Transcript

Tom Gores (00:00) You can get more clicks for the metric that you care about if you put it in someone's face. But does it really mean quality leads?

Ashley Stirrup (00:40) Hello and welcome to today's episode. I'm excited to have Tom Gores, Senior Director, Digital Ecosystems at GE Healthcare. Welcome to the show, Tom.

Tom Gores (00:49) Thanks. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Ashley.

Ashley Stirrup (00:51) Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. You've got a slightly different type of business than what a lot of our other guests have, so this is gonna be a fun episode. Maybe we could start with just a little bit on your background. When did you first get into A/B testing?

Tom Gores (01:06) Yeah, it was about 12 years ago when I was working in retail at Kohl's, a big domestic retailer in the US. It was right about the time that A/B testing tools started to become a lot more business and marketer user friendly. We had a tool that not a lot of people were using, and I kind of got assigned to that because my boss at the time was like, "Yeah, this could be a good opportunity. I think you have the right personality to drive this sort of program forward." And I realized quickly the gold mine that we were sitting on and a lot of the opportunity there. It only grew from there, and I grew that whole program into something that I thought at the time was pretty special. Then my role got a little more technical. I moved into IT, and then I ended up joining GE Healthcare just over 5 years ago, doing similar kind of work, but I've expanded scope beyond A/B testing into broader optimization and content authoring and publishing and UX as well.

Ashley Stirrup (02:01) Got it. Great. So with your role you're actually responsible for the main GE Healthcare website as well as coordinating with other digital channels, is that right?

Tom Gores (02:11) That's right. Yeah, we think of the digital ecosystem as GEHealthcare.com, our main corporate site, at the center, but then it also connects to a lot of other websites, channels and experiences that customers can tail off into, and other ones that we offer.

Ashley Stirrup (02:29) Yeah, and it's much more of a B2B experience versus Kohl's, which is B2C, right?

Tom Gores (02:34) Yeah. Most of the shoppers or browsers on our website are mostly healthcare professionals and health system representatives and different buyer groups like that. So quite a bit different audience than the B2C consumer going to Kohl's trying to buy socks.

Ashley Stirrup (02:51) Yeah, right, right. And does that change how you think about designing experiments?

Tom Gores (02:58) Yeah, I think one of the big differences is that in retail the buying cycles are much shorter. It's kind of in the moment: how can we capture attention and get the conversion right now with the promotions and the flashy experiences? It's just a shorter, instant-gratification sort of world. In B2B, and especially in healthcare, the buying cycles are long. They can be months to a year, with multiple visits on a journey with us. It's not always about the instant click making the sale. It's much more in it for the long game.

Ashley Stirrup (03:36) Yeah. So I'd imagine what that leads to is you're looking more at leading indicators and then tracking long-term impact, maybe after the experiment's done.

Tom Gores (03:47) That's right. Yep, exactly.

Ashley Stirrup (03:49) That's great. Tell us a little bit more about experimentation at GE Healthcare. How many experiments are you running? How many teams are there? And how much of it is centralized versus decentralized?

Tom Gores (04:02) Sure. My team would be considered centralized. We operate the program that runs A/B tests, but we partner with a ton of stakeholders across the organization that come to us with different ideas. Sometimes the ideas are kind of raw, but our job is really to turn them into more executable A/B tests and actual experiments that we can make bigger, better and learn from. I mentioned the huge differences: the volume of traffic might be lower than we had in a retail environment, but the stakes are higher. Like I mentioned, in retail someone might place an order for socks and clothes for $10 with all the coupons.

Ashley Stirrup (04:53) Yeah, I'll bet. And is it the kind of thing where a lot of that is self-service, or does it tend to be more of a B2B sale once you actually get to that part?

Tom Gores (05:05) A little bit of both. It depends. We offer some e-commerce-like experiences where it's self-service. But if we're talking more about capital equipment and some of the bigger deals, the journey might start online and then engage with a sales rep, but it usually ends up being closed offline and goes through a little more traditional channel.

Ashley Stirrup (05:26) Yeah, that's super interesting that it's a mix like that, because even the initial transaction from a B2B account might be quite a bit bigger than those socks from Kohl's, and then you have all the repeat business afterwards as well.

Tom Gores (05:38) Yeah. It's a fundamentally different way of thinking about the kind of digital experience we need to deliver, and of course the things we want to test and the hypotheses we test when we run some of these experiments.

Ashley Stirrup (05:52) Do you have an example of an experiment that you've run, doesn't have to be at GE Healthcare, where you've had a lot of learnings?

