eHealth Insurance CRO Michelle Barbeau, Part 2

Greg Stuart: This is Building Better CMOs. Let's get back to my conversation with Michelle Barbeau, the CRO and former CMO of eHealth Insurance.

So Michelle, a bunch of really interesting stuff here. So I'd be curious to see where you kind of go on this one. And I sent your team, and you know the sort of big question here is what do we as the marketing industry, as marketers, where might we be missing the mark? What do we maybe not fully understand or maybe even fully appreciate about marketing? What do you think that we would be better as marketers if we did, if we really dug in there and really had a better comprehensive understanding? You're giving where we've maybe probably not prioritized well, where we need to prioritize. How ever you want to go at that, but what do you think that is, Michelle, in your experience?

MB: I'll tell you my thesis is that marketers need to realize that they need to be the voice and agents of change in the organization because they sit at this unique intersection of really understanding the consumer in a way that other functions maybe often don't, right? People can have opinions on the message, the media placement, but at the end of the day, great marketers are the ones that can walk in their consumers' shoes, understand what that consumer will actually respond to, and therefore they need to represent that voice in the organization. They need to make sure that voice has a seat at the table in decisions. But also they are then marrying the consumer understanding with what the organization's strengths and ability to deliver that value that ultimately are going to drive the financial performance. We've talked about I have a passion for data and that's because we need to be able to drive growth. So it's not just being an agent of change for the sake of change, but it is grounded deeply in what the consumer needs and what the organization can deliver. And I think marketers get a unique view of looking across all of those components: what's going on in the industry and the competitive set and the consumer and the organization and the financial needs, and being able to bring that picture and recommendation forward in the organization.

GS: So what makes that kind of interesting as I listen to you, it's a one-two step. They're not disconnected. So we definitely have to understand the consumer better. It's funny, I've been listening to a celebrity podcast a little bit and I hear the actors always talk about being true to their character, understand your character, so you're kind of doing a variation of that. You're remaining true to what the company is, which you provide with the insight that the consumer needs. And you're right, others in the company certainly don't study that. The CFO doesn't, CTO, CIO, and nobody else really studies that in the way that you will and know it and for a fact, like you said, you got the in lock from the research you did. Okay, but I think what you're also really advocating for there, I guess, is kind of the courage to push that point or push points based on that insight. You're not just saying we need to know the customer better and reflect the customer, you're saying, but you've got to step in and really lead that, is really I think your core point here, right, Michelle? Is that right?

MB: That is absolutely right, and let's bring it back to getting comfortable with discomfort, but you have a responsibility to the organization. I do think that there's parts of marketing that can feel very subjective. And so the CFO might have an opinion on the message or, "Can't we just tell a consumer to go do this, and then they'll just magically go do this." But we are the ones who think they might think of that because maybe they're thinking through the lens as if they were the consumer.

GS: Yes.

MB: Marketers know that they are not the consumer. They know that when they put that consumer hat on, I am literally transforming and walking in the shoes of my consumer, and so I need to represent that voice to the organization. That opinion is really important.

GS: I really am struck, though, Michelle. And I don't know if I got this before here when we were talking about it, but it really is that two part that you have to be willing to take a stand to push a point of view, which might even be somewhat unfavorable. I mean, marketers have a terrible habit. Anytime I feel like I'm the customer, it makes me really nervous.

MB: Yes, yes.

GS: That's funny you agree to that so quickly.

MB: To be honest, because I was sitting here thinking about that. I mean most of our business is for Medicare.

GS: Yeah.

MB: I am not over 65, believe it or not. So if I am making...

GS: I could believe that. The listener's not going to see you on video. Let me vouch for the listener. She's far from 65. I can attest to that, but go ahead.

MB: So it's very dangerous if I sit here and make decisions...

GS: Totally.

MB: ... on my behalf or what I think is best instead of as a 65-, 70-, 80-year-old senior, and what do they need?

GS: Anytime when I sat on the agency, I did the agency business for the first 10 years of my life. I think you were an agency person too originally, right? Yeah.

