Episode 274 / Alejandra Ramirez Giles / BD / Marketing Manager LATAM - MMS Dispensing Hospital & Pharmacy Automation
AI Insights for B2B Med Tech Marketing
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With 14 years’ experience in med tech marketing, Alejandra Ramirez Giles values the importance of always learning to improve her skills and her understanding of her audience, among others. She is the Marketing Manager LATAM - MMS Dispensing Hospital & Pharmacy Automation at BD. On the podcast, she shared her interest in using AI for gathering insights on B2B audiences in med tech specifically.
As she explains, the challenge in this space is gathering the right data and insights to understand the collective decision-making processes of key stakeholders, such as hospital CFOs. "If AI can help you to collect that information and to analyse it, it will be really powerful," Alejandra says, emphasising the need to train AI models using real-world focus groups to ensure they accurately reflect the target audience's thought processes.
Alejandra's vision for this tool is not to replace human interaction, but to enhance it. "AIs won't cover a big part of human connection that face-to-face interaction does," she acknowledged. Instead, the AI-led insights tool would serve as a guide, providing marketers with a better understanding of their audience to inform more effective strategies and decisions.
Learn more about her vision and get some top data driven marketing tips from Alejandra on the podcast.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Alejandra Ramirez Giles 0:00
What we do as marketers, even if you use AI tools or not, is converting whatever a person says, whatever data you gather, to some artificial thing called information, called Insight, that in volume will be useful for you to make a better decision.
Speaker 0:22
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Tom Ollerton 0:51
Hello and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative, and this is a weekly podcast about the future of data driven marketing. And I have the pleasure and the privilege of interviewing our industry's leaders, and I'm very fortunate to be in Mexico, certainly today, interviewing Alejandra Ramirez, who is Regional Marketing Manager for automated, medicated management solutions in Latin America at BD. So Ale, can you give the audience a brief background into how you ended up doing this job?
Alejandra Ramirez Giles 1:36
Yeah, well, first, thank you for the invitation. I'm glad to be here. And yeah, as you mentioned, I'm the Regional Marketing Manager, Becton Dickinson. I've been in the med tech industry for 14 years now, and I'm really passionate about how these new technologies are being applied to what we do as marketers, and special specifically, as data driven marketers.
Tom Ollerton 2:02
So in your career, what has been the best investment of your own time, energy or money?
Alejandra Ramirez Giles 2:10
Well, I would say that the best investment of my energy, my time and my money, has been for sure, learning. And when I say learning. I say that in general. So learning about everything I can to perform my job better, but also to give that next step in my career every time. So for example, I'm saying not only about these formal education programs, like to invest a lot of money and a lot of time, for example, in these post graduate programs or in trainings or in certificates, and not only because I want a paper that says, hey, this person knows that, but also because I identify these knowledge gaps that I have that can be covered to perform my job better, and also I honestly believe that you can learn from everyone and from everything. So, for example, it is really rich to invest your time, which eventually is money in knowing other people, or, for example, traveling to some places understand other cultures. For example, can I tell you a story? On my last trip to Argentina, I took a flight from Cordoba to Buenos Aires, and there was a lady about 70 years old, next to me in the plane. I don't remember exactly how our conversation started, but she asked me about something that if I was going to use a coat or something because it was cold in the plane. But eventually we ended up talking about her experience in the hospital she worked for. So she was a former head of Hematology in one of the biggest hospitals in Argentina, and she ended up telling me how she fight, and she was challenged to learn how to use all the technologies that passed through the hospital in 20 years. And she was like, imagine, I had to learn how to use a computer. I had to learn how to touch strange things that I have never seen, and now she's retired and so but that conversation was so neutral, was so rich, that I wasn't trying to sell her anything. She wasn't trying to convince me about every anything. But all the information that I gather from that conversation was not only something was useful for life. It was always also something that what can actually apply to my job, because she was some person that has deal with this technology adoption, and she gave me so much insights about her experience that I can use and apply. In my job. And also, I would say that the third way I had invested my time, my effort and my money in learning has been searching about anything I want to learn. So for example, if I'm working on a project and I want to learn how to use a martech tool, I just Google it, or use chat GPT or whatever, I take the time to learn from that, and it doesn't matter if, if you think or not that you have the time or not, whatever, but there's a lot of information out there, and we have this huge opportunity of using the internet that is almost information unlimited access. And of course, you need to check if the source is reliable. But once you have this information and this knowledge, and I don't think that there's no time for that, and a lot of people think that there's no time for everything, I don't, I do believe that we have time for everything, but you cannot do everything at the same time. So just to close my comment right, as this guy, Benjamin Franklin, said, and that before being in the 100 US, Bill, he was philosopher, he was a scientist. He said that the investment that pays the best interest is knowledge, and I really believe that.
