A health-tech company: message market fit, built with a fractional CMO

The situation, the work, the outcome

What the engagement actually looked like

Christopher Gabby operates a fractional chief marketing officer practice and a marketing consultancy, and has worked as a CMO in a fractional capacity for about 10 different businesses. His background is brand marketing and management: an MBA concentrated in marketing and management information systems, early years agency-side in experiential marketing, then about a decade at Nike working across retail, field, experiential, category, account and grassroots marketing before moving into a head of integrated marketing role.

He came in as fractional CMO of a health-tech company that is under NDA and is not named here. The timing was specific. The brand had been launched and the broad-stroke awareness and education work was done. The next phase was hyper business growth, which meant identifying the right highly qualified prospects in healthcare and health tech who were in need of what the company had to offer, in a landscape complex enough that several approaches to lead generation were being tried at once.

The first piece of proof was accidental. The company was in the market for exactly this capability when our cold email arrived. In his words, “It was like in a weird way a really great example of the efficacy of their program.”

His account of what he had been doing before is unusually direct for a CMO on camera. He had taken a broad-stroke approach to customer communications and lead generation, using really traditional email marketing and really traditional email marketing service providers, and came to understand he was going about it all wrong: not using tools that optimize for deliverability, and not structuring the offers and communications in a way that was actionable for his target audience.

What replaced it started with onboarding. Three comprehensive workshops, built for the needs and stage of the business rather than run off a template, went deep into where the company had been, its value proposition, the persona and customer-profile work already done, and every marketing communication sent up to that point.

Out of that came the idea he keeps returning to. Marketers have always thought in terms of product market fit; there is also a message market fit, and it is earned the same way, by spending time up front honing the message and defining where it fits in the market, then testing continuously rather than hunting for one perfect line. The alternative, the templated approach he calls spray and prey, lands in spam and never tailors the offer to the needs or objectives of the prospect.

Speed is the other thing he raises, and the part he says is hardest: “the hardest thing to do as a marketer is is move at the pace of your market”, especially in tech or innovative spaces where conditions change faster than a plan. Inbound builds long-term lifetime value, which matters, but it does not let you get ahead of those conditions. For partners, first results typically arrive in three to four weeks, against the three to six months a company usually spends building the same capability with its own team and tools.

Asked what marketing leaders should look for in an outbound partner, his answer is about level. C-suite leaders hold high standards for the expertise of the people they work with, and a lot of agency relationships sour because the work is pitched below that line. The second thing is focus: marketing offers more opportunities than any team can pursue, and the ones worth taking are the ones that add value to the business.

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