MB: Yes.

GS: Anytime I would sit in a meeting, I'd hear somebody reflect a point about what the consumer is, but it felt very much like that person or their lifestyle. I was like, I'm suspicious.

MB: Got to be skeptical. You've got to be skeptical when you start to hear that. That's exactly right.

GS: I'm like, I don't know. And then putting yourself in another consumer's shoes and you're right, nobody else in the company is really going to be able to do it. Absolutely not. I mean there's just no way. Unless you sit and pay attention and read the research and really form a point of view, there's no way you're going to get there. Especially, at dare I say... All due respect. I don't know your CFO, your CFO, or CTO, I'll just use broad titles there. Yeah, I mean what are the chances? I mean over time, maybe some of them are wired that way and can get there, but as a general rule, very hard if you're not studied or trained in that. Interesting.

MB: Yes.

GS: Do you have an example of where you've had to push a consumer point of view that you're not so sure those in the team or the company would've appreciated? It doesn't have to be eHealth, but have you ever been in a situation like that? Can you think of anything?

MB: Maybe I can say it this way. This happens pretty regularly in marketing, but there are CEOs that get very passionate about media placement, and I have heard lots of examples of times where...

GS: Oh, don't even get me started. Oh my god, go ahead.

MB: Well, you know what I'm going to say.

GS: Oh, I know exactly what you're going to say.

MB: Marketers need to put up billboards, as an example, right? In the city, in the neighborhood where the CEO lives. Now marketers look at all the data, and you're an expert in that. Is that the right place? Well, no, but the CEO has a passion for and needs to feel like they're seeing that message out there. Right? I see, let's just say, competitors with that same sort of billboard and I want us out there as well. And so it runs counter to the data and is that the right point to show up for that consumer, as an example.

GS: Well, I can appreciate the politics of that one. I could actually see myself letting that go because the expense wouldn't be so high to help the board or others feel more attached. So at some level, okay. That said, I thought where you were going to go is that those who have a sponsorship with F1 and have no business being there.

MB: Well, it's the same thing.

GS: Or NASCAR.

MB: It's the same thing.

GS: That just drives me crazy when I see that.

MB: I'm not a personal big believer in big athletic sponsorships. It's a little harder to see that show up and pay off in the data depending on where you are, what your brand is, and where you are in your brand life cycle. It could be, but yes, sometimes those could be just little pet passion projects as well.

GS: Yeah, well that's what I'm saying. Sometimes when I hear people because it's a sport or it's an activity or something that they really believe in, what is the insight that really told us that matters to the customer and supports the brand in some way? I happen to have measured Super Bowl, and I happen to know that it is extraordinarily valuable and the pricing, the escalation in pricing. I remember the Super Bowl spot, when we were aghast it was $500,000 for 30. That was a long time ago, obviously.

MB: Now that'd be so cheap.

GS: $7.5 million I think now. But even still my guess, based on the knowledge... I had co-founded multi-touch attribution with a guy named Rex Briggs many years ago. It was the first time you measure individual media at that level. In fact, we actually measured the value of a press release. At the time, there was no way you could do that, but we could measure the value of a press release in relationship to the other media elements of the campaign, which by the way really reset everything I understood about marketing and media to your point. But when you hear people do that when you know it's their interest, I'm like, yeah, just can't, I don't know, doesn't feel right. That's an interesting topic, though. So aside from media placements... We had a speaker at one of the MMA events here a couple of years ago, she made a reference to... You can nod, but you don't have to say anything here. They won't know. The listener won't know. But they were explaining a crisis that they had been through, a very well-known crisis here in the industry, and she goes, "Yes, because everybody in the C-suite did marketing as a side hustle." Which I thought is sometimes what we're up against.

MB: Yes, that's right. Well, and that's when I say there are parts of it that are subjective, right? There are parts of marketing that are art, it's not all science. And so, everyone can see themselves as a marketer. Can I write that headline or can I pick that placement of media or a sponsorship? So again, we know what we were talking about. Really important for the marketer to bring the voice and make sure that the actual consumer is represented there.

