Maya Ber Lerner of Chiefy on vanity metrics and the goal behind a KPI

Maya Ber Lerner

Thank you, happy to be here.

Maya Ber Lerner

Chiefy, chiefly, no, I'm kidding. In the background we talked about how our company, Chiefy... I'm the CEO of Chiefy, we very often get called "chiefly" by accident, or autocorrected to "Chief" or "chiefly."

Maya Ber Lerner

Yeah, you also offered that I'm very cool and creative about it. But back to me: my name is Maya, I'm the CEO of Chiefy, and Chiefy is a company for surgical team collaboration. In my background I'm an engineer, a biomedical engineer, but I spent my entire career in software, mainly building and selling tools for software developers and for DevOps. So I was dealing a lot with automation and quality improvement and collaboration when it comes to developers and testers and product teams, stuff like that.

01:33 And I'm married to a surgeon, his name is Roy, and Roy had a lot of complaints about surgical team collaboration, so I had to do something about it. When he wanted to research this topic he got me involved in developing a prototype he could research with, and it was so interesting and exciting that I kind of got sucked into it, and we somehow organically found ourselves starting a company, and actually naming it after a name that was made up by the users: Chiefy.

02:03 I'm based in New York, I have two daughters, married to Roy, who's still a surgeon. This is me.

Maya Ber Lerner 03:05

My background is mainly product work. I previously worked for a startup and did pretty much every possible job there, because I can't say no to anything, but most of the years were product work and sales, never marketing. By the way, I always worked with marketing, I just never did it myself.

03:37 But what I did learn in product, and really loved, was impact mapping. I don't know if you're familiar with the concept, but it's mainly for product teams trying to understand why they're developing something, why they're doing the things they're doing. The idea is: everything you're thinking about doing, you try to understand why you're doing it, who it's going to impact, and what it's going to make them do. So if you're changing something in one screen: who's the target population that's going to be affected by it, what is it going to make them do, and how does it connect to what you're really trying to achieve. For example, if you're trying to get more users, doing something that makes it easier to invite users makes a lot of sense.

So back to marketing: I try to work by the same principles. If the company has a certain goal, you need to connect everything back to that. If the goal is revenue, if the goal is getting to the first customers, if the goal is getting the product to readiness, then whatever marketing is doing has to somehow be tied to that. And I'm not a marketing person, but Sian, who's an amazing person and heads our marketing, I'll sit with her and tell her, okay, our goal as a company is to get to this much revenue, or these many customers, or these targets, and then we'll sit together and figure out what marketing can do that will make an impact on that. As a company we're doing things that are a little bit unique, in terms of going directly to clinicians, for example, so a lot of the KPIs have to do with that.

Maya Ber Lerner

We're still early stage, which means we're fast. If we're fast, then the goals of the company are changing a lot, and that means the KPIs are changing, which could be a problem, by the way, because one of the most interesting things about KPIs is to look at how they change over time, and if you measure different things you're never going to see how it changes.

Maya Ber Lerner

The KPIs change when... one of the big things, as a healthcare startup, the biggest challenge is always go-to-market. It's never technology, technology is way ahead of healthcare, but go-to-market is the problem. So this is something we've been experimenting with, a lot of different ways to get to market. Do we need to talk to operating room leaders, for example, are they the right audience for us, or do we need to talk to surgeons specifically and try to get to market that way? When we tested these different strategies, marketing was obviously doing completely different things in the early days.

When we said, okay, we need to get there top-down, we were trying to generate top-down conversations with a different audience, and it was a completely different number of meetings you needed to have, and the journey was very different, so the KPIs were different. At some point, very early on, we realized we don't want to bring Chiefy to market top-down initially, we want to go bottom-up and go direct to clinicians, which is a very unique thing, there's not a lot of this going on in healthcare in general. Then the marketing KPI became: okay, how many clinician conversations can we have, how do we get them, and how many of them can actually converge into a more meaningful conversation about purchasing the software we're selling, and so on. So right now, for example, our KPIs are more around the number of meetings we manage to have, the number of conversations we manage to have, how meaningful they are, whether they lead to something, and whether we're able to converge that. So I love this question.

