As AI transforms healthcare, organizations face a growing challenge: how do you scale trusted expertise while addressing a global workforce shortage? Matt sits down with Leslie Marshall, Director of Marketing at neuRealities, to discuss building a healthcare technology brand from the ground up and using AI to transform training. Leslie shares how her experience at Morningstar shaped her approach to brand building. She also discusses the thinking behind the company’s brand launch and why content and video have become powerful tools for building credibility and supporting sales. What you'll learn in this episode: - What went into building the neuRealities brand - How AI can help scale training and expertise in Healthcare - Where video content can build trust and support sales - How to launch a brand from the ground up Check out Leslie on LinkedIn! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leslieamarshall/
As AI transforms healthcare, organizations face a growing challenge: how do you scale trusted expertise while addressing a global workforce shortage? Matt sits down with Leslie Marshall, Director of Marketing at neuRealities, to discuss building a healthcare technology brand from the ground up and using AI to transform training.
Leslie shares how her experience at Morningstar shaped her approach to brand building. She also discusses the thinking behind the company’s brand launch and why content and video have become powerful tools for building credibility and supporting sales.
What you'll learn in this episode:
- What went into building the neuRealities brand
- How AI can help scale training and expertise in Healthcare
- Where video content can build trust and support sales
- How to launch a brand from the ground up
Check out Leslie on LinkedIn!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leslieamarshall/
Speaker: [00:00:00] I've got Leslie Marshall with me. She's the director of marketing at New Realities. Leslie, welcome to the show
Leslie: Thanks so much, man. I'm excited to speak with you today
Speaker: Yeah. And, you know, I got the chance to meet you and see you speak at BrandSmart through the AMA, and you kind of broke down a little bit about how you launched the brand and especially in this sort of AI world. Um, and I thought it would be awesome to just get a breakdown of that today
Leslie: Yeah, I would love to talk with you. And I, I love how Brand Smart, um, brings people together, and that's something I thought I'd talk about today, too, is the importance of community and connection with peers. So I loved meeting you at Brand Smart, and I loved, uh, how the AMA Chicago brings people together, and I think it's really cool when these kind of after-event conversations keep happening, and I think that's just the power of, you know, connecting with really cool and interesting people.
Speaker: Well, I thought it would be fun to get, do a little get to know Leslie rapid fire session. Are you up for it?
Leslie: I'm up for it.
Speaker: Okay, good. What did you have for breakfast today?
Leslie: today?
Leslie: I had a [00:01:00] stars and Honey bar and coffee. Protein maxing, fiber maxing, I feel like we're all trying to max out on, on our eating. But if I could have anything I wanted for breakfast, one of my favorite things is scrambled eggs from our own chickens.
Leslie: My husband and I, since we've moved to Michigan, um, now we've got eight chickens and it's really fun to be able to get fresh eggs and, um, enjoy the eggs from them.
Speaker: Super cool. And do you have names for your chickens?
Leslie: You're not supposed to name your animals. And I had a conversation with one of my friends, um, he was asking why we didn't have a rooster. And I said, "Well, if you have a rooster, you get more chickens, and I'm not-- What are we gonna do if we just keep having more chickens?"
Leslie: And he said, "Well, you eat the chickens." And I said, "Not our chickens."
Speaker: Ready for the next question? Here we go. What quality do you look most for in a friend?
Leslie: I feel really lucky. I, I have friends from many different chapters of my life, um, and I've been lucky enough to-- that we've stayed in touch. The thing that I value most is people who demonstrate curiosity and interest in the world around them, whether they're traveling [00:02:00] or wanna go to museum or, um, be a tourist for a day in the s- in the place where they live.
Leslie: Um, and I think that curiosity keeps relationships alive 'cause you're always learning from each other, um, challenging each other.
Speaker: I always just feel like when somebody, when you meet somebody who's curious, um, it just feels good to be around them.
Speaker: Obviously, they're asking you questions about you and things like that, and, uh, it feels good,
Speaker: all right, one week to live, how are you gonna spend it?
Leslie: If I only had one week and didn't wanna deal with jet lag, I would just hope for one perfect Michigan summer week. Um, I'd rent a beach house somewhere on along Lake Michigan, or a beautiful lake here, gather my husband, our pets, family, close friends, and just spend evenings around the bonfire on the beach, watching the sunsets, um, taking trips to the local wineries, vintage markets, um, enjoying lots of food and laughter together.
Leslie: Like, I think I'd wanna just enjoy being with, uh, my favorite [00:03:00] things, my favorite people in a beautiful place and, um, make the most of that time
Speaker: let's get into professional Leslie.