GS: Do you have any other examples where you think this idea of showing up — whether it be sort of a hard show up to do, which is kind of how you positioned it there, it doesn't always have to be difficult — where you think it's really important that marketing has its input that it might not necessarily? Do you have examples of that where maybe it's not the first thought? I don't know.

MB: There is another piece of it that I was thinking of, which is it's so important for marketing to help play a role in that end-to-end experience.

I talked a lot about marketing brings them to the website or to pick up the phone call, but again, how the organization delivers against the rest of that experience and pays off the message. It is incredibly important for marketing to work hand in hand with product, engineering, sales to ensure that that gets paid off. And also really working through every use case because again, at the end of the day, if you really are accountable to the KPIs and the ROI and the business, marketing knows that they can't just bring them to the door. But you need them to convert and to build loyalty time and time again. So working through every use case, what does the sad path and the happy path look like? What does it look like when they're a first-time visitor or a return visitor? How about acquisition upfront versus ongoing retention? So really thinking through every journey that our consumer needs to go on and how do we help partner and equip the organization to deliver against that? Which also, by the way, at the end of the day is about delivering on our brand promise.

GS: Yeah, Michelle, you're going to really love this then. So MMA has worked with a team of professors led by a guy named Dr. Omar Rodriguez at Emory University. He's formerly a Coke guy, operating executive at Coke for many years before he got his PhD. And we have been doing research for them around marketing org and because there's other guys in there: Sundar Bharadwaj over at University of Georgia, a couple others, some real financially oriented professors connected then also to marketing. They're all sort of the same thing. Neil Morgan's a part of that. I shouldn't mention Neil's name, he'll notice if I didn't, but Neil Morgan's in there, too. Dr. Neil Morgan. And one of the things they've discovered is that beside there just being really three core marketing strategies: brand, customer experience, and DTC. There's really only three. That's all there are. There's no more. Stop making up marketing strategies. There's only three. You can have different combinations. Okay, here's what's new. When the CMO owns customer experience, the data seems to strongly suggest that those are the best financially performing organizations. So they do a regression analysis and eliminate all other variables. You just get down to just that. And I think too often, to your point, I'm not so sure that CMOs always own customer experience. And that gets back to your insights question too, doesn't it? Or your insights point.

MB: Yes, that's exactly right. And again, the unique role that marketers play in the organization and need to play to be able to drive that kind of performance.

GS: I also want to be fair, though, to others. Just thinking this through a little bit. I mean, listen, I don't know. I never worked in General Mills' business, but I know enough. I worked in Procter & Gamble, and I have a lot of friends over at Unilever, so I know the type of training and expertise that you're given. You really also have to be really good at that kind of thing. It's not just putting a marketer in charge of insights. You have to come from that well-honed, trained experience you got there, don't you think?

MB: Absolutely. No question. But again, and I think this goes back to what I was saying earlier, that I really believe that marketing is not about just looking at yourself as one slice of what's happening in the organization. And that's part of, I think, what that training was about and marketing being the general manager. You need to look at everything that's going on, all of the external trends, consumer dynamics, competitive industry, and then everything internal, and think about it very holistically. Your business class 101 will talk about the four Ps, right? That's basic product marketing, but that's just a formula of breaking down kind of that general idea of it's not just about the message. It's not just about what sexy advertisement you're going to go put out there. Is it in TV? Is it in radio? It is how every part of that experience shows up. It's your price point, how it's positioned, how a consumer is going to find it, how they're going to interact with the entirety of the experience, the first experience, the ongoing experience, the customer service that we're going to provide again and again. It is literally in my mind. Great marketers have to own the entirety of that to really be successful.

GS: And so just to go back to this point to make sure it's really clear to people, I think I know what you mean. Would you say the CMO must be a general manager? So just talk one more step on what that means. I think I know where you're going on, but just for the listener to make sure they get it. What's it mean to be a general manager, not just a CMO, I guess is what you're saying.