Maya Ber Lerner 08:46

In my experience there was always great love between product and marketing. I'm more familiar with this tension when it comes to sales versus marketing, or, I don't know, customer success with sales. Anyway, I think the answer is... this is the next question, don't worry, okay. Yeah, so I think it's the same, this is the next question, don't worry about it. And it's kind of funny because Chiefy, at the end of the day, is a communication company, so I think a big part of what we do is try to get people to not work in silos, and this is probably the answer to your question, at least as far as I'm concerned. The thing is, it's very easy to blame someone when you don't talk to them a lot, and it's very easy to blame someone when you have very different agendas, and these are two things we keep fighting. So how do we do it practically?

For example, we try to, and we are a remote-first company, so it's not always easy, but we make sure that marketing and sales meet together every week, to talk about topics on the agenda that are for all of us together, and we're looking at the goals at the company level and how that translates to what marketing and sales are doing, to make sure we're all on the same page. Because a big part of it, when you feel like someone is doing something and it's not what you want them to do, is because they have a different agenda. For example, say marketing is working like crazy to get all these leads, and sales says, these are horrible leads, they don't lead me to anything, and you'll get more and more bitter about it if you give it a lot of time to fester. But if you have a conversation about it every week, and every week you say, okay, these were the leads this week, how was it, and sales says, well, we don't get much from it, it's all the wrong people, and it's not what we're looking for, then you can have this conversation, you can tweak things, you can let people vent a little bit, and usually what happens is you understand everyone's really trying to work towards the same thing. So keeping it human, I think, is a big part of it.

Maya Ber Lerner

So we're doing something big, but we're doing it through a lot of small things, and I'm a big believer in small things. I think, for example, that when you develop software for surgeons, yeah, it needs to save lives, it needs to make surgery more efficient and care better, and so on, but it's also really important that it saves the surgeon time, that it gets them home to their families earlier, that they need to wait less, maybe, for the next surgery, for the room to be ready. And, like, it's okay to be a little to be selfish, and to look for these things. Selfish, quote unquote, because the professions we're selling to, or that we're marketing to, are the most unselfish that you can get, right, it's people who dedicate their lives to helping people, and doing it under very, very difficult conditions, but they do deserve better conditions.

And sometimes it's very, very easy to mix that up. When you start a healthcare company, it's all about saving lives, and, you know, saving healthcare, but no, it's also like getting my husband home early for dinner, and that's a big part of our marketing. If you go and look, right now, at the stuff we put on social media, right, what do we do? We started a TikTok community about life in the operating room, what it means for teams when there is miscommunication, what it feels like to drag a really heavy piece of equipment into the operating room in the morning, stuff like that, you don't think about it when you think about saving lives, but this is also part of surgery, it's getting the room ready, it's a lot of supply chain stuff and getting stuff ready and a lot of pressure.

And, at the end of the day, you look at our social media, you'll also see us talking to surgeons and telling them, you don't need to be quarterbacking your surgeries, you don't need to be spending hours sending emails and text messages and making sure that everyone is ready, everyone knows what you're planning, everyone, just so that you can come to the room and be kind of relaxed, that your patient is in good care and that the room's going to be set up just right, and everything is okay. You don't need to quarterback it, someone, or some software, is going to help you do it. But it's a lot of very small things, right. It's not all about, let's say, "surgery together," it's more about, let's use 2024 technology tools to make your day in the operating room much better, and let you focus on the stuff you wanted to focus on when you went to medical school, for example.

Maya Ber Lerner

Yeah, completely agree.

Maya Ber Lerner

Usually we find ourselves hiring people when we definitely don't need people and cannot afford them, but we fall in love with them and we just say, okay, this person has to be joining our team. I see that it's kind of a repetitive behavior for us, and I think I kind of like it. But in general, when we are talking to people, I think the reasons that make us fall in love: first of all, as a communication, as a teamwork company, a lot of it is about team players, and people that can complement the team, and I kind of feel like, as the team grows, every team member that's added, it kind of makes it better and nicer, it's like this core that's growing, and everyone adds like this nice thing that's added to it, and it becomes like this stronger entity.