Tom Gores (05:58) Yeah, one that sticks out is from when I started working here. Experimentation as a practice and a culture wasn't quite as mature as we had it at Kohl's and in retail. But there was an appetite for it. You could tell people wanted more of that. We just didn't, honestly, have it resourced appropriately to do it at the scale we wanted. Of course, when you're at the beginning of a program, you're trying to get quick wins. So we asked, what are our most important KPIs? Contact Us form submissions were always surfacing to the top. So we went after something quick that could get more clicks on Contact Us and more forms. We added a Contact Us floating badge, kind of an experience, to the homepage. And what we found was a really important lesson in this new environment: you can get more clicks for the metric you care about if you put it in someone's face. But does it really mean quality leads? Probably not. We saw a pretty significant increase in clicks, but we also learned from the business development teams that we increased junk leads, ones that weren't as qualified. It can actually end up causing more churn and a lot more work for the sales teams to vet those out. So I think it was an important lesson on the balance between trying to drive the click and what's best for the business.

Ashley Stirrup (07:26) Yeah. One thing I've really learned on this show is just how important it is to understand your buyer and your buyer's journey, and then ask, am I doing things that optimize that journey? This sounds a little bit like that: maybe some of those buyers would have been great for a self-serve e-commerce scenario, but not necessarily ones you wanted to send to your direct sales team.

Tom Gores (07:48) Yep, I agree with that.

Ashley Stirrup (07:49) So understanding those buyers and making sure you're funneling the right people to the right experience is probably even more important for a business like yours.

Tom Gores (07:58) Yeah, you've got to be a lot more tactical about that. In B2C, when you get so much volume, you can throw things to the masses and see what sticks. But in B2B you've got to be a lot more strategic and a little more tactical about who you're delivering what to.

Ashley Stirrup (08:17) Yeah, that's right. And very different buyer journeys between those. For Kohl's, everybody's probably got a roughly similar buyer's journey. Maybe they need to do more research or less, but in the end it's still an e-commerce transaction, versus moving to an offline transaction in the other case, right?

Ashley Stirrup (08:47) How do you help people design experiments so that there's the most learning? Often when people come to you, they've got an idea for a great new feature, not necessarily a great new experiment. Maybe the idea is right, but the initial implementation isn't always necessarily going to be right. So you want to make sure you're learning as much as you can about, okay, good idea, but how do I iterate? How do you help people design experiments that give you the most learning?

Tom Gores (09:13) Yeah, the way we first look at it is to put some quantitative juice behind it. First of all, how much volume is there on the page you want to test? Oftentimes people come to us, and this was the same for retail too, and they care about their thing: their page, their business, the thing they focus on day to day, and they've got ideas for it. But what we have to do is understand how high volume that area of the site or page is. How much action do we actually get there? And then, could we apply a similar theme more broadly? Let's say someone wants to redesign their product page. Could we apply that similar theme to all product page templates, for example, and make it a bigger, better, broader idea? Then we can put it on a roadmap: okay, we tested this change, let's apply it to our base template. Now we're talking about thousands of people who could be impacted by the change, as opposed to maybe hundreds on one particular product page. That's one of the more common examples. It's taking an idea that we think has some legs, but is in isolation, and asking how we apply it more broadly and a little more globally.

Ashley Stirrup (10:23) Yeah, that's interesting. Where I thought you were going was, "This is a great idea, but it's underpowered." And you flipped it to, "Okay, how do we make this into a bigger thing?" And then from there, I assume you also want to think about how this might fail, and what the signals are that it's a good idea but maybe not done right. How do you try to get signals like that? What are certain metrics that are important to you that might be good leading indicators for your business?

Tom Gores (10:52) There are the initial ones: are customers engaging with the content we're putting out on our pages? The basic things like clicks and engagement. And then of course we care about things like form fills, starting that lead gen relationship with us. There are different product pages and different templates that we put out there, and these pages have different purposes. Some of them are more information finding and research based, and some are more focused on conversion. We've done a whole bunch of experiments on forms and how to optimize those. But when it comes to your question, to me it's really forward thinking about what happens after. Let's say we go through this whole effort, spend the time, money and resources, build this out and test it. What if it fails? What if we don't get the results we thought we might? Just having a lot of foresight and playing out these different scenarios: what do we do afterwards? Once you've mapped that out, you do a much better job of avoiding a scenario where you're coming back to the leaders and saying, "This didn't work." There's a negative energy that comes with that. But if you've already thought it through, you're like, "All right, here's the plan. If it works well, here's the plan. If it doesn't, here's how we're going to iterate." You get ahead of a lot of those conversations and keep it framed as: we run experiments to learn and to help us make better decisions. And oftentimes you get a win from the thing you don't end up building, or the thing you didn't end up spending the time on, because it turns out it wouldn't have been worth it.