MB: That's exactly right. So for me, what a general manager means is you have accountability for the P&L driving top line growth as well as bottom line, right? I am very conscious of the costs and the return on everything that I'm doing. And the other piece of it is really helping to provide direction, coordination, orchestration of all of the other functions that are needed to support the entirety of that whole end-to-end experience that we talked about.

GS: Yeah, we call it running a coalition, not a function.

MB: Yes, I love that.

GS: I think everything you've said today just unbelievably completely supports that premise. It is so much more complicated, and it takes a lot of people. You do, even if you own customer experience, you still need product people. You need tech people, you need other people to sort of align around that mission and get going. Very interesting. Wow.

GS: I'm just curious here, how long did it take you actually get to... I'm going way back here in the earlier conversation, I'm still dwelling on all that you've said. How long did it take you to actually get to the market with a brand message? That takes time.

MB: Well, it seems like it, but we didn't have time. So this is one of the things that just blows me away. I am very proud of it because as I talked about, I needed to come in and look at the organization structure and be able to set the team. How does the team need to be organized? Do I have the right people? The first year I hired 25 people, so that was one of my biggest priorities was getting the right people in place and the right capabilities. And so I had to do that. I started having that team in place probably at the beginning, within the first three months in my role, but this campaign needed to be launched. We have our season, so for Medicare, it is the annual enrollment period that is October 15th to December 7th, and that ends up being about 80 percent of our sales. So you have one shot to hit it.

GS: You have your own not holiday season, but feels like a holiday season.

MB: Exactly right.

GS: I'm sorry, forgive me. Why is enrollment there for Medicare, just so I know, why is that?

MB: That is dictated by CMS, the government, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

GS: When did you start there then? I think we got to know.

MB: So I started in September, so I was kind of just beginning the first annual enrollment period. So that was sort of experiencing what was happening, directing what I could while knowing I needed to lay the foundation for that next year to get the brand launched and to really start the transformation. And so that's when I say within those first three months, by about January I started having the right people in place. I hired the agency, we started the consumer research. That was all within those first three months because the other part of working in health care, and particularly Medicare, is that it is highly, highly regulated. So now back up from October, really, we needed everything produced and ready by the summer. So we're talking about a six-month period because it's months and months of every single insurance carrier has to review every word of marketing copy, and then it goes to the government for a review. On a TV ad, they get 45 days every time they review the ad.

GS: Forty-five days to review an ad?! Oh my god, I'd kill myself. Are you kidding?

MB: So this is the box that we work within marketing. So talk about signing up for even more of a challenge and how do you work within. And, by the way, every year the government CMS comes out with new sets of marketing guidelines. So how do we need to tweak and what shows up in disclaimers and how do we... Yeah, so it's a constant dance, but I am incredibly proud of the team and the organization that we built in order to get it launched. I mean really, truly, we built this thing with less than six months.

GS: Michelle, I've done a couple of turnarounds. I've done startups, but I've also done a couple of turnarounds here. The MMA was a turnaround, and it is all hands on deck.

MB: That's right.

GS: Dare I say, one person needs to make decisions. We're not here to have a chitty chat about stuff. Once you input, then we make a decision and we go fast. I personally love the intensity of that because you're really sort of out on the edge. But that's a crazy thing to have to go through to sort of get it organized and get it done quickly.

MB: Yes. Yeah.

GS: All to the benefit... By the way, can you say what happened to doubling the growth? How did you do that?

MB: So within that first year, once we launched, we doubled our brand awareness. We had six times the visits to the website. A big part of it was because we brought TV back into the mix, which as you know, is one of your highest reach vehicles. And so we can really demonstrate that people can use the product online or call. And so we were doing both.

GS: Works for that are linear or streaming, by the way?

MB: Mostly linear.

GS: Which would work for that audience.

MB: I think our Medicare audience.

GS: Yeah, I was just going to say, yeah.

MB: We're talking Prices is Right, Judge Judy, they work real hard. It is DRTV, so it was also making this amazing...

GS: It's also one-fourth the price, too. I've done DR.

