The Healthtech Marketing Show

Another special episode from the vault. Instead of me hosting, you'll hear my colleague Mark Erwich, Chief Strategy Officer at Health Launchpad, and me as guests on the Sway Health Podcast, in conversation with Colin Hung. We recorded this about a year ago, but if anything, the topic feels more relevant today than it did then.
We get into the real mechanics of the healthcare buyer journey. Sales cycles are running past a year. Buying groups keep growing. And there's a stat that still stops people in their tracks: most buyers say they end up choosing the first company they call, which means their minds are largely made up before they ever pick up the phone. AI is only making this harder, since it gives buyers even more ways to research before they talk to a vendor at all.
If you've ever felt like deals appear out of nowhere, or wondered why your lead volume doesn't translate into pipeline, this conversation will explain why, and what to do differently. Mark and I walk through account-based thinking, how to read buying signals, why thought leadership matters most in the part of the journey you can't see, and what we tell clients to actually change first. We also talk about why healthcare is a genuinely different B2B market than the one most marketing advice is written for, and why leveraging your own customer network may be the most underused asset you have.
If pipeline growth is a constant conversation on your team, this episode is worth the listen.
Key Topics Covered
"(00:00)" – Introduction
"(05:00)" – The biggest pipeline struggle marketers report
"(08:00)" – Reframing the marketer's job
"(09:00)" – Why the old MQL-to-sales handoff model is breaking down
"(10:00)" – Shifting from lead-level tracking to account-level signal tracking
"(11:00)" – Why pipeline ownership belongs to the whole company, not just sales
"(13:00)" – What ABM thinking actually means: accounts, buying groups, and signals
"(16:00)" – Why healthcare is a finite, nameable market, unlike most B2B categories
"(18:00)" – Balancing ABM with broader brand awareness
"(19:00)" – What NOT to stop doing
"(20:00)" – Why "(outbound is dead)" and similar absolutes are wrong
"(22:00)" – Why most B2B marketing advice doesn't translate directly to healthcare
"(23:00)" – Examples of companies further along their ABM journey
"(24:00)" – The operational ripple effects of shifting to ABM
"(25:00)" – Sales and marketing alignment in practice
"(27:00)" – Practical ways to activate customer advocacy without relying on formal case studies
"(32:00)" – Recap and key takeaways for revenue teams
If you are interested in discussing this or any other topic, let's have a chat.  Reach out to me directly to schedule a no-obligation discussion. This isn't a sales call, but rather an opportunity to talk through your questions and challenges.
Follow me on LinkedIn.
Subscribe to The Healthtech Marketing Show on Spotify or watch us on YouTube for more insights into marketing, AI, ABM, buyer journeys, and beyond!
Find all of our episodes on the Health Podcast Library.
Thank you to our presenting sponsor, HealthcareNOW, 24/7 expert shows, interviews, and podcasts, powering healthcare leaders with innovation, policy, and strategy insights.

How do you build an AI-first marketing team from the ground up, and get legal, compliance, and a skeptical staff on board with you? I'm away this week, so I'm pulling one of my favorite conversations from the vault to answer exactly that question.
This is my chat with Nick Panayi, recorded when he was CMO at Inovalon. Nick and I go deep on how he and his digital marketing lead, Chris Marin, put an AI-first mindset into practice across every function of a 95-person marketing team. He walks through the real speed bumps: how he addressed legal's privacy concerns in a highly regulated industry, and how he got his own people past the fear that AI was coming for their jobs.
We also get tactical. Nick explains the AI tools his team built for content creation, website personalization at scale, and agentic AI systems that draft and bid on paid ads with a human checking the work at the end. He breaks down what agentic AI actually means in plain English, how his team measures ROI on each pilot, and how they even used an AI-generated podcast to turn a stack of white papers into content people would actually consume.
The playbook here, an AI-first mindset backed by leadership, hiring for AI fluency, and treating experimentation as a mandate, is more relevant now than when we first aired it.
Key Topics Covered
"(00:00)" Introduction
"(05:00)" Hiring Chris Moran and adopting an "AI first" mindset
"(09:00)" Navigating legal and privacy concerns in healthcare
"(12:00)" Building an AI roadmap
"(15:00)" The AI content engine
"(19:00)" Using AI to tag and personalize 1,000 website pages
"(23:00)" Agentic AI for building and bidding on paid search ads
"(27:00)" What "agentic AI" and "zero-shot" actually mean
"(32:00)" Amaru AI, Chris's internal multi-agent marketing platform
"(36:00)" Bringing AI tools into monday.com and an AI image remix tool
"(39:00)" Prospecting tools Tiga AI and Synthflow for AI-driven outreach
"(44:00)" How realistic AI voice conversations have become
"(46:00)" Measuring ROI and answering the CEO's top line growth question
"(52:00)" Turning white papers into AI generated podcasts
"(54:00)" Advice for agencies and consultants
"(57:00)" Advice for peers starting their own AI journey
If you are interested in discussing this or any other topic, let's have a chat.  Reach out to me directly to schedule a no-obligation discussion. This isn't a sales call, but rather an opportunity to talk through your questions and challenges.
Follow me on LinkedIn.
Subscribe to The Healthtech Marketing Show on Spotify or watch us on YouTube for more insights into marketing, AI, ABM, buyer journeys, and beyond!
Find all of our episodes on the Health Podcast Library.
Thank you to our presenting sponsor, HealthcareNOW, 24/7 expert shows, interviews, and podcasts, powering healthcare leaders with innovation, policy, and strategy insights.

