I would miss a latex allergy or a penicillin allergy, or I would miss a pre-existing condition if I shifted that around and automated it. Even though it might end up being better, legacy users are not used to that. So what happens is, is they will either complain, and it will be reverted back, or it has to be super small, incremental changes or gigantic changes. So what happens is there's a lot of good electronic health records out there that actually take workflows into consideration. But now I walk up to a practice and go, hey, do me a favor and change your electronic health record. People will quit. Doctors retire because of this, where they go, "I'm good. I don't wanna learn any of this ever again. I already hate my existing one. Paper's way better. I'm done. I'm out." So you're left with having to find something in between, and I didn't know any of that, by the way, going in. I just thought that we could fix it with a better electronic health record. I decided to go to dental school because I noticed that, so my dad's a golf pro. My mom's a nurse. But I noticed it whenever my dad was out at the golf course, all of the dentists were there on Wednesdays taking the full day off and half day on Fridays. And I'm like, this is the profession for me 'cause all the MDs are working 24-7 and on the weekends. I don't wanna be that person.
RYAN: No. No. Yeah, and it's tough. You're right. It's tough. You want to because sometimes you'll see when something screws up, and you're like, how the hell did you not see this in this interview? It's very hard, and all you can do is try to embed culture into everything because what happens is like usually attracts like, is what I end up finding unless you're putting undue pressure on growth. So every so often, like let's say, I'm like, I gotta hire 90 salespeople between now and this time next year. What happens is is if you say that, I have to have 90, then what you concentrate on is you concentrate on the number, not the quality. And I've made that mistake before. So I think that the more people can hire, and that's obviously from undue pressure from VCs, right? They expect you to grow revenue, how it is.
So a lot of times, money is great, and I highly recommend working with great VCs out there. The one thing is, is try to not let it, it will, but try to not let it change your DNA too much in how you're growing, and grow appropriately.
CAROLINE: Mm-hm, yeah. That's a great point. Yeah, so I do have a question about marketing because it is "Growth Marketing," after all. So it's about sales and marketing, right? And it relates to culture. Really aligning sales and marketing is something so crucial to both sales and marketing success. And I wanted to ask you about your approach when you try to align sales and marketing teams.
RYAN: Yeah, so you just got to remember one thing, right? Marketing loves sales. Sales loves marketing, right? That's the culture you have to sow, in my opinion. And if they truly love one another, it'll work, but they have to truly love one another, and let me tell you what I mean by that. When we first started marketing, it kind of felt like it was on an island. So you had this island over here called marketing, and sales just expects marketing to do their job and shove leads in their face that are the easiest leads to close on Earth. And that's it. That's just how marketing works, of course.
CAROLINE: In 90% of the companies, this is exactly what's happening, more, 99% of the companies.
RYAN: Yeah, pre-qualified lead, registered, basically begging to buy your products. No, right? You will always have the lion's share of the work of the sales process on sales. It's going to be a thing like that, right? Will they be warmer and more knowledgeable about your product and a better pre-qualified lead? Yeah, we should be able to do that, but there are so many different sides to marketing, right? There's the marketing cash that you, quote, light on fire for branding. You have to do that. You literally have to do that. And I've gone from thinking like, okay, that's lighting, catch on fire. That's not, right? You have to build that brand. You have to do that. It might be farther down the line. Maybe you should start with marketing qualified leads and then move on to that. But one kind of feeds the other in that hand, as well. So the thing where we really started to accelerate was when we started to have weekly meetings between sales and marketing. And what we would do is marketing would tell everybody. And marketing kind of led sales in a way, I guess you could say, but meeting that they would say, look, here's what the market research is that we've done. Here's what we think our users would like to hear about our product.
So they know the forward, backward of the product. That's the other thing. Marketing has to understand the product just as well as sales. Everybody has to actually understand use cases, the whys, the wheres, the whos. All those things have to be understood uniformly in the exact same way from sales to marketing. The second piece is that once they do all of that information, like, research on marketing, they also have to tell them, these are the campaigns we're running. This is what the person will be thinking when they come in from that meeting. And then after they're done when they come in, here's how you're going to follow up. So they have to have follow-up campaigns ready to go. Like we utilize Pardot within Salesforce where they can do that. You can do it in HubSpot, whatever might be that you're gonna end up using, but you have to have follow-up campaigns so that they're calling in and saying the same thing.
So if a lead does come in, it's not just the same old pitch. So maybe marketing ran something where, would you like more, like take our company, for example. We want it to help doctors get more implant cases sometimes. Okay, if a person does that, and then you talk to them and go, hey, would you like more new patients? It's not as cool as saying, would you like more new implant patients, right? You have to be able to follow up in a perfect fluid way from marketing to sales. And when we finally started to have those conversations, sales finally understood and said, oh, you're teeing me up in a better way than I could have ever imagined. Yes, the doctor is a little bit more knowledgeable, or your customers are a little bit more knowledgeable about what you're talking about, but that's really all I needed. Our close rate went from 40% on a call to, all of a sudden, it jumps to 60%. I mean, that's an insane jump overnight.
We also have to help explain those numbers to sales because their reaction is very binary, right? They look at it and they go, did I make a sale? Did I not make a sale? Marketing's not doing their job. No, like that's not how that works either. Sure, you can show them that your numbers are going up. We're getting more marketing qualified leads as time goes up. We're reaching out to more people. It's nice to show graphs in marketing meetings that look like this, right? That's another thing that I remind people, but you also have to explain that to them because some salespeople who are good at their job will go, well, those graphs are going up, but my sales are flat. So that makes no sense to me. And other people, you gotta say, whoa, whoa, whoa, that person was able to do it in the way that we explained. And that's why their sales numbers are going up. So, again, I think it's really explaining it, sorry, explaining it, to everybody. The example I always use is when, I don't know if you ever did the exercise back in the day, we did it in grade school where somebody teaches somebody how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. When you really truly write out all the instructions for that, you have to tell somebody to pick up the knife, and you have to tell somebody to unscrew the lid. And everybody forgets about that because a lot of times, when you're a specialist in an area of marketing or sales, you assume the other person understands your job just as well as you. That is never the case. So you need to be okay with, especially in a startup, because you're doing things from scratch, explaining everything from start to finish. And if you do that, you're gonna get people that appreciate it. And you're gonna get uniform departments that like to work with each other more and more because you don't feel like you're shorting each other. But, yeah, remember, sales loves marketing. Marketing love sales. It's what you gotta do.
CAROLINE: Yeah, no, that's amazing. And this is what gets results. And most of the time, this is where things fall apart. You can have two incredible teams. If they don't work together, and just like everything you said, you really need to go into the details of it. Because otherwise you're not gonna get the return on investment. So, yeah, I really appreciate that you went through all of this.
RYAN: Of course.
CAROLINE: It was really helpful. All right, I have one more question. So, throughout your journey, what is the most valuable lesson you've learned?
