CMO Spotlight | Ellen Donahue-Dalton - Medecision
The CMO Spotlight is a chance to get an inside look into the minds and journeys of high performing marketing leaders.
Setup CEO Joe Koufman virtually sat down with Ellen Donahue-Dalton, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Medecision. The full conversation covers her career path from politics to marketing, ability to form connections within her organization to succeed, and working for a purpose-driven company and ever-changing Healthcare industry.
WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW AND READ THE RECAP BELOW.
Q1 | Tell us about your career path.
Donahue-Dalton described her career path as different chapters of her life. Starting off as a Legislative Analyst in a field focused on legalizing gaming, she learned intensely about consumer marketing. “It's where I learned a lot about consumer marketing and that's something that is now coming into Healthcare in a big way, right? Consumer marketing, behavioral and psychographic segmentation, etc.”
She then moved onto own a consulting company where she worked with a number of Healthcare IT and Healthcare Services companies, and then moved into the Medecision role about ten years ago.
At the beginning of her time at Medecision, it was a turnaround company with some market issues where 40% of the customers indicated that they were leaving. To fix that, she personally spoke to the main buyers to figure out the path forward. “We ended up doing a light-weight rebranding in 2013 to clear the air and try to forge a new path for ourselves. And here we are seven years later, and we're about to do another one probably much bigger and broader. So certainly going from a turnaround to an at-scale company.”
In her current role, her team has also increased the amount of tools and quantitative analysis to predict trends and create a beneficial consumer experience.
Q2 | What is your super power?
“My super power is my eyes.”
“I tend to see things as they connect in ways that a lot of people around me maybe haven't seen because they're seeing other things or doing other things. I think that my leadership team counts on me today to be able to connect dots between CX, UX, and EX.” Donahue-Dalton prided her ability to see the things that went unnoticed, and use that sight to form connections.
“What's the customer experience that we have to create that's competitively compelling and that delivers value to them? What is the user experience? We have about 150,000 users that are hands on our software every day. What is that user experience that they have to have? How does it get more streamlined? How does it help them do their jobs faster? How is it less taxing on their day to day life? And then what's our employee experience? How is it that our employees are connected into customer experience and the user experience? So being able to bring those things together into the articulation of a brand and then use them to build impact - that's what I think that I do well for our organization. And I think that's what people count on me personally for.”
Donahue-Dalton continued to explain how she connects people across the organization. “I have teams that focus in certain program areas or in certain functional areas, and I try as much as I can to have them co-collaborate.
“As soon as we start connecting people across the group, not only of course do they build those human relationships, but the productivity goes up, and the quality of the work goes way up. And, of course, people’s sense of fulfillment and accomplishment goes up.”
She also uses this super power to connect the dots between processes or patterns from other industries to fill gaps.
“I have the kind of mind like I just said where I'm always connecting dots. I draw a lot of inspiration from other category leaders that have nothing to do with Healthcare. Because if there is anything I know, it's that every single one of us is a Healthcare consumer, right? Not just when we're in a hospital or doctor's office. Not just when we're choosing our insurance. Really, every single day. We're buying that Smart Watch, we're going to the yoga class, we're going to a nutritional counseling class for our Diabetes - whatever it is, we are consumers. And we expect Healthcare to be as seamless and personalized and convenient and value-oriented as we expect anything else.”
“We expect Healthcare to be as seamless and personalized and convenient and value-oriented as we expect anything else.”
Q3 | Is there a piece of advice that you would like to pass onto other marketers?
Donahue-Dalton emphasized the importance of creating actual value for consumers. “When I grew up in my marketing career, I think that it was easy to get overly focused on the achievement of tactical goals - run a great campaign, or create a great event, or whatever. And now it's all about impact. And one of my focal points with my team going into next year's planning, budgeting, etc, is build impact.”
“Build impact.”
“Unless we can create a meaningful impact for our users, for our business clients, and for the way in which they create an experience for their members and patients, it's kind of not worth doing.”
“The old focus around growth rate, shared targets, and program-level achievements have faded away into: how do we build impact?”
As a purpose-driven organization with the mission “Liberating Healthcare,” Donahue-Dalton asks herself:
How do we build impact throughout the journey that this user, or this member, or this patient, or this business client has with us?
How do we invest to drive the most amount of value and to achieve our mission?
Q4 | What are the most important values that you demonstrate as a leader, or that you may even demand from people on your team?
Donahue-Dalton values a collaborative environment where the employees continue to push themselves and each other. “In terms of leadership values, I tend to be sort of impatient and even a little relentless.”
Collaboration - “Being able to infect my leaders and other leaders in the company with that spirit of collaboration where the dots can be connected is something that I try to do.”
Ambition - “Desire and ambition and appetite to achieve a big vision is something to me that's really critical.”
Other highlights include her outlook on agency partners and the benefits of having a marketing agency with chemistry in addition to capability and how her team manages to prove marketing’s value to the C-suite through measurable and impactful results.
For more marketing leadership advice and a view into the mindset of a Healthcare marketing executive, be sure to watch the full interview with Ellen Donahue-Dalton, and keep an eye out for more thought leadership from our CMO Spotlights.
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