MB: But a really amazing blend when you think from a creative standpoint of creating the brand at the same time as needing to create a direct response. And again, I think the marketers that we had, we were able to kind of make that perfect marriage along with the agency. We used Shinebox, who were absolutely incredible. But also, just to say so great results, incredibly proud of the results within a very short period of time. But as you can imagine, not everything hits the way that you expect either. And so it is incredibly gratifying to now be in year two and had a whole year of what did we learn that first year and building on that. And I can tell you this year, great trajectory, we're right in the middle of our big annual enrollment period.

GS: Yeah, Michelle, I'll give you a couple of stuff, and maybe this is much for the listeners here. So I've probably measured more media, more marketing than probably just about anybody, not as much creative testing. I've done a fair amount of that, but especially in creating MTA. So I will tell you up until the last time I did an evaluation of a marketing mix was 2018, 2019. So just before streaming hit big. Okay, just to be fair. At that time, our studies had very consistently shown — and we were doing this, I have no bias, I don't care what the answer is. I don't care that I get to the best of truth. And so we ran a series, and the studies were done with Walmart, Unilever, big brands. On average, linear television should have been 45 to 65 percent of the mix. That's a crazy high number for what was also a declining, the cutting cord kind of —

MB: That's right.

GS: So I think you have to be very careful about your reading the press. They were always complaining about how the price was going up. They were always saying that the access to consumers is going down. Those may or may not have been true. That's a separate point. But I'm just telling you on an absolute purely economic basis, linear television should have been 45-65. Now granted that will change now, but it was unbelievably high to us, it was surprising. It basically said that linear television was the deal of the century. I mean it worked, but that it was priced at such a level that it was not nearly for its value. And basically you figured it out. And if you're doing DR, I mean I've done direct response in the back. I mean then you're getting stuff on discount.

MB: But also figuring out the right role. So, we are doing some connected TV, most effective for retargeting, right? Because you can get pretty specific and bring people back through the funnel. So it's knowing the role that each of these channels play in the mix.

GS: And to your point, how do they kind of interoperate? So the other data point we just have learned, and the board here all knows this. Actually, this data point comes from Andrea Brimmer, by the way. And she's let us make it public. When there is a brand, when the consumer is made favorable, the cost of acquisition, 85 percent less. So if that doesn't argue for the importance of brand or some balance between those, it's so important. And honestly, all of us are still... we repeat that data point a lot because we're all flabbergasted. Eighty-five percent less? Like it lowers the cost of acquisition 85 percent? And it feels like you figured that out in what you're doing there for eHealth.

MB: That's exactly right. There's also stats. Literally, brand lifts all boats. It also plays dividends in recruiting efforts, as an example. You see all tides rise as you really develop the strength of a brand.

GS: And by the way, the information I just gave, Andrea Brimmer just even talking about that with Ally, she was the first person... So what happened is I had started to hear all this negativity in the marketplace towards performance marketing because most CMOs come off a brand background, and so they were just very negative on it. And we kind of went, well, what's the dynamics between long and short term? And the MMA was kind of like, why the hell don't we know the answer to that? Really? This is a math problem. This is not a cold fusion problem.

So we sat down, it turned out there was no methodology in the world to measure long versus short to balance performance and brand, so we built one. We figured it out, we took a year to do it, and we ran it by everybody in the industry.

And they said, okay, you're probably right. Google said, we don't think what you're doing you actually can collect the data for, but that was a different thing. They didn't argue with the analytics or the mathematics. They argued, could we collect the data? We cracked the code on that, and Ally was the first marketer to actually go live with that brand-new methodology to try to figure it out. And it did give us a final sense. In fact, the other thing we learned — not from her study, but from another one — that a hundred dollars of return of sales from an initial brand campaign — because all brand campaigns still deliver sales — it was worth another $700 over time. So that's the issue. Nobody had ever really figured out what that was because the methodology was complicated and only could have been probably done today.

MB: I love that. I mean, I'm just also a firm believer in breaking the paradigm.

GS: Totally. I hear that.