Does your team keep chasing more leads but can't explain why the pipeline doesn't turn into revenue? This episode is for you. 
Aaron Burnett, founder and CEO of Wheelhouse DMG, built his agency specifically for privacy-first industries like healthcare and medtech, and he walked me through something most agencies can't do: predicting the dollar value of a lead in real time, without ever touching protected health information.
We get into why more leads is the wrong goal for most medtech marketers, how Wheelhouse's real-time propensity modeling drove a 50 percent increase in new customer starts for one large medtech client, and why Aaron's team sometimes tells prospective clients not to spend a dime with them until they fix their product or messaging first.
If you are trying to make sense of measurement in a HIPAA-constrained world, wondering whether your dual funnel of patients and physicians is actually working the way you think it is, or curious about how AI fits into a performance marketing agency without replacing the experts who make it work, you will get a lot out of this conversation.
Key Topics Covered
"(00:00)" – Introduction
"(00:07)" – The Go-Giver philosophy
"(00:10)" – What Wheelhouse does and who it serves
"(00:13)" – Why more leads is the wrong goal
"(00:16)" – The double bind of HIPAA-regulated marketing
"(00:18)" – Inside real-time propensity modeling
"(00:21)" – Applying propensity modeling to HCP recruitment
"(00:23)" – Building Compass, Lighthouse, and Sonar instead of buying off the shelf tools
"(00:29)" – Why ABM starts with the same question Wheelhouse asks
"(00:29)" – How AI has changed Wheelhouse's work
"(00:34)" – Using AI to eliminate the boring parts of client reporting
"(00:37)" – Where to find Aaron and Wheelhouse
Find The Go-Giver book here.
If you are interested in discussing this or any other topic, let's have a chat.  Reach out to me directly to schedule a no-obligation discussion. This isn't a sales call, but rather an opportunity to talk through your questions and challenges.
Follow me on LinkedIn.
Subscribe to The Healthtech Marketing Show on Spotify or watch us on YouTube for more insights into marketing, AI, ABM, buyer journeys, and beyond!
Find all of our episodes on the Health Podcast Library.
Thank you to our presenting sponsor, HealthcareNOW, 24/7 expert shows, interviews, and podcasts, powering healthcare leaders with innovation, policy, and strategy insights.

If you have felt like the channels you used to count on for pipeline just are not producing the way they used to, you’re not alone. Cold call connection rates have dropped to around 3 percent, email is getting buried by spam filters, and now LinkedIn is starting to go the same way as more salespeople lean on AI to fire off generic connect-and-pitch sequences that buyers can spot from a mile away. 
To close out our four-part series on AI and sales enablement, I sat down with Tim Hughes, co-founder of DLA Ignite and one of the most respected voices in social selling. 
Tim built the only certified social selling methodology in the world, just released the fourth edition of his book Social Selling and Influence, and spent the last year building an AI platform, Azpertilo.ai, that helps salespeople sound more like themselves, not less.
We get into why buyers still buy on trust and relationship, how Tim's platform grounds AI output in a salesperson's actual voice, and how brand guardrails can keep content on message without making it sound like generic corporate copy. 
Tim also breaks down why most sales teams just need friction removed rather than more training when adopting new tools, and how a simple commenting feature is helping him start real conversations with total strangers before ever asking to connect.
If you want to understand what actually works for building pipeline now that the old playbooks are breaking down, this conversation is packed with practical thinking you can use right away.
Key Topics Covered
"(00:00)" Introduction
"(05:00)" Tim's background
"(07:00)" Why so few salespeople actually use LinkedIn effectively
"(09:00)" The psychology of buying
"(10:00)" How the idea for an AI sales tool started, built around how people actually buy
"(13:00)" Why visibility on LinkedIn also drives visibility in LLMs and Google search
"(14:00)" Building an "easy button" that removes the friction of posting content
"(15:00)" Brand guardrails that keep AI generated posts on message and authentic
"(17:00)" The adoption bell curve
"(19:00)" How the platform works
"(22:00)" The scoring and guardrail system 
"(24:00)" Turning corporate campaign content and colleague posts into personalized content
"(25:00)" The four step posting process, including hashtag and amplifier channel suggestions
"(27:00)" A planned daily nudge feature to build a consistent posting habit
"(28:00)" The AI powered commenting tool and how it opens conversations with cold prospects
"(32:00)" The irony of using AI to scale generic outreach and commoditize the salesperson
"(33:00)" Where to find Tim, his book, and Aspetillo.ai
"(34:00)" Adam's four takeaways

