Davin Marceau (00:02): We move past this, into our new normal, and potentially into this headlong second wave of COVID-19 that's awaiting us in September. I don't care how valuable we see onsite visits. They may never be coming back.

Intro (00:16): Welcome to access points, the podcast, where we discuss the tools, habits, and ideas that can help you achieve and maintain the leadership mindset. So you can reach peak performance. Are you ready for your all access pass? Do some of the top minds on the topic of leadership let's get started?

Davin Marceau (00:37): All right, good afternoon to our listeners. Welcome back to access points podcast. My name's Davin Marceau, chief operating officer with access eat forms, and I'm here today with our vice president of sales. Mike Kelly, how you doing buddy?

Mike Kelly (00:49): Good morning. Thanks Devin. I'm doing well.

Davin Marceau (00:52): Good. And, uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're actually in the Dallas office this week, right?

Mike Kelly (00:56): Yeah. I've thrown caution to the wind and I have jumped on a Southwest airlines flight and I am back to being on the road. Don't know how many people I am going to be able to see while I'm here, but certainly it's great to get back to what we used to know as normal,

Davin Marceau (01:11): I guess, ever the rebel Mike. So what is it like being in the airport? What is it like traveling, you know, and who are you seeing, frankly? Who are you seeing on the plane?

Davin Marceau (01:21): Is it an uptick in business? Is it, you know, families starting to travel speaks to that dynamic a little bit?

Mike Kelly (01:27): You know, it's interesting. This was probably the second time in about a month that we've had the opportunity to get back to the airport. And honestly, it's a ghost town. It's absolutely like nothing you've ever really seen, especially if, uh, for those of us that, you know, traveled quite a bit for work and that type of thing. Um, what you typically would see would be folks that are traveling for business, uh, folks that are families that are certainly, uh, traveling together, especially here in the summertime. And you know, you're just not seeing it plus everybody is masked obviously. And with that, you would certainly expect that, um, you know, the, the communications would be altered a little bit, but it's interesting. It's really wild.

Mike Kelly (02:10): There's not even an acknowledgement that there's other people around based upon this, this whole idea of being in a mask to a degree, it's, it's a bit sad. You don't exist here in the airport because I'm just too afraid to even communicate with you. So I think it's, you know, my opinion is it's a bit of an overreaction, but that's what it looks like as it stands today, you know, is I think about it, Mike, the only other time that I can recall where the volume of travelers was, this low was back in 2001 just post 911. And it's an interesting juxtaposition between then and now, because obviously after the terror attacks on, uh, in New York city and Washington DC, the whole world was unified. It was like when you saw another person, when you saw a fellow American, you wanted to hug them, you wanted to shake their hand. You wanted to connect with them in a way that that helps alleviate the pain that both of you were feeling.

Davin Marceau (03:03): Absolutely I can. It's so memorable. What you're talking about. It's so memorable that I can tell you, there was a flight from st. Louis to Columbus, Ohio, and there were two of us on it. And the first communication we had was looking at each other across the aisle. And we said, if you think you're going to rush the cockpit, we're going to go and he's done it. And he's like, you know, if you think you're going to do it then, and then all of a sudden we were best friends. I've stayed in touch with this guy because we were the only two on the airplane. So as soon as we got over, you know, some of that fear of the unknown, I guess, during, you know, right after nine 11, you know, it was a great communication. There was so much that came out of it. That's the difference. Now we're not communicating. We're just, we're avoiding at all costs. We, we're not even acknowledging the existence of that other person, which is weird. And I'm a people person. I love it. I want to talk to everybody. And it's just weird.

Mike Kelly (03:58): Then it's so counterintuitive to our nature as human beings, you know, we're pack animals, right? We need that serotonin. We need that oxytocin. We need those release of those weak chemicals in order for us to feel connected. And that's, what's so intriguing when you look at the other side of it, you know, where we sit right now is I've traveled twice since the global pandemic. And there's such a disconnect as Americans. We've always galvanized against some external threat and we've done well, or we've rallied and we've found a path forward, but now we're all kind of looking around and wearing masks. So there's that disconnect. And there's a whole bunch of social psychology stuff that comes into play, but we couldn't be more distant than we are right now, socially, emotionally for people that we don't know, we want nothing to do with them because we almost see them as some threat to our wellbeing. And I don't think we've ever had that before. It's weird. I mean, to be physically

Davin Marceau (04:49): close, but be so distant while you're in that. Yeah. We're six feet away by, gosh, I stayed six feet away from everybody belonged before this happened, but now it seems like that divide is just even greater. That part of it, my hope is that it will ease a bit, but it's, it's, it's sad at this point. I mean, it's, it really is. It's we need to get back to, you know, at least acknowledging the existence of those of everyone that's around us, that we're not even acknowledging right now.