MB: I sometimes think that we get too cute in the latest naming of performance marketing versus brand marketing. And quite honestly, at the end of the day, they're one and the same. You have to do both.

GS: You have to do both.

MB: I don't think that you get the luxury of building some big sexy brand spot. At the end of the day, particularly if you're a public company, you have quarterly earnings and you need to drive that financial performance. And so that's why I think the beauty of what we did in our TV, all of our direct mail, it's still direct response. It is performance marketing, but we are building a brand at the same time and proving that by being able to double the brand awareness within three months that it launched. So I believe you can do both.

GS: Let me ask you a funny question back to your earlier thesis for marketers here. So you said you have to learn to be comfortable with discomfort. How do you manage discomfort? I mean, listen, it's hard to sit in the middle. You had to turn around situations. I mean, jobs could have been at stake here. I don't know the whole state of the company. I want to be kind of careful when I say something like that, but eventually, I mean, if you don't reverse the trend, you've got a problem for sure. So how do you kind of learn to live with some of that discomfort or uncertainty or lack of, I don't know, lack of comfort for lack of a better choice of words?

MB: I love it. When you ask that, two things come to mind for me. One is how do you reduce some of the uncertainty, right? And so I've been doing this a long time and you have experience to draw on. There is a playbook here, but also, again, when you ground yourself in the data, the metrics, the consumer, it can really help guide your way. So it allows it to be become calculated risks instead of just leaning in to risk for the sake of leaning in. The other part is on a more personal level, I think of just, again, that idea of getting comfort with discomfort means that there's a growth opportunity in front of you. And I personally would get bored if I had to sort of sit in one place all the time, just doing the same thing over and over again. To me, I think things are a whole lot more interesting when I can grow as a person, when I can grow professionally, and when I can help drive that growth in a business, that's what is inspiring for me. It's what drives my passion. So it's both of those pieces. How do you reduce the amount of risk by kind of calculated and knowing what you're doing, but then also being okay with it, knowing that that's a good thing to lean into.

GS: It's funny, I saw this because I get most of my information from TikTok nowadays. But I saw a TikTok the other day, I thought it was really good. I have it right here, I just pulled it up. "If you can't beat fear, just do it scared." And I think that sometimes I kind of almost wonder, I think you're not really saying be comfortable with discomfort. You're saying just learn to play with discomfort in some words. Yeah, exactly. And I think the advantage you have that not everybody does, is that you've got the experience of gotten yourself through it and done it. There's a lot to be said for that as I am older — not quite Medicare — but as I'm older, I sort of look back and go, yeah, it really does. You learn the pattern recognition that the world's going to be okay, I'm going to get through this. I'll figure it out. I know what I'm doing. I know enough about what I'm doing, and I'll get the help of others to go get it done. There's a lot to be said for that. Yeah, I'm playing for legacy at this point. I'm playing for a sense of comfort that I accomplished something. There's no real other reason.

MB: I think also one of the things that you said is leaning on others, because it's not all on you and you are never going to have all the answers. But you need to know how to listen to those that do, how to pull them into your circle, and get all of those pieces of feedback. Tune into what you're listening to and use that to help guide you.

GS: I've often said that I feel like the most fortunate guy in the world because I'm running a trade association, sitting in the middle of an industry, working with some of the smartest people in the business, and my job is to just kind of figure it out. And I find that if I ask enough of the right questions, the board will inevitably give me the answer if I pay attention. It's a very funny thing. So in some regards, there's sort of no fear, maybe some discomfort sometimes, but no fear because if I show up, pay attention, ask questions, listen carefully, it's all going to be okay. That's exactly right.

MB: It also is part of why I stressed in the beginning about the importance of building the right organization and the opportunity to also bring in the right people that have expertise. I mean, again, listen, all the areas that we needed capabilities where we were short, I don't have the deep expertise in every one of those areas. But I needed to go find people and bring them in. But similarly, right, it's also the beauty when you're at a CMO/CRO level, you're working as part of a senior leadership team, and we all get to lean on one another and our expertise to help guide the direction as well.