Tom Ollerton 6:29
So what is your advice to someone who wants to become a better data driven marketer? What's the one thing that you find yourself sharing most often?
Alejandra Ramirez Giles 6:40
Well, I would say is one thing, but divided into parts. First, you cannot forget to set a clear objective when you are, for example, conducting market research. And second, you need to be open to whatever you will find out. The first thing when I say you need to set clear objective is because world is full of data. You will find data everywhere, but you need to be clear, and you need to have this good idea, but also this good objective of what you're looking at, what you're looking for, which is not the same. And for example, let's say that in my career, right? If I'm trying to build a buyer persona profile to refine that, I will get some data. I will convert that to information, but then I have to transform that into insights, into valuable insights that will be actionable. But if I don't know, or I don't have any idea what to do with that data, I will get lost, and data itself can be useless. And the second part be open, because what customer thinks is what is important, not what you believe, not what you have this preconception, or whatever you can have in your market research and hypothesis that may not be linked to what you will find out, and you need to be open to embrace, to accept the results and to understand you are not the customer. And if you want to connect with the customer, if you want to talk to their minds, if you want to connect with the hearts you need to take their insights, not your beliefs.
So we're going to move on now to your shiny new object, which is something that doesn't exist, which is quite exciting. So what your shiny new object is, is an AI led Insights tool for B2B audiences, specifically within med tech, right? So this is an unbelievably niche thing, which I'm really excited to know more about. So why have you chosen that as your shiny new object?
Yeah, well, I think because we've been dealing with this problem in our industry, in the med tech industry, specifically talking on the B2B approach to gather these data, these information, these insights that are relevant to understand these collective decision making mind, right? So in C2C, this is more straightforward. So you gather information from people, their emails, if they are female or male, if they have pets or not, things that are connected to the way they live their lives. But it's not the same to look for those specific data, for data or that insights that connect the way they make decisions in their jobs, like, for example, talking about one particular stakeholder that will be part of a decision making committee in a hospital. Let's say the CFO. I don't care if he likes green or red, but I care if he's more likely to take risks if he is a pro technology or if he is a pro innovation guy or not, or let's say I can, I can take some information from even his email address, if he uses Yahoo or Hotmail. Maybe he is not like a high tech guy, right? But for example, let's say that you you can check the behaviors, you can track their their history, the records, or use these programmatic tools to understand better how that part of his mind works when making decisions in a B2B environment. And if AI can help you to collect that information and to analyze that information, it will be really powerful.
Tom Ollerton 10:58
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Where is that information coming from? So AI is nothing without training data, right? Exactly. So using a kind of programmatic example, like A, B to B to C, we know what websites are on. We know what they're interested in, so we can sell them pineapple juice or whatever. Fine. And so if we're going to have an AI led Insights tool for B2B audiences in med tech, where are those data points going to come from to train the AI?
Alejandra Ramirez Giles 12:02
Yeah, yeah, of course. And actually, today, I'm participating in a project of AI training for training an AI tool. So how, how do you train AI to understand what you want to know is giving them or giving it a focus group of the profile of people that you want to get insights in the future from. So, for example, if you want some AI to help you to build a buyer persona profile for a CFO in hospitals, then use a focus group of CFOs to train this AI, right?
Tom Ollerton 12:44
So, so what you're doing is you're organizing a focus group with real human beings, and you're talking to them about, I don't know, their buying preferences and biases and sources of intelligence so that you're creating a kind of a bespoke GPT so that you can go right? Well, we're thinking of sponsoring this med tech event, and then the machine would come back and say no, because, because we never do...
Alejandra Ramirez Giles 13:12
Yeah, for example, I will tell you an example that is also something that we already did as some kind of testing with nurses in Argentina, precisely. We said, Okay, we want to do this webinar. We we are super believers that webinars are the best thing. And then we had this focus group with nurses, and they say, we hate webinars. It's losing our time, so you need to train AISs and that's something I think applies to any industry. AIs must be trained by humans, because they must emulate our thoughts, our way of thinking, so we cannot assume that we will have everything in our mindset. And that's why this is connected to my previous answer of the to the advice, we are not the customer. They are the customers.