Mike Kelly (05:17): And then you extend that past the social context and into the business world. And thankfully I think what we're going to start seeing in fairly short order is our clients beginning to open up their campuses, to external visitors, to vendors, to people like us to allow ourselves to regain some level of normalcy. But what will it be like for you as a vendor for you as a sales rep to come in and have to make a connection with that client because people buy from those, those they respect and those they trust, right? And if you've got a big chunk of cloth on your face, and the only thing that's there is your eyes. How the heck do you establish that connection with a client? It's interesting. It's

Davin Marceau (05:58): a great question. I'm a relationship guy I've been selling in some form or other through number of different challenges that have come our way, whether or not that was nine 11 or the financial crisis or whatever it was. And Y two K others, blah, blah, blah. But just this week, I was able to book my first onsite and I asked not, it was great that it booked the onsite. I'm going to be with a great customer of ours in Florida. And I'm excited to get to go to that because, you know, in sunny, Florida, but just so that I can get back to working with customers face to face and that barrier that you're talking about, I don't know. So I asked them this week, I said, what's driving you guys to, uh, want to do this face to face because I'm all in. I'm ready to go.

Davin Marceau (06:41): I think it's a great idea. Keep in mind, a lot of times people think of a sales relationship with the customer as it's very one sided sales is on front-stage, we're dancing, we're doing our thing and it's so one sided and just, just to production, it's not ever what I've done or what I do. It's a joint thing together. And what this customer is saying is that we missed that as much as you miss it. And so for us, she said, listen, we're going to meet. But if we pull up, you know, we all get in the conference room, everybody's going to make their decision whether or not they want to keep their mask on. And if you want to, that's great. If you don't, that's great too. So, you know, given the opportunity to do it so far, I'm gonna take the mask off type of guy, I guess, I'll roll the dice.

Davin Marceau (07:25): Well, then we saw that at our first post pandemic executive team meeting and doubtless, right? We just had that a couple of weeks ago and we allowed it to the COVID-19 pandemic to creep to the forefront. It was like almost where it was going to be another attendee in the room. And we had to make a conscious decision to acknowledge the fact that there is a threat, but not make it the focus of the meeting not make it the focus of our time together. So we took the masks off. We understood that there was going to be a threat there, but the return on the investment for the meeting and the connection that we get from being able to look each other in the face. And I can see your big, dumb jovial smile, and know that you're not scowling and be behind this mask or, you know, telling me different things with body language.

Davin Marceau (08:09): And, and we made that decision to not allow it, to dictate our actions, to dictate our dynamic and just progress forward and have the most productive meeting possible. Agreed. Being able to, you cannot replace that face to face interaction. I have again been doing this for a number of years and we even with salespeople that I work with that are obviously selling into health, it, I tell them all the time, if there's an opportunity to be onsite versus do a remote call, you're going onsite. If you don't understand why I'm saying this, then let's talk about it, but you cannot replace the idea of being on site. I know that if I've got an opportunity to sell an account, that's going to be a million dollars to us. And I've got 10 on-sites that it's going to take to close this piece of business. Every one of those meetings that I'm going to have is worth a hundred thousand dollars.

Davin Marceau (09:03): Now, if I don't put the prep and if I don't take it as serious, I don't make my effort worthy of the, of that hundred thousand dollars shame on me. This is the key. This is the main element as to why we've been able to make it through things like Y two K and make it through a financial crisis and make it through these times when it's very lean, because we have a way of doing things. We've got a belief system that says, you know what, we're going to do this, and we're going to do it right. Not because anybody's going to get patted on the back for it, but because that's the way we do things. And if, you know, listen, you do this long enough. You put enough into the pipeline, things come out, it just works that way. So stay on your belief system. I know it's tough to stay on that belief system, especially in times like what we have, especially when we've got situations where we don't even acknowledge each other at the airport, stay on that belief system, that we do good things, and we're going to do it in a right way. And the results will speak for themselves.