Leslie: Sure
Speaker: Are there two or three sort of milestones in your career that kind of have led you to where you are today?
Leslie: I actually started my career in publishing. I always loved to read, um, from the time I was really little. It's a beautiful sunny day here?
Leslie: while we're talking, um, and this would be the kind of day I probably would've been reading inside as a kid, and my mom would scold me and say, "You need to get outside and enjoy the day."
Leslie: And so I'd take my book and take it outside.
Speaker: Just read outside. Yeah.
Leslie: Enjoy the day outside with the book. The theme throughout my career, I think, is really just the storytelling. Um, and so I spent a large part of my career, um, in editorial, like creating books, Then I realized I wanted to tell the stories of those books and how they were created and why you should want to read them.
Leslie: So that moved me into marketing. And so pretty early on I learned I love being a translator between kind of the people who are selling something and how do we reach that audience
Speaker: I feel [00:04:00] like the word translator is the marketer's job. That's just such a perfect summary of what you're really doing, 'cause you are trying to take what's, you know, in our head in the, on the product side or service side, and you can't just start selling people stuff. You have to meet them where they're at, right?
Speaker: And you have to speak their language
Leslie: Why do they care about it? Um, also some, you know, I've worked for companies that have very complex, whether it's investing information at Morningstar or com- complex technology now at New Realities. How do you, again, make that accessible a- and explain to the customer why, why they need that information or that service? and again, I think that's marketer's job is to help bridge that gap, and 'cause it's really easy to, um, get too, a little bit too complicated in how we wanna talk about our products and services, and I think marketers can be that bridge for the customer.
Speaker: Yeah, you're right. And I think it, yeah, what, at the end of the day, we have all these things that we wanna say 'cause we're so [00:05:00] excited about what we do, and we want everybody to know everything all at once. But we, you know, if we understand our audience and, and we can empathize with just people in general, we know that they can only handle the most important thing
Leslie: we spend a lot of time thinking about working on that, right, as marketers?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. What, what was next after that?
Leslie: Um, and then after um, that I spent, uh, just about 16 years at Morningstar, and that
Leslie: really changed the way I think about brands. I got to work for one of the best brands in the world, I think.
Leslie: That experience working at Morningstar was really foundational in helping me understand the value of a brand and that we weren't just marketing products. We really were building trust with our customers.
Leslie: And for my role, I, um, I helped develop our experience, the experiential marketing practice at Morningstar and think about not just we host events, but how do we ex- host experiences for customers, as well as launching Morningstar social media strategy as a global [00:06:00] practice, um, when social media was just at, you know, coming out as a new way to communicate with customers.
Leslie: And I remember talking to people and saying, "This is how we're gonna communicate with investors," and there was a lot of skepticism around that. Um, but I could see that this was the way things were going in terms of an opportunity to connect with people. And it was also, for me, a time where I got to see technology as more than just a communications channel.
Leslie: It really became a way to create rich customer experiences and help people learn.
Speaker: What is New Realities, um, and what are you working on now?
Leslie: Yeah, New Realities was formed, um, with a collaboration with Mayo Clinic, um, with the whole impetus to really transform, um, the workforce, uh, through training and to address the global workforce shortage in healthcare. Um, so-- And we use spatial computing and artificial intelli-intelligence tools to do that.
Speaker: So can you give me some examples of what that actually looks like? It's, it's training and [00:07:00] it's access to certain resources. What does that look like in, uh, practice?
Leslie: Sure
Leslie: So, you know, a lot of people that come through the healthcare market, there's a lot of burnout. Um, there's aren't enough experts, so there's a global workforce shortage, um, contributing to that burnout. Um, there just aren't enough people, so you've probably experienced that in your own healthcare journey.
Leslie: Whether you're trying to make an appointment with a doctor or a specialist, you've got to wait a long time. Um, it's because there aren't enough people in the healthcare market to serve, you know, to help patients.
Leslie: And we've seen a lot of turnover in the time it takes to train someone. Um, they might get trained and then move on to another hospital system. So if we can get train-- help people to become trained more efficiently, um, using AI tools and help them get more compet- gain more competence more quickly, um, then you don't have MRI machines or X-ray machines or other services that are sitting unused in a hospital system.
Leslie: Um, you don't have-- patients don't have to [00:08:00] wait as long to be scheduled for, um, tests and procedures that they need, and then ultimately they get diagnoses more quickly and, and can get a, get further ahead in terms of where they need to be in their health journey.
Speaker: A slew of problems there And I think everybody feels that, has experienced that in some way. And so are the-- It's a startup, right? Is it-- Are the, are these tools, are they out in the market now, like out there being used? Are they still being developed?
