I've worked in and with pharma and med tech for 20 years. The same question keeps coming up: "What are marketing doing to help us win business?"
The Question That Never Goes Away
I have worked inside and alongside healthcare companies of every size, from fast-moving med-tech start-ups to global pharma giants. And no matter where I have been, one question always seems to come from the commercial team: "How is marketing helping us?"
It is a fair question. For too long, marketing in healthcare has been viewed as an extension of product management or as sales support. In reality, their job is to help you stand out and cut through the noise.
The truth is, marketing should not be judged on whether it directly found the customer. Instead, its real contribution lies in how it moves customers along their journey — from awareness to engagement, from interest to advocacy. When you break that journey into smaller steps with clear KPIs, the impact becomes easy to see, measure, and prove.
Why Marketing Gets Undervalued in Healthcare
Commercial teams often believe marketing is slow, unfocused, or difficult to measure. From the outside, it can look like marketing is spread across too many tasks with little obvious output.
The reality is very different. Marketing teams are usually holding together multiple priorities and dealing with layers of compliance, legal review, and market complexity. They are already doing critical work, but because they lack clear attribution within the sales process, their impact is easily overlooked.
What Good Looks Like
Good marketing in healthcare means mapping the customer journey in detail and understanding exactly what moves a prospect from one stage to the next. Leading pharma and device companies are already doing this well. They treat the customer journey as a series of measurable steps and align marketing activity to each one.
That journey might begin with a healthcare professional following your company on LinkedIn. It could progress to subscribing to a newsletter, registering for an event, booking a course, or attending a meeting. Later, the journey could involve supporting your clinical champion during an active sales process, engaging procurement, or presenting value to hospital management.
Every one of these stages creates an opportunity for marketing to provide the right activity at the right time.
How Marketing Proves Its Value in the Sales Process
The key to proving marketing's role is visibility. A modern CRM system should do more than store contact details. It should track every step of the customer journey — from digital touchpoints to in-person meetings — so you can see how stakeholders are moving forward.
With this visibility, marketing can deliver highly targeted outreach and content creation that directly supports the sales process. Instead of generic campaigns, the focus shifts to precise activities designed for specific personas at specific stages of the journey.
That means:
- Supporting clinical champions with case studies, real-world evidence, and educational content that helps them make the case internally
- Creating bespoke collateral for procurement teams who need clarity on value, cost, and compliance
- Equipping hospital management with messages that align to strategic goals such as efficiency, patient outcomes, or cost savings
- Sending tailored email sequences to prospects who have engaged with educational content but not yet spoken to sales
- Inviting stakeholders to events and webinars only when they are at the right point in their decision-making process
By combining CRM data with targeted content, marketing demonstrates progress in real terms. It shows the commercial team not only that marketing is active, but that it is advancing prospects in measurable ways.
Marketing as a Measurable Growth Engine
Marketing is too important to be dismissed as a support function. In today's healthcare commercial process, it should be your engine moving customers forward.
By mapping journeys, using CRM to track progress, aligning activities to each stage, and measuring the right KPIs, marketing has a key role to play in eradicating inconsistent pipelines.
The next time the commercial team asks "How is marketing helping us?" the answer should be clear:
- Marketing has gained 8,000 new followers on LinkedIn
- 600 sign-ups to the newsletter
- Signed up 90 people to upcoming events from these platforms
- Facilitated 70 downloads of the procurement support guide
- Sent targeted insight-based content to key stakeholders in the top 20 target accounts
- Achieved a 30% engagement rate with a procurement survey
- Engaged 8 C-Suite personnel from multiple accounts to participate in a new white paper
- Created 5 dedicated tender proposals with case studies, testimonials, and real-world evidence tailored to top key tender targets
That's how marketing advances customers along the journey, accelerates decisions, and drives growth.
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