by creatives, right? 

There’s typically a lot of chaos within the organization. Well, about five years ago we decided to implement EOS because we did not want to have any chaos within our organization. We wanted to really make sure that we understood our purpose as our organization, for our organization.

Everybody understood their roles and their responsibilities for helping us accomplish those goals and that purpose. And we had a structure to be able to communicate where we were going and why, and it has worked wonders. It has been phenomenal. The growth that we have experienced is phenomenal. It has just been a really great way to be able to grow an organization that has a solid foundation.

So there are a couple of key fundamentals in the EOS system that I want to share with you today. If you’re a marketing leader, this does not mean that you have to implement EOS for your marketing team or your organization. But there’s a couple of philosophies and structures that they recommend, and that is part of the EOS system that could be helpful to just kind of cherry pick them out.

So let’s talk about it. First is an accountability chart. So everybody has heard about thinking about your team and the titles that people have and the org chart set all of that aside. We’re not going to think about that at all. Instead, what we need to think about with an accountability chart is really what are the functions that a company needs and the role responsibilities?

So what are things that people need to own within your marketing team, and what are the skill sets for those individual boxes? We’re going to link to resources in the show notes. So you can actually see what one of these look like. But each box in the accountability chart is a person that is a seat. So within that, let’s say, for example, one of them may be, well, I’ll just share mine within our organization.

My seat is Visionary. So I am the top box at Hedy & Hopp. And my, accountabilities for the organization is to drive the organizational vision to manage large relationships for our organization, to drive the culture of our organization and a couple of other things. So when you’re building an accountability chart there, usually for a marketing team, you usually will have one, perhaps for a box for content strategy, one for paid media, one for analytics, one for CRM.

Right? So you can map all of those things out, and you really want to make sure that you’re thinking about what are the core functions. Make sure each one has a box. And then what are the five roles or the five responsibilities? The cool thing about accountability charts is it does not leave any vagueness. So for example, within content strategy, only one box has a content strategy in it.

They’re not multiple boxes with content strategy. So you always know who is in charge of that for your team and for your organization. Zero ambiguity or confusion exists after this exercise is completed. The big difficult thing about this is you have to completely set your and all of the humans to the side. This is about structure, not about humans.

So don’t think about your current team at all as you’re designing this. Imagine you’re building an ideal structure for your organization’s marketing team from scratch. Your hands aren’t tied for any reason. You’re not trying to retrofit current staff members into positions or into titles because they’ve been there for so long. Set all of the humans aside, and then map out all of the areas of responsibility and all of the functions that you really need to have to make your team successful.

A couple of things that I’ll note is you may choose to outsource some of these boxes to agency partners, and that’s okay. Still map it out. So you can understand the functions you need to be able to operate efficiently. Another concern that we’re seeing over and over is there may be some ambiguity around who owns certain functions. So for example, marketing analytics often IT will own the data pipe or the technical structure, but marketing will own the strategy.

And putting data into the structure and getting data out for reporting purposes. Set all of those to the side from a concerns perspective. We’ll deal with that later. For now, map out all of the things that you need to operate efficiently. Once you have all of that mapped out, then you have to start thinking about RPRS, that stands for right person and right seat.

So the first thing you have to do as you begin reviewing your current team members is you have to honestly look at it through the lens of right people. Do they share your organization’s core values? Are they the right person for your team? Do they have the interest in continuing and to grow their skill sets? You have to really take a look at that first.

And that’s what the RP is in RPRS. If they don’t share your culture, there is not a box for them in the accountability chart. If they do share your culture and you have RP, then you can start going into RS right seat. This is determined by what EOS calls a GWC framework. So that is Get It, Want It, and Capacity to Do It.

So “Get It” is do they understand the soul of this role? Do they understand what needs to be done? So do they get how a CRM drives patient volume, or do they just see it as a database right. For paid media, do they understand performance marketing and continuous optimization, or are they just really good at building ad campaigns?

Right. That’s the G that you have to decide that part the “Get It” first. And then W, “Want It.” Do they want these five responsibilities every day? So, for example, somebody who’s been there for a long time may say yes just to keep their job, but they may hate tracking, they may hate UTM parameters, they may not want anything to do with it, and they may just say that they do in order to stay on your team.

So you have to really push and understand. Do you want this right? Are you excited about this role? And then C is Capacity. Do they have the mental, emotional, and technical capacity to actually fulfill the position? So, this can be really difficult because the tough truth here is that you’re likely going to find some of your favorite, most loyal people do not have the capacity for modern technical seats like predictive analytics or the clinical CRM logic.

And that’s okay. If it means they belong in a different seat, or you may need to hire external talent for that specific function, that does not mean that they need to exit your team. If you can find a different seat for them. So that’s why we really separate that decision of right people first and then right seat.

So, this is we have found just such a phenomenal way to really separate the person from the problem. And really make sure that you’re serving your organization’s greater good and solving the problem first. So again, I strongly recommend reading Traction. I’m not saying you need to implement EOS for your organization, but I really, really like how simple it is to think about processes and structure for your organization.

So it’s a quick read. There’s some great podcasts. Also, you can specifically look for podcast episodes around accountability charts or RPRS and listen just to those. But it’s a really kind of refreshing way outside of a traditional corporate structure, to think about the way that you’re structuring your team for today’s hectic environment. I want to give a quick shout out to our EOS implementer, Kevin Hundel.

Kevin’s phenomenal. Kevin has been with us since day one, and he has been a big part of our organization’s growth. So if you are looking for an EOS implementer, I strongly recommend Kevin. He’s just a phenomenal human. In addition to being really, really good at what he does. So hopefully this gave you some really good food for thought.

If you have any questions or just want to brainstorm marketing team structure, give me a shout. This is a topic that we’re really passionate about here at Hedy & Hopp, and always happy to share our wisdom or even connect you with other leaders in the space that we know are currently trying to tackle the same problem. Thanks so much for tuning in.

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