Leslie: We're just a bit over a year old, but we've Got some important pilot programs, um, kicking off at Mayo Clinic. Um, the breast cancer patient app is one of them, the AI expert for breast cancer. Um, in addition to other areas of, of Mayo Clinic, we're developing these AI experts, um, that will help across various aspects of the hospital system. And so we are really helping solve some of their training, both their cost and the logistics, developing AI experts and solutions for training.
Speaker: It's a new [00:09:00] startup obviously, so everybody, you know, it's like, "Well, what is this?" But if you say Mayo Clinic, the trust and credibility that comes with just that association is gonna say a lot, right? It's like, well,
Leslie: Yes.
Speaker: this is
Speaker: legit
Speaker: Do you kind of have like a one thing or a one message that you sort of are hanging your hat on that's like, "This is the thing that we sort of say that makes us different"?
Leslie: Um, yeah, we're, we're really honed in on scaling trusted knowledge. So again, one of the challenges with this global workforce shortage is there just aren't enough experts. There's-- and there's not enough people in the world to be those experts, right? Uh, not everyone has the right level of expertise to deliver medical information, um, medical procedures.
Leslie: So, um, we're-- trusted knowledge is something that is in short supply, and then how do you scale that?
Leslie: trusted knowledge i- when you're faced with workforce shortages? And so scaling trusted knowledge is a core piece of our messaging, and we think about that in terms of how we talk about what's the value of [00:10:00] what we're delivering with our AI expert solutions, is that you can scale the knowledge in your organization.
Leslie: It's not just housed now in one silo, and then if you don't get that appointment with that specific healthcare professional, you don't get that knowledge. With the AI expert, that knowledge can be distributed to more people and help, um, provide more solutions, um, than if it's just in one place.
Speaker: And the scale part of that, does that resonate mostly with like the healthcare practice or practitioners in that they are try- they're trying to scale that knowledge from a business perspective? Or does that resonate more with actual, people like you and me, the consumer that sort of needs to understand that.
Leslie: Yeah, right now we're really focused-- I think the most value for scaling is with a hospital system or a device manufacturing company. Again, if I'm a device manufacturer, I only have so many people who can train on a certain de- uh, device. But if I could offer that [00:11:00] same training knowledge, um, through an AI expert, then I can reach more people, um, so that people are trained effectively on how to use this device the right way, trained when there's updates.
Leslie: Same thing with, with the hospital system.
Speaker: Sure. And in terms of l-- the brand launch itself, um, talk a little bit about that. How, you know, were there a couple of key moments? Like, how did you think about it? It's a startup, so it's not like you have to, like, go and take over the world right away, right? You, you need to focus on a couple of areas. What did you focus on?
Speaker: What were a couple of those sort of steps or milestones along the way that sort of stand out for you?
Leslie: Yeah. You know, launching a company brand from the ground up, you know, doesn't happen very often in a career, so that's one of the things that was really exciting for me. the idea again, when I think about longstanding brands that I re- that I respect, it's, it's really exciting to be able to be on the ground up and build what the brand means.
Leslie: And so we thought a lot about ways to express the brand, um, and we thought about it's not just about [00:12:00] designing a logo that looks cool
Leslie: but what does the logo mean? And so New Realities has two thought bubbles in our logo, two circles, and that idea was really born out of, um, the concept that all realities or everything that we have today starts with an idea, something that people were inspired by.
Leslie: Um, and so ideas into reality is the-- and then also goes into our name of our New Realities, that we're creating a new reality around how we train and how we experience information. And so we really wanted to make, make sure our logo was thoughtful and it also aligned to the story we're trying to tell about the company.
Leslie: And then we also thought a lot about, um, how we express the name. Um, neu, N-E-U is, is lowercase with a capital R for Realities, um, and that was a nod to our, the technical side of the company, um, using camel case, which is a, which is a coding language. And so we really wanted to think about [00:13:00] again, how is the, how is the brand name represented?
Leslie: Um, and then we also, we've been having fun even like how do we use neu for other things and have some fun with it. So, um, we have some, like "New Pulse" is our employee newsletter. Um, we've been playing around with some words like "neuversary," so your first year anni- your anniversary within the company. So how can we have like a play on words using, using neu?
Leslie: We've been experimenting with that. We try to, again, create a lot of brand pride and excitement around what we're doing, um, even as a startup.
Speaker: I love that. Yeah. I mean, I think employee advocacy can be really powerful, and especially if you've got a, you know, 100 or so people out there evangelizing it, telling the story, talking about it in a positive way. I think that it has a major impact. It's re- I mean, companies invest in that.