Mike Kelly (10:01): No, I love that. And it's honestly a really good segue into, I guess we're 10 minutes into this thing and I'll bring up the topic and it's, it's the impact of this global pandemic on emerging technology and its role in healthcare. It, and the healthcare, it for our listeners. Most people know this by now. This is our niche world in which we exist, but it's an agnostic topic enough to where it should be able to impact every single one of our listeners, no matter which sector you reside in. And so what we'll do is we'll try to keep it again, ambiguous enough to where you guys will be able to glean a nugget or two of information away from this topic. So, and again, Mike, we're 10 minutes into this bad boy, and we're just now bringing up the topic

Davin Marceau (10:46): you put the two of us together. We can certainly talk about a number of different things. So I'm glad for the segue and certainly moving into the topic of discussion. As my grandfather said, I could talk the horns off a Billy goat, a thousand words when 10 would suffice as well. The way I think I was, I was characterized a number of times in my career.

Mike Kelly (11:04): Yeah. And on that note, shout out to Cody Strait who, uh, who can do the same thing. So interesting. The way that you positioned it last time is the value of getting to an onsite visit. We know Mike because we've been able to apply analytics to it, to, it takes X amount of phone calls to secure onsite X amount of on-sites to secure a quote X amount of interactions, to progress a deal from our various stages, to what we call a closed one. We know what those numbers look like, right? But it's so intriguing because when we move past this, into our new normal, and potentially into this headlong second wave of COVID-19, that's awaiting us in September. I don't care how valuable we see onsite visits. They may never be coming back

Davin Marceau (11:54): that Shakespeare. Good does. And it, it shakes me not from a me perspective, I guess, but it shakes me because of what it means for our business. I mean, when you look at what we do as a company and improving the business of healthcare, realistically, that's why I do what I do want to do something that's memorable. And certainly in healthcare, this pandemic and pandemics in general from 1918, 1957, 1968. I mean, there's number of pandemics that have happened. They are burdensome. They change economies, they change societies, but it's really the reaction to the pandemic that really paints the future. Okay. To say that we're going to get away from onsite visits. The reason I say Shakespeare is because I'm not going to do it. I can't, I can't fathom being in this business without being able to be face to face. I can't imagine working with the hospital without being able to plant these two feet in that lobby and look around because I learned so much when I see what they're doing and how they're doing it, everyone is so different.

Davin Marceau (12:59): I can't get that level of understanding and be able to give my level of consultation to them much. Like I said, in prior podcast, meet pandemics. This is all going on while it's going on, it's all about what we could give versus what we could take. We're coming out of it. And as we come out of it, we've got the opportunity to get it balanced. Again, we've got customers that are, they're telling us, we want to, we want some level of normal. That's, it's never going to be the same. I would agree with what you're saying. It's never going to be the same, but there has to be some level of working together outside of just a, you know, a zoom meeting or a Microsoft teams meeting or whatever it is. That's just our business, in my opinion, is going to, it's going to force that.

Davin Marceau (13:47): And I think in the long run, it's going to be much better. It's healthcare businesses. And I've, I've shared this cartoon. And 9 million times healthcare is standing on a precipice of a castle and they're just shooting bows and arrows as fast as they can shoot. And we're standing there with a machine gun. And if you'll just give me five minutes, I can show you a better way to do it. That's it. It's probably not the greatest metaphor, but my point is what we do every day is talk to those customers in a consultative way. It's not a production to me. I'm not just a guy standing on front stage dancing and entertaining. I'm here to talk with you about changing the way you guys do business, taking this pandemic and making sure that that impact of that pandemic is hugely positive because it can go any number of ways, pandemics and emerging technologies, heavy duty.

Davin Marceau (14:43): I mean, the idea is that they're fast growth, they're big impact, and that's the positive side, but you also have the uncertainty and ambiguity side of, and it's mindset for the people that you work with. That's what I do. I work with my customers to ensure that I changed their mindset to push them in a way that focuses on the high impact and the growth side of things versus the uncertainty and ambiguity. But you've got to make sure, you know, you can't have the discussion unless they at least come to the same conclusion or they're on the same page with you, I guess. Sure. Necessity is the mother of invention, right? No doubt. So not only how we sell our existing product, which we've certainly discussed at length, how we sell it right now is different, but it's such an interesting topic to discuss the, what you can offer as a result of a global pandemic as well.