I love that, so being a team player is a big part of it. I also really like people who have these expanding personalities, they want to take over everything, they start out from, you know, helping you with the website, and suddenly you find them doing your lead generation, your growth marketing. It's my favorite thing in the world, expanders, people that just can't stop, I just love it. I know a few people like this, and they're definitely a treasure for every company.

Maya Ber Lerner

I'm going to give you a not-fun answer: it depends. Every function, and the question of how much this function really needs to be incentivized by stuff, or is it very easy for them to understand what to do and to develop the habits to do this job well, it depends a lot on the person, too, I think. And in marketing, for sure, some things are... I'm not always a big believer in telling someone, "make this list of a thousand people who said they were interested into a hundred meetings," or whatever, but sometimes you need to do it, and it's something that makes sense. So I don't have one answer, at least at the early stages of the company. I think the most important thing is just to be flexible about it, and to understand that when you put incentives on stuff, you generate behaviors, so it's very important to understand what behaviors you're generating, and if you're generating the wrong behaviors, change that. And this is definitely the hard part, especially in marketing, when the sales side is not a hundred percent. This is like one of the struggles that I see, and marketers who go to work for early-stage founders and investors struggle with, it's not really clear how to build those structures.

Maya Ber Lerner

If you're talking about mistakes, there can't only be one, probably.

Maya Ber Lerner

I think the one thing we keep going back to is making sure that marketing stays with the right focus on what the company is trying to achieve, because there's so much that can be done, and sometimes you want to do things in marketing and they don't have very clear results for the company, and then it becomes like this, you know, things like brand awareness, right, what's like, how does it translate to, "what does it help me that 10,643 people went to the website, I want to know how many meetings it generated." But no, "we need to have these 10,641 entries to the website, because, you know, you'll thank me later," kind of thing. And these are conversations that Sian and I have all the time: whenever we see them do something, it always gets to, "wait, wait, wait, why are we doing this, what is it going to do, what are we trying to achieve." And I'm very lucky, because Sian likes to put KPIs on everything, and measure everything, and go back to everything, it's like her nature, so I'm spoiled, and I don't always need to be the big thinker about this.

20:32 So the answer is: the biggest mistake is not to find heads of marketing that are super amazing. That's it.

Maya Ber Lerner 21:04

When I just started Chiefy, and I was talking to a lot of people, there was one founder that told me that the biggest problem with startups is not failing, or, you know, whether you're going to fail or succeed, but whether you're not going to know, this gray area of not really succeeding but not really failing. And I think the biggest misconception I can think of about startups is: when you start it, you're like, okay, if it succeeds it succeeds, if it fails it fails, and, you know, I think society is a little bit in love with failing, and you're like, "yeah, I didn't fail, I just found ten thousand ways that don't work," all this, people are a little bit in love with failing and the idea of failing.

But the idea of not really, of just keeping going and spending five years of your life doing something that hasn't really succeeded amazingly but hasn't really failed, is a bigger thing that I think you need to think about when you start something. You're going to do it, and if you're persistent, if you're talented, then maybe what you're going to do is not going to completely fail, maybe it's not going to completely succeed, and you're just going to keep doing it for a while, and you want to do it right, even if it doesn't become this incredible, unbelievable, top one percent story, but also you don't get the failed satisfaction of, "oh yeah, I tried it for six months but it failed."

Maya Ber Lerner

On the day that I launch my startup, I'd probably tell myself: in healthcare it's all about go-to-market, nothing else matters, it's the only thing, it's going to succeed or fail. As a marketer I can say that in other fields it's all about go-to-market too, but I'm definitely biased. I come from DevOps, I mean, I've seen products that were successful just because some product got launched and people started using it, and five years later you had this crazy community, all these Cinderella stories, and I still carry that into healthcare, and into a lot of other industries, and maybe all industries. Go to market, just go to market. That's the one thing that you need to figure out. I would definitely tell myself that, and I would not listen, and do the same things anyway, because I'm stubborn.

Maya Ber Lerner

I'm enjoying it too, Etgar, but I think you asked everything. I don't, I can't think of anything that you haven't asked, really.