Leslie: I think employer, employer brand is something that maybe more mature companies invest in, uh, but it's something we're definitely doing, um, as we [00:14:00] build out the brand, is think about how do we bring our, our peers and our, our team members along, along the way.
Speaker: That's great. You know, Fungi Media, we're a video marketing agency and we, we work a lot with healthcare companies and so, you know, content's a big part of what we do. So I'm curious, are you, uh, developing, are you creating content for marketing purposes? Are you doing anything either on the advertising side or on just thought leadership side or social media?
Speaker: Where, where are you guys at with that? Or is that even a part of the mix?
Leslie: It's a huge part of our mix, and I think, again, when I think about my career, content has always been so important. Um, and again, trusted, validated content. So I think it's a great way to not just sell. It helps educate people. It helps show another side of the company. And so we've done a serie-- Last year when we were at a large conference in Chicago, RSNA, which is the [00:15:00] Radiology- Radiological Society of North America, uh, we filmed, um, videos on site. We did conversation t-talks in our booth. We filmed those, and now we've got a section of videos on our website called New Talks.
Leslie: So being able to hear that from, again, a trusted source, um, is so important. Uh, we also have done interviews with people that we work with closely at Mayo Clinic. Um, it just validates what we're doing, and it's not just marketing hype. Um, it really provides clarity and information that helps them understand what we're doing and why it matters to them.
Leslie: So I think content is really central, um, to what we do, I don't know very many businesses that aren't using content marketing. Uh, I think it's just a, it's really important. But that's also a challenge too, because if in a sea of lots of content, how do you make sure it's relevant?
Leslie: I'm sure with your work on that and as an agency, you're trying to encourage your clients to [00:16:00] think of like not just adding to another voice in a sea of, of sameness, right? But how do they stand out and produce unique content?
Speaker: Yeah. That's-- And that is the challenge and, you know, it is, it's the noise level has risen, right? And even, and with AI too. And so how do you, uh, you know, there's the more, more, more mentality, but at the end of the day, you can get all the reach in the world if you want. Um, doesn't matter if you-- it doesn't resonate, right?
Leslie: Exactly
Speaker: So I think getting that right first, resonating over reach first, especially with B2B, uh, 'cause there's complex s- you know, sales cycles. It's a little bit-- There's more d- decision makers involved and, uh, especially in healthcare, um, getting that trust piece right is everything. So that's awesome. I'm curious what, within that content world, is there anything you're seeing that's working for you? I know you're a year in, it's kind of early. Anything that's kind of paying back, you know, where you're like, "Oh, I'm g- we're getting some momentum with this audience," or, "We're seeing some traction."
Leslie: I [00:17:00] definitely think our videos, um, are g-- are-- have really strong traction. We film these videos, and I was talking with one of our sales team members, and he said, "I watched this video that you filmed from the conference, and it does a, a job 10 times harder, like, like, uh, works 10 times harder, um, than if I were to do just, uh, like share one of our s- you know, sales, um, sales co- pieces of colla-- not sales collateral, but our PowerPoints if I were to do a presentation."
Leslie: He got to send the video in advance, and then it made his sales meeting, um, it was that?
Leslie: much more effective for him. So again, we think about what are the things that our sales team, our go-to-market team needs to help kind of open the door or make that sales meeting go more smoothly. And again, these, this type of video content i- is one way that we've seen that work really effectively.
Speaker: Yeah. And I'd love to hear how you're using video in particular, because it really is a way to scale trust, which is what you're trying to do, especially in your, your line of business, and hearing and seeing from the real [00:18:00] people that are doing the real work is, means a lot.
Leslie: Exactly. It's not just us saying it, but listen to the experts that we're working with, right?
Speaker: Don't just take my word for it.
Speaker: Yeah, and when-- and you can start to get that credibility from the Mayo Clinic to almost like the voice of the, the customer, so to speak, or the partner, uh, even more powerful, so. Well, Leslie, this was awesome. I have to ask one last question. Um, did the new blue come at all from you being in Michigan and related to blue?
Leslie: Um, no, it didn't. Uh, Michigan had nothing to do with New Blue. Uh, yeah. Um,
Leslie: we're, we're more objective than that at New Realities.
Speaker: I figured. I just thought I'd put you on the spot and just make sure. Well, Leslie, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. It's really exciting what you're building and we w- you know, we work with healthcare and AI companies, and it's just cool to see what everybody's doing.
Speaker: It's such a new place to be in, and everybody's trying to figure this out. So congrats on the work so far.[00:19:00]
Leslie: Thank you. And I love learning from other companies and other p- other peers. Like I said, more, uh, AMA Chicago is such a great resource for that, so I'm really glad we connected through Brand Smart and AMA Chicago.
Speaker: Absolutely