Davin Marceau (15:36): Uh, the, the what and how you can pivot your market offering or how you can emerge an entirely new technology on the heels of this pandemic. When our, what is different when our, how is different when our, why is different. That's the meat of this podcast and that's the meat of actually our endeavor with access right now, we were able to step back from this and let the clouds of lift just a little bit with this global pandemic and take a look at healthcare and understand that they were shifting towards a tele-health remote pre access type situation. And we were able to jump out ahead of it with an offering that we have right now, and for our listeners that want to, that want to understand more of what we're talking about. Go to access efm.com and look at our impression offering. It's fantastic. And it's a direct result of us looking at this pandemic and us looking at these scary, uncertain times that laid at our feet.

Davin Marceau (16:27): And we asked ourselves, how do we get better? How do we make ourselves an offering that helps our clients that's altruistic, but it's also bleeding edge in the marketplace. And I think we've done a really good job of that mic. No doubt. I mean, just to the point that I made before high impact high growth, I mean, those are certainly good things. Telehealth, I think is in my opinion, we can talk about AI. We can talk about analytics. We can talk about revenue cycle management, but tele-health out of, at least those four or five is absolutely the number one growth area for healthcare. No doubt about it. In 2015, 800,000 physician consultations were done via telehealth. Okay. So what does it tell help was around in 2015, we did 800 consultations. You have any idea how many physician consultations we'll do by the end of this year, we've got research agencies like Forrester and Gartner and others that track this, but we'll be somewhere in the neighborhood of 900 million to billion physician consultations as a result of telehealth.

Davin Marceau (17:31): So high growth, high opportunity, absolutely. This pandemic has the metaphor. It's a train, okay. The conductor let's call that the CEO of the hospital, but it's the guy that's, you know, the guy that's been shoveling coal into that engine is our it folks. They have been given a every year. And then they've been told, you know what, keep this train running twice as fast that I'm only gonna give you half that pile every year. It happens all the time. Now what we've got is not only do we need to make this train run even faster, I'm going to give you a little bit more cold to do it with, but we're going to have to make that cold. Do 10 times more than it's ever done. We're going to change the culture all together in a hospital, a culture that is used to coming in that door and going and sitting in that waiting room is now going to drive into that parking lot and sit in that car.

Davin Marceau (18:23): It's a virtual way to grow. This is a flip of everything that you've ever thought in healthcare. We, as a company have built preregistration solutions for years and had been able to touch the surface of a little bit of that application. But again, keep in mind. In 2015, we had 800,000 visits. I have a customer in Louisville, Kentucky then in the beginning of March was doing 20 to 30 physician visits a day. That was it. By the end of March, they were doing 3000 visits a day. Were they ready for that? What's anybody in healthcare ready for this move to tele-health yet the opportunity was there. The solutions were there, it's a demand shot up, but they weren't necessarily able to handle it from a supply side. So what we're trying to do is create solutions that help with let's not make a virtual waiting room, have the waiting time that in person waiting for him would have.

Davin Marceau (19:21): I mean, if we're just changing from a, you know, from this environment to this one, without putting some efficiencies and you're sitting in your car for three or four hours to get to see your physician, you know what, that's, that's an issue. So there's some growth. There's some growing pains. That's the ambiguous side and the uncertain side of it. But part of my job is to make sure that I'm with those customers and I'm educating them on here's how to do telehealth. Here's a total tele-health solution, not just a plug it in here, because that's what we're seeing right now. We have hospitals that are just there. They're just jamming. They're trying to do anything they can to not only take care of the COVID patients that are existing, but to be ready for what they consider to be a second wave that's coming, regardless of what you think about it, we have to get hospitals ready for the unknown.

