Two things make marketing leadership in healthcare and medical device different from marketing leadership anywhere else. Everything else about the role is recognizable.
The first is that you cannot say things that aren't substantiated, and the definition of substantiated is set by a regulator rather than by your own comfort level. The second is that the person who uses the product, the person who pays for it, and the person who approves the purchase are three different people who want three different things.
The committee problem
In a typical medical device or healthcare services sale you're persuading:
- A clinician, who cares about outcomes, evidence, and whether it disrupts their workflow. Deeply skeptical of marketing and rightly so.
- A procurement lead, who cares about price, contract terms, supplier risk, and whether this fits an existing framework.
- A finance director, who cares about total cost, the budget line it comes from, and whether the saving is real or theoretical.
- Sometimes an IT or information governance lead, who cares about data, integration, and security, and who can stop the whole thing on their own.
Most healthcare marketing is written for the clinician, because clinicians are the sympathetic audience and the one the company understands best. Then the deal stalls in procurement and everyone is surprised.
A properly built message set addresses each of them, in the order they enter the decision, with the evidence each of them finds credible. Clinical evidence for the clinician. Total cost of ownership for finance. Framework compliance and supplier stability for procurement. Integration detail for IT. Same product, four arguments.
Working inside the constraints
Regulatory constraint is the thing that most often gets used as a reason marketing can't do anything. Usually that's a process problem rather than a rules problem.
The rules are real: claims need substantiation, off-label promotion is prohibited, comparative claims need evidence, and requirements differ across markets. What's also real is that most companies handle this with an ad-hoc review process that takes weeks, has no clear criteria, and makes everyone reluctant to attempt anything.
The fix is boring and effective. A claims library, with each approved claim mapped to its supporting evidence and the markets it's approved for. A defined review path with named reviewers and a service level. And a clear distinction between promotional material, which needs full review, and educational or disease-awareness content, which usually doesn't.
Get that in place and marketing output typically increases substantially without anyone changing a single rule. It's rarely the constraint people think it is.
Where evidence and marketing meet
In most sectors, marketing generates the demand and product delivers the substance. In healthcare, the substance is the demand.
Which means marketing leadership here involves questions that sit close to clinical and regulatory territory:
- Which studies would actually change a buying decision, as opposed to which would be interesting
- Whether health economic data exists for the buyer's specific setting, since a general saving means little to a specific budget holder
- How real-world evidence from existing customers can be captured and used
- Which clinical opinion leaders matter to your buyers, and how to work with them properly
- Whether the KOL program is producing anything or is a set of relationships nobody has audited
A marketing leader who can't hold a credible conversation about evidence will be politely excluded from the discussions that decide whether the product sells.
What the first six months look like
Months one and two. Understand the actual buying process, which usually means sitting in on sales calls and talking to customers rather than reading the internal account of it. Audit the existing claims and evidence. Map the committee. Identify the point in the process where deals most often stall, which is rarely where the sales team thinks it is.
Months three and four. Build the message set for each committee member. Set up the claims library and the review process. Fix the sales materials, which in most companies of this size are a product deck aimed entirely at clinicians.
Months five and six. Demand generation aimed at a named account list, because in healthcare your addressable market is usually a knowable set of institutions rather than a broad audience. Reference customer program. Health economic material if it doesn't exist, which it usually doesn't.
Where fractional works and where it doesn't
The model suits a healthcare business that has a proven product, a consultative sale, and a positioning or evidence problem rather than an execution volume problem. Below the scale that justifies a full-time CMO, which for most device businesses is somewhere north of twenty million, fractional leadership is a sensible structure.
It's a poor fit in three situations.
Deep clinical knowledge is needed daily. Some categories require genuine subject expertise that takes a year to acquire. Fifteen hours a week is a slow way to get there.
You're pre-approval or pre-launch in a novel category. The intensity around a first launch in a new category is closer to a full-time job, and the window is short enough that part-time attention is a real risk.
The regulatory environment is unusually complex for your specific product. Multi-market device businesses with different classifications in each market need someone living in that detail.
What to look for
Sector experience, genuinely. This is one of the few categories where we'd insist on it. Someone who has never worked inside a claims review process will spend three months learning what they can't do.
Comfort with clinical colleagues. Marketing leaders who treat clinical and regulatory teams as obstacles get frozen out. The ones who involve them early and build the review process with them get far more published.
Commercial rather than communications background. Healthcare marketing attracts people from communications and medical education. Both valuable, and neither is the same as owning a pipeline number. Ask what they've been accountable for.
They ask about your evidence before your channels. A healthcare marketing leader whose first questions are about your website has misunderstood which end of the problem matters.
The measurement problem, briefly
Healthcare sales cycles run twelve to twenty-four months and involve procurement processes that are largely invisible from outside. Standard attribution is close to useless.
What works better: tracking named account progression through defined stages, monitoring engagement at account rather than individual level, and asking every closed deal what actually influenced it, then aggregating those answers quarterly.
It's less precise than a dashboard and considerably more accurate. Anyone promising clean attribution in a market where the buying committee never fills in a form is selling you a number that was invented rather than measured.