Tom Ollerton 14:07
But the AI is not the customer. So, so I'm going to push back a little bit, just for the sake of a good podcast. But you know, you're saying that like the AI can think, like our consumers, it can't. It doesn't think it's a probabilistic model. So is, if I get answered this question, asked this question, probably these are the these are the successions of words that is most likely going to deliver the highest percentage of having the right answer. It doesn't understand anything.
Alejandra Ramirez Giles 14:35
If it's not well trained, because the one of the basics part of the large learning models, if that you must train those tools or those artificial intelligences in the way that that target person, or that target kind of person will think so, yes, it will be a wrong idea to. Train. I an AI to think as you in a company think. But if you use this, a this AI to be trained by the by by eventually, what you are trying to emulate, for example, I if I want to know how nurses think I won't be training AIs with with marketers, right?
Tom Ollerton 15:27
No, I understand. I understand how it works. I think I haven't done it myself, and it's an inspiring idea that automated creative could create a buyer persona and then get those buyers to create a corpus of intelligence of which you could train an LLM to respond, but my, my fear of AI, well, my, my sort of understanding of AI, that it's, it's not knowledge, it's not, it's not in it's not artificial intelligence. It's statistics, right? I think there's a danger that we will stop talking to people, yeah, stop talking to nurses in Argentina. And as you said, You sat next to that lady on the plane and reading your body language and your tone of voice, you're inspired by that moment where it's like you could have easily, I guess, gone to like a, you know, a GPT for the same information, and I don't think you would have responded to it in quite, quite such an emotional way. I'm not sure. Yeah, so how do you, so, my Sorry, I'm rambling a little bit. Apologize, right? How would you? How do you, how do you put the human into AI in that scenario when you're talking to a GPT of nurses in Argentina?
Alejandra Ramirez Giles 16:33
Yeah, for example, there's way to train these AIs, yeah, they will never replace humans. I hope they will not, yeah, but in the end there, they must be used as a tool, as a guide, yeah, but that applies to any AI in any industry. For example, today, you cannot rely on whatever GPT tells you, right?
Tom Ollerton 17:01
Definitely not.
Alejandra Ramirez Giles 17:02
And I think that's or at least in this point where, in which AIs are not mature enough, because, yes, in the end, you are training them not to think, to follow algorithms, which is different because decision making for AIS, I will say decision making as not a real decision making process is based on algorithms that humans are programming. Okay, so it's kind of a gray area of where this AI evolution is taking us, and if we believe that this will be a problem in the future, not for medtech, for any industry, but yeah, I think that AIs won't cover a big part of human connection that face to face interaction does. And I'm not sure, and I don't think, and I don't will this tool to replace that part, because, in the end, what we do as marketers, even if you use AI tools or not, is converting whatever a person says, whatever data you gather, to some artificial thing called information, called Insight, that in volume will be useful for you to make a better decision. And that's the same thing with these models of the same thought that I have for this AI tool to give you a better guide, because you won't be able to talk to any person in the plane, right? But let's say that if in that plane that I took from Cordova to Buenos Aires, there was 20 physicians I just have this chat with one, and having an AI tool will give me more information, more data, maybe not emotional or 100% accurate, but it will be a good guide, and it will save time, and I hope, money for for companies.
Tom Ollerton 19:19
I feel like we could talk about this for a long time, but we've come to the end. So if someone wanted to get in touch with you about any of the things that we've discussed today, where's a good place to do that and what makes a message that you will reply to?
Alejandra Ramirez Giles 19:39
Well, the best way is LinkedIn, so send me a message through LinkedIn, and that's it.
Tom Ollerton 19:48
What kind of message will you reply to?
Alejandra Ramirez Giles 19:50
Just don't say you're trying to sell me something because or that you're but for example, Hey, I heard you at the podcast. And, or I want to have a talk with you regarding med tech, whatever, or I want to learn, or just want to discuss about some topic regarding marketing, which I love to by, by the way, I consider myself this med tech marketing activist, so anything that has to do with that, I will reply to.
Tom Ollerton 20:21
Brilliant, well, you're our first med tech marketing activist on the show. So thank you.
Alejandra Ramirez Giles 20:27
Thanks to you.
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