Ashley Stirrup (12:27) Yeah. What you're saying reminds me of my business. At GrowthBook, people are going on buyer's journeys. Maybe they haven't clicked the Contact Us button yet, but you see, okay, they did this and they did that, and then they went and did a bunch of research over in this area. So what does that tell me about the buyer's journey, and how can I help them to their next step? I assume you must be doing similar types of things.

Tom Gores (12:52) Yeah. Next action, and understanding that funnel. Like we mentioned at the beginning, the buying cycle and buyer behavior in a B2B healthcare environment are drastically different from what you get in an individual B2C retail environment.

Ashley Stirrup (13:07) And how do you see experimentation evolving at your company?

Tom Gores (13:11) The way I see it, we've got probably 3 different areas for it to grow and keep improving. The first is getting more integrated into a lot of the company's big activities and being salient, top of mind, for a lot of big projects. We've done a pretty good job creating that sort of culture and empowering some of the teams to think that way. I see it as people and culture. We've still got an opportunity there to keep highlighting big wins and putting the idea out there: let's get experimentation at the forefront of the development and the work we're doing, so that we don't have to go back retroactively. Then we've also got an opportunity with data. As I'm sure you're well aware, and you hear on the show a lot, not everyone has the cleanest data and data systems and data sources that connect. So that's always an opportunity to set your foundation in a better way to do more personalized experiences and more advanced use cases. And the third bucket I see is technology and capabilities. How do we set ourselves up to actually run some of those more advanced use cases with tools like the customer data profiles that have emerged? How do we have the same view of a customer across all of our different channels and systems, and connect the dots from a visit online to a visit on another channel and keep the conversation going?

Ashley Stirrup (14:35) Yeah, that's interesting. You're making me realize how many of our guests have been more B2C focused. The data requirements must be significantly more complex for a business like yours because of that whole multi-channel experience. Obviously Kohl's was multi-channel as well, but in a different way. Having that data in a B2B world, because of that more complex journey, has got to be so critical.

Tom Gores (15:04) Yeah. And it's complicated. Being a global company, we run into considerations for global privacy laws and all these different pieces that complicate the things you can do and the visibility you have. But they're challenges we have to solve if we want to deliver a great experience.

Ashley Stirrup (15:22) Yeah, that's a great point as well. We talked a little bit about metrics, and you mentioned the Contact Us form fills. What are some of the other key metrics you're trying to optimize?

Tom Gores (15:36) Overall, now that I'm leading the ecosystem, and this includes everything around the website experience, one of our main North Star metrics is CSAT, customer satisfaction. In my mind, all the activities we do, delivering high-impact experiences that are relevant to our customers and engaging, culminate in a CSAT rating. Do they find our website satisfactory? Would they recommend it to a friend? Those sorts of ideas. Those are high-level metrics that encompass a lot of the things we're trying to deliver, knowing that it's a long cycle. Some visits are just coming to read a little about a product, or maybe an article that was published. Different kinds of journeys lead to the different KPIs we care about. But it's really, of course, conversion rate, so how many people who come to our site are filling out forms, and CSAT. The other side of my team is optimization and how we're setting ourselves up for discoverability. And one of the newer metrics that we, and I'm sure a lot of companies, are looking at is how we're showing up in AI visibility, and in organic traffic still. How do we position our content and our site to make sure we're top of mind for a lot of the LLMs and these conversations? Knowing that customer behavior is significantly changing toward using AI for research, we've got to make sure our brand shows up when they're performing those prompts.

Ashley Stirrup (17:05) Yeah, that's really interesting, especially, I would imagine, for a business like yours. You could see a lot of that buyer's journey moving to an LLM. So providing that type of thought leadership content, I would imagine, is pretty important as well.

Tom Gores (17:19) Yeah, it's a whole other piece of it. As I was mentioning about the ecosystem, there are so many different pieces to it and different parts of our site that serve different audiences and different stages of that buyer journey.

Ashley Stirrup (17:34) And how do you measure CSAT?

Tom Gores (17:37) It's through a survey. It's really similar to how we did it in retail too. It's basically a survey rerun on some kind of regular cadence. Same questions, so you have a baseline, and then you compare it against the last quarter or last year or whatever time granularity you're looking at. But you try to keep consistent with it.

Ashley Stirrup (17:55) Well, terrific. Tom, this has been great having you on the show. I feel like we learned a lot, and I bet we could have gone into so much more. You have a really fascinating business.

Tom Gores (18:04) Thanks. I really appreciate you having me on. I'm always down to talk shop, so anytime.

Ashley Stirrup (18:10) Well, thank you.