Previous Episodes in this series:
How AI Aligned Marketing and Sales in Seven Months
Finding Your True Customer Profile with Bruce Brandes
Building an AI Lead Scoring System That Boosted Conversion by 70%
If you are interested in discussing this or any other topic, let's have a chat.  Reach out to me directly to schedule a no-obligation discussion. This isn't a sales call, but rather an opportunity to talk through your questions and challenges.
Follow me on LinkedIn.
Subscribe to The Healthtech Marketing Show on Spotify or watch us on YouTube for more insights into marketing, AI, ABM, buyer journeys, and beyond!
Find all of our episodes on the Health Podcast Library.
Thank you to our presenting sponsor, HealthcareNOW, 24/7 expert shows, interviews, and podcasts, powering healthcare leaders with innovation, policy, and strategy insights.

Your marketing engine is generating leads, but how do you know which ones are actually worth handing to sales? That is the question at the heart of this episode, and it is one that gets harder to answer the bigger your funnel gets.
My guest is Nick Panayi, a technology marketing veteran who most recently led marketing at Inovalon. If you listened to our episode with Nick last year, you know he has spent his career at the intersection of marketing and AI. This time he is back to walk me through something he built with his partner Chris Marin: an AI-powered lead scoring system that moved his team's MQL-to-opportunity conversion rate from 10 percent to 17 percent in a single quarter. That is a 70 percent improvement in lead conversion.
We get into why traditional lead scoring has not really changed since marketing automation platforms first showed up, and why that single-dimensional approach creates false positives and quietly erodes trust between marketing and sales. Nick breaks down how his team combined ten different signals, from individual behavior to ICP alignment to lookalike modeling, into one dynamic score built on a self-improving Bayesian model.
We also talk about the part I think matters most for actually getting sales to act: pairing every score with a plain-language, AI-generated synopsis that tells the rep exactly why the lead matters and how to open the conversation.
If you are a CMO or VP of marketing trying to get sales to actually believe in your leads, this episode gives you a real blueprint, along with Nick's honest take on what it takes to get started even if you do not have a full AI team in-house.
Key Topics Covered
"(00:00)" Welcome and introduction
"(05:00)" Nick's background 
"(06:00)" Why traditional lead scoring has not changed in years 
"(09:00)" The specific problems with lead scoring
"(12:00)" Multivariate AI platform scoring
"(15:00)" Turning complex scoring data into a single AI generated synopsis 
"(17:00)" Why recency and lead quality together drive better conversion
"(19:00)" How the project actually got built
"(21:00)" The result
"(23:00)" A real example of a counterintuitive lead score
"(25:00)" The value of being able to reconstruct a full deal story
"(27:00)" Nick's one piece of advice for a CMO who wants to get started next week
"(31:00)" Adam's five key takeaways from the conversation
If you are interested in discussing this or any other topic, let's have a chat.  Reach out to me directly to schedule a no-obligation discussion. This isn't a sales call, but rather an opportunity to talk through your questions and challenges.
Follow me on LinkedIn.
Subscribe to The Healthtech Marketing Show on Spotify or watch us on YouTube for more insights into marketing, AI, ABM, buyer journeys, and beyond!
Find all of our episodes on the Health Podcast Library.
Thank you to our presenting sponsor, HealthcareNOW, 24/7 expert shows, interviews, and podcasts, powering healthcare leaders with innovation, policy, and strategy insights.