The Healthtech Marketing Show

If you skipped every healthtech conference this year, this episode is your catch-up call.
My guest is Colin Hung, Editor-in-Chief at Swaay.Health and Healthcare IT Today, who is on pace to attend 50 conferences in 2026, roughly one a week, which means he sees more vendor pitches and more buyer conversations than almost anyone else in this industry. I asked him what has actually changed on the show floor this year, and his answer should worry anyone still pitching a five-year ROI story.
Colin walks me through why buyers have no patience for long payback periods. The standard or many, is three to six months. And, why AI has quietly moved from a standalone purchase to something baked into every backend system you already own. That shift is making it harder than ever for vendors to stand out.
We get into the one unglamorous AI use case that is actually winning deals right now (hint: it involves faxes), why security transparency and AI governance are becoming the next competitive edge, and what he thinks marketers need to stop saying if they want their message to break through the noise.
We close with his predictions for 2027, including a call on patient experience investment that you may not want to hear, and his take on what you are missing every single time you decide to stay home instead of showing up.
Key Topics Covered
“(00:00)” – Introduction
“(06:00)” – The economy takes center stage in conversations
“(08:00)” – Budget cuts, paused projects, and stripped down requirements
“(09:00)” – Buyers now demand proof of value in three to six months
“(10:00)” – Operational efficiency becomes the new buzzword
“(12:00)” – A maturing conversation around generative versus agentic AI
“(17:00)” – Fax triage and other unglamorous, high impact AI deployments
“(19:00)” – The gap between what vendors promote and what buyers want
“(23:00)” – Security transparency and AI governance are becoming competitive advantages
“(24:00)” – The standout technology of the year
“(26:00)” – Predictions for 2027
“(29:00)” – What healthtech marketers miss by skipping conferences entirely
“(30:00)” – What's next for Swaay.Health
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've ever wondered why splitting your brand budget from your demand gen budget always seems to end with brand getting cut first, this episode is for you. I sat down with Drew Neisser, founder of CMO Huddles, a peer community built exclusively for B2B CMOs with over 800 members, to dig into what's actually changed for CMOs in the AI era, and what hasn't.
We talk about why AI is turning competent content into a commodity, and why that actually makes human judgment, humor, and original thinking more valuable, not less. Drew makes the case for the return of the big idea, and explains why treating brand and demand gen as separate budgets sets marketing and sales up to work against each other.
If you're worried about CMO tenure or wondering whether the job is even still worth pursuing, Drew shares brand new data from a study he ran with Findem on how long CMOs actually last at public, venture backed, and private equity backed companies, and why the gap is bigger than you'd think.
We also get into what a CMO should do in their first 90 days at a new company, why peer communities like CMO Huddles matter more than ever, and why knowing your customer better than anyone else in the room is still the strongest superpower a CMO has.
Key Topics Covered
"(00:00)" - Introduction
"(00:04)" - Why CMO Huddles is built
"(00:06)" - What's changed and what hasn't for CMOs in the AI era
"(00:09)" - Why the pressure on marketers keeps rising
"(00:13)" - Why splitting brand and demand gen backfires
"(00:19)" - The rise of unified GTM teams and who should lead them
"(00:21)" - Is the CMO role disappearing?
"(00:23)" - The buyer journey in healthtech
"(00:25)" - Agent sprawl: a new kind of MarTech debt
"(00:28)" - Inside Reputracker
"(00:31)" - New CMO tenure data from the Findem study
"(00:36)" - The Quick Wins Playbook for a CMO's first 90 days
"(00:39)" - Why marketers should join a peer community
"(00:42)" - How CMO Huddles supports CMOs in transition
"(00:44)" - Why AI fluency is now a make or break interview question
"(00:45)" - Talking to customers: the real CMO superpower
"(00:48)" - 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.

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.