GS: This marketing org work that we did that I had mentioned earlier here, one of the factors that does align... So when you look at org, what doesn't matter to financial performance — which is very funny because most consultancies focus on this — what doesn't matter is insourcing/outsourcing or centralization or decentralized decisions. And that's what most marketing reorgs focus on. There are a series of factors. What does matter is the right capabilities of fit to org. We know that there's a direct alignment that if you do more of what matters and less of what doesn't, importantly less of what doesn't. Marketing for whatever reason creates zombie projects that live forever in the hallways of companies. I'm not sure why that is, but it does. So it's not just this fit, but the thing that really matters, you just said it there — I don't know that I respected this opportunity until I saw the research in this — is psychological safety.

What psychological safety says that we're willing to have a conversation within the company about hard things that we might need to make decisions on. And I just actually saw somebody on the board just shared the insights of their study and analysis around this. And it's like I know her. I'm absolutely convinced that she provided an environment of psychological safety within that company. It was very interesting. Now, by the way, they totally failed in some other part of it that they've got to go work on. But it's like just having that knowledge that that's not the thing I've got to fix. That's okay. That's here and that's important and does align to sales performance of the company, but not knowing the other. Yeah, very interesting.

MB: I mean, I couldn't agree... Well, and that was, I give our CEO a lot of credit for this. As we were going through transformation, he rebuilt the senior leadership team. And a big focus, all of us care deeply about culture, but also we meet every single day as an SLT.

GS: Every single day.

MB: Every single day.

GS: The C-suite meets every single day.

MB: Every single day.

GS: Wow.

MB: There is no daylight. That's the whole goal. And particularly when you're working as fast as we were...

GS: What does no daylight mean? What does that mean?

MB: No daylight between functions, creating silos. We are all working towards... and a big part of it is where are there barriers? What do we need to clear for teams to keep them moving as fast as possible? Or what are we seeing coming down the pike from the industry that we need to start getting ahead of now? And so again, when you are going through transformation, making sure that we are all in sync, but then that can keep our teams in sync. And I really believe that that's a big part of what set us on the trajectory. We just... one great place to work. Again, culture was, as you can imagine, not in a good place when we showed up. There had been riffs and layoffs, and we had to rebuild the teams, the organizations, the capabilities, and then that cultural component. And I will say, again, I talked about transparency is a big part of our strategy externally. It's also the same sort of thread and value that we live in our culture internally.

GS: Funny how it all kind of fits together.

MB: Isn't that?

GS: When you take a step back and go, oh yeah. It's just really one big of the whole. Exactly. I love it.

Michelle, I can't thank you enough for doing this. So interesting. And I love transformations, and I love how people go through them and I love people who are kind of willing to go through them, too. Because not everybody's willing to do that. You've really got to be ready to sort of, like you said, no daylight between anything. I mean, you're really got to hunker down and make it happen, otherwise it doesn't get better on its own.

MB: Exactly right. Well, I think it kind of creates a junkie because that's kind of become my area of specialty and love.

GS: Yeah, exactly. I don't think there's any going back. For me, I like the adrenaline of fixing it, so I'm with you on that. But again, thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

MB: Thank you so much. So wonderful to talk to you.

GS: Thanks again to Michelle Barbeau from eHealth Insurance for coming on Building Better CMOs. Check the description of this episode for links to connect with Michelle.

And if you want to know more about MMA'S work to make marketing matter more, visit mmaglobal.com, or you can attend any one of our 43 conferences in the 16 countries where MMA operates, Or write me, greg@mmaglobal.com.

Thank you so much for listening. Tap the link in the description to leave us a review. If you're new to the show, please follow or subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can find links to all of those places and more at bettercmos.com.

Our producer and podcast consultant is Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm. Artwork is by Jason Chase, and a special thanks to Angela Gray and Dan Whiting for making this all happen.

We'll be off for the rest of December, and back in 2025 with more great conversations just like this one. This is Greg Stuart. Happy holidays everyone, and see you in the new year!