The Healthtech Marketing Show

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.

In this episode, I sit down with Bruce Brandes, a 35-year healthtech veteran. Together with his longtime friend and business partner Brian Shulman, he is building WhaleHawk, which they call the first agentic sales accelerator built specifically for healthcare.
Bruce and I dig into why go-to-market in healthcare is so uniquely hard, why generic prompting in Claude or ChatGPT will not solve it, and what it actually takes to combine AI with deep healthcare-specific data to find the right accounts, at the right time, with a warm path in.
Bruce walks through the concept of a true customer profile, which goes well beyond the usual ideal customer profile exercise most of us struggle to nail down. He explains how WhaleHawk analyzes hundreds of clinical, financial, and operational metrics to spot patterns human eyes would never catch, then layers in real-time buying signals and relationship mapping to identify warm introduction paths to decision-makers. 
He also shares three concrete client examples, including one involving a Becker's conference attendee list, that show exactly how this plays out in practice.
If you are a healthtech marketing or sales leader wondering whether AI can genuinely transform your go-to-market approach, or whether you are just creating the appearance of using AI, this episode gives you a clear framework for thinking it through.
Key Topics Covered:
"(00:00)" Introduction
"(08:00)" The WhaleHawk pitch
"(10:00)" Defining the "true customer profile"
"(12:00)" Why WhaleHawk calls itself the first agentic sales accelerator built specifically for healthcare
"(13:00)" Why this could not have been built two years ago
"(15:00)" The core problems in B2B healthcare go-to-market
"(17:00)" Who brings WhaleHawk in, and who is typically in the room
"(19:30)" Three use case patterns across startups, growth stage companies, and mature companies
"(23:00)" What's next for WhaleHawk
"(24:30)" Client example one: Equa Medical
"(26:30)" Client example two: Butterfly Network
"(28:30)" Client example three: the Becker's conference use case revisited in full
"(30:00)" Why this approach differs fundamentally from database driven sales intelligence tools
"(31:00)" What changes for clients once they start using WhaleHawk, and how quickly they see ROI
"(34:00)" Four reasons off the shelf LLM prompting falls short
"(37:00)" Bruce's closing advice for healthtech marketing leaders
"(40:00)" Adam's five 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.

Have you ever wondered why the smaller, more intimate industry events on your calendar seem to generate more real business than the massive trade show floors? 
In this episode, part two of our series The Intimacy Shift, I sit down with Mike Mosquito and Maureen Nylin, the duo behind the Buzz podcast, to find out exactly what happens once buyers are in the room.
If you are planning your 2027 event strategy and trying to figure out where your budget should actually go, this conversation gives you the answer. Mike and Maureen have built their careers on being the people event organizers call when they want a room to feel less like a trade show and more like a reunion, and they pull back the curtain on how they do it.
We get into why healthcare buyers are craving personal connection over another badge scan, what the real art of facilitation looks like when you are moderating a panel that people actually remember, and how they turned a single night of content into 50,000 LinkedIn impressions. 
If you have ever sat through a forgettable panel or wondered how to make your own event stand out, this is the episode that shows you what good actually looks like, and why fewer, better rooms beat another crowded ballroom every time.
Key Topics Covered
"(00:00)" Introduction
"(02:00)" Mike and Maureen's backgrounds
"(05:00)" Why intimate events are growing in importance
"(07:00)" The buyer's perspective
"(09:00)" Why relationships are the real differentiator
"(11:00)" What Mike and Maureen do at events
"(13:00)" Behind the scenes of their Chime event game show
"(16:00)" How Mike and Maureen started working together
"(19:00)" What event organizers consistently get wrong
"(22:00)" The story behind their pre-promotion at the UGA
After Dark event
"(26:00)" The art of facilitation
"(27:00)" Moderating together
"(28:00)" Why curiosity and active listening matter more than a script
"(31:00)" Why story beats data
"(32:00)" How they generated 50,000 LinkedIn impressions in three hours
"(34:00)" Livestreaming from HIMSS
"(35:00)" Advice for healthtech marketers rethinking event strategy for 2027
"(41:00)" Closing takeaways from the series

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.