Davin Marceau (20:11): They have never been very good. Soothsayers fortune tellers to see what's coming in the future, but now we're forcing them to do that. We are as a country, we're moving so quickly to an environment of virtual visits that is going to ultimately fit in, or it has to fit into this idea of a quadruple lane, still have to deliver efficiencies, still have to deliver outcomes. And we still have to provide clinician and patient experience. If you can balance those four things. Now you've got a solution that'll mean something for the future. That's it has to have that or else it's going to fall miserably on its face. I like that. And we certainly

Mike Kelly (20:48): got way down the rabbit trail of healthcare it on that. And that's great, but not all of our listeners are in the healthcare it world, right. Which is it's part of our region. So to pull that back out and to bring it back to a broader business context, you have to be able to define the market problem. Understand we have a global pandemic. What is the market problem? Because six months ago, Mike was the healthcare ecosystems problem, a lack of solutions relative to telehealth. Would you agree with it? Was that the problem?

Davin Marceau (21:20): Yes. Ill prepared. Nobody looked into the future. Nobody saw what was coming,

Mike Kelly (21:26): right? And we don't always have the ability to look into the future, but then this pandemic hit and we had this cataclysmic shift or the cat, this cataclysmic event caused a massive paradigm shift and it redefined the problem for our clients. And I don't care what sector you're in this pandemic because of its supply side shock in the end, the massive impact that it had, it redefined your problem. It redefined the problem that your clients are having. And so you have to, as an organization, be able to step back, rally the troops a little bit and say, okay, what is the problem today? Because we too often get focused on what the problem was six months ago and how our market offering met that problem. We're in a whole different ball game. Now we're in a whole different environment and focusing on the past, you're almost like trying to step back through that one way revolving door. You're just going to run into it. And then you're going to wonder why you're getting left behind in the marketplace. So you have to be able to readdress the new problem, understanding, and then understand how your current market offering can pivot can shift in order to be able to meet the new market demands.

Davin Marceau (22:32): I automatically go to the commercials that you see from Amazon. It's a great example. Amazon had a business model that worked extremely well. I think everybody would agree that they're probably fairly successful company. And when the pandemic kid, their business model changed, I was mad. I was angry Amazon. And you know why? Because of my stuff, didn't get there the next day. So Amazon was forced to get away from the, you know, their biggest principle was make that order. And we'll have that thing to you the next day. Whether or not it's a, it's a widget or whatever it is. And the pandemic happened. It certainly changed my perception of things, but it also changed the business model of somebody in distribution, like, like Amazon, they have got to fundamentally get away from next day delivery to, you know what, you're still prime member, but it's going to take three or days.

Davin Marceau (23:24): And you know, what, how do you handle that? How do you communicate that? How do we change? Because we have to go through all these extra steps in terms of infection control and cross contamination and those types of things in a manufacturing facility to still support billions and billions of customers. They have, I think embedded, you know, even non-healthcare related things in manufacturing and robotics, it changed, we've got still agrees that are making hand sanitizer. It changes it will you adopt and you adapt or you either not going to make it. And the idea of not making it. I mean, yeah, it sounds terrible, but that's what happens in academies that it does come and go. If you don't adapt, you are not going to make it. And somebody else is going to come in and they will do it. Yeah. I completely agree with that.

Davin Marceau (24:13): And here's the interesting part of it. Also, Mike, is that we live in such a habit now, immediate gratification society. But when something like this happens, it rattles the mindset, right. And take it back to the toilet paper shortage. And it's crazy as that was. And as many as just wild memes and just stupid people doing stupid things, it made people understand that we are going to have to shift away at least for a period of time from this, get it now, have it now immediate gratification society and why local businesses from Heath where I live from standard service. It's a restaurant that I love to all the way up to Amazon is because they communicated with the customer. They were like, look times have shifted. It's different. Now we're doing this to help the community. So in turn, our offering is going to look a little bit different.

Davin Marceau (25:01): You're going to have to wait longer. Our menu is limited, right? And then for Amazon, we're busy delivering stuff to frontline aid workers. So your widget is going to take five days longer. And for me, when the first time that happened to me, I was like, okay, cool. Right. I wanted to be mad, but I knew like, wait a minute, like what kind of selfish consumer am I to put my widget, my phone case ahead of frontline workers and the businesses. I think that you saw that struggled to pivot or struggled to, to gain market share and ultimately lost it either. Didn't they didn't try to redefine the problem. And then they didn't clearly communicate with their customers what the new problem was and how they were addressing it in an altruistic manner. Couldn't agree more. And that's why I love this podcast so much.

Davin Marceau (25:48): Is that it, I think if you were to look at the podcast that we were doing at the beginning, or just prior to the pandemic, and then at the beginning of the pandemic and in the middle and, and where we are today, I think the messaging that we were very quick to come out with was, it's not, you know what, I'm getting away from selling this commodity. I'm getting away, listen, this is like nothing that any of us have ever seen. So I'm going to do my best. I'm going to change what I do every day. And I'm going to, this is all about what I can provide to you guys. We did a thing I know on our, on our ed team that was so impactful to me. Uh, the Tim led and it was about this emergency survival kit in, in the time of pandemics.

Davin Marceau (26:35): And one of the keys of that, that our remember was forget about what you do forget about anything that is about you and make it about them. The example was, you know, what can I do for you today just to help you out, tell me. And the example that the speaker gave was how about I go pick up your dry cleaning? I know it sounds crazy, and it's more of a metaphor for what we do, but I've seen in spades throughout this entire pandemic with customers. And I'll just talk to them, tell me how you're doing. I have a customer in New York and we communicated every day in terms of how your numbers look, what are you feeling? Anything I can do to help? You know what, I think I got a line on some masks. It's not me, or it's not my business, but if I can connect, you I'll do it.

Davin Marceau (27:24): And you know what? I needed it for me as much as he needed it for him, or she needed it for her. Because if I'm not doing something, if I'm not making a chain, if I'm not, you know, helping somebody every day, I'm probably not going to be a very nice person. I'm not getting what I need out of this. So it did change. It. Absolutely. It changed things like, like I've never seen before, and that's not a healthcare thing. That's not a manufacturer. That's just our, that's our entire universe type thing. How can I help? Yeah.

Mike Kelly (27:55): That needs to be the leading question, whether you're a business owner or whether you're a business operator, it's about putting customers, employees, other people ahead of yourselves. And I think that's that new shift. And if you do that, and if you communicate that well with your client, I think you're really onto something. So to recap this bad boy, Mike Love this great 30 minute podcast, the impact on the global pandemic, on emerging technology and its role in health care. It again, the first part that we have to do is step back and reevaluate the problem, redefined the problem. And you can do that through asking yourself five why's there's different things that you can do in order to be able to get to the root of the new problem, and then how you either pivot or change your offering entirely to be able to meet the new demands of the marketplace.

Mike Kelly (28:42): And then you shift and you train and you encourage your people to be able to shift their mindset along with it. And then you communicate with your customer base and you go out and you pursue it. And you grasp this new way of selling, whether you're B2B or whether you're B to C don't fight the fact that you have to wear masks. Don't fight the fact that you have to do teleconferencing in order to be able to sell it, because if you're doing it, your competition is doing it as well. And so if you adapt your market offering and don't adapt your mindset to selling, then what the hell are you doing? Those two things aren't meshing together. And the way that you sell needs to mesh with the new way of the product that you're selling. And if you can do that, and if you can adapt your mindset, I think you're going to be on to something as a business, whether you're in healthcare, whether you're in the auto industry, whatever it is. And you're going to come out ahead of your competition. Anything else to add to that? You bet.

Davin Marceau (29:32): I would say that, um, again, whether or not it's healthcare, manufacturing, hospitality, what industry it is. I think my experience tells me this is changing faster than anything that I have ever seen. There's no doubt we are in this hyper growth area, especially when it comes to the health it, and tele-health side of what we're doing, what it looks like in the future is going to be greatly determined based upon how we react to things right now, how we react to this pandemic, whether or not it's not acknowledging each other in the airport or having to do something completely remote, or if we're front stage versus backstage with a particular customer, it is going to be vastly different. We're moving to a world where barriers to do things like virtual meetings and virtual physician visits are being collapsed. They're just going away. And I think no doubt our reaction to this and what we come out of this with in terms of solutions is going to paint the picture for tremendous success in the future and for our listeners. You know, again, we're always looking for feedback on this podcast, hit the subscribe button, give us some critical feedback, how we can make this thing better. Go to our website@accessefm.com. Check us out there. Find us on Twitter, find us on Instagram, find us on Facebook. Give us a light. Give us a tweet. Give us a thumbs up and appreciate you guys listening.

Speaker 4 (31:07): [inaudible].