Episode 51: How Healthcare Marketers Build for a Buying Process They Don’t Control

Healthcare buying committees are large, slow-moving, and full of stakeholders with competing priorities. Adam Turinas understands this from both sides of the table. Before founding Health Launchpad, he spent years running a health tech company navigating the same complexity his clients face today. 

In this episode, Adam shares how to approach account selection, map buying committees, and build measurement frameworks that connect marketing activity to pipeline. He also covers where AI adoption is creating a genuine competitive opening for healthcare marketers right now and what it takes to treat it as infrastructure rather than a productivity shortcut. 

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Introducing Adam Turinas

Aaron Burnett: Welcome to The Digital Clinic, the show where we dig into what actually works in digital marketing for healthcare and med tech — the strategies, tools, and thinking that move the needle when the rules are tighter, the stakes are higher, and “that’s the way we’ve always done it” is no longer a viable answer.

Adam Turinas spent two decades in leadership roles with some of the world’s largest advertising agencies before co-founding a clinical communications software company and ultimately selling it to Harris Healthcare. He then founded Health Launchpad in 2020. He wrote the book on account-based marketing in healthcare — literally — and runs a network of roughly 300 health tech marketers who are navigating this market in real time.

His experience running a clinical communications company, struggling with the same problems his clients now face, is what shapes how he approaches healthcare B2B marketing. In this episode, Adam explains what healthcare buyers actually need from the partners pursuing them, and what most marketing teams get wrong about earning the right to stay in the room.

Here’s our conversation.

This podcast is sponsored by Wheelhouse Digital Marketing Group. Wheelhouse provides exceptional performance marketing for healthcare and medical device manufacturers. Every Wheelhouse client saw record performance in 2025, even after implementing HIPAA-compliant data solutions. Find out more at wheelhousedmg.com.

What Health Launchpad Does and Who It Serves

Aaron Burnett: Tell me about Health Launchpad, what you do and who you serve.

Adam Turinas: Health Launchpad is a healthcare B2B agency. We work with enterprise software companies, services companies, venture-backed startups in digital health, and device companies, anyone selling something significant to hospitals or health insurance companies. We help them with messaging, brand strategy, and creative, and we have a superpower in account-based marketing.

What sets us apart is that the leadership team, and the extended team as well, all have hands-on experience in the marketing seat. Most of the people on the team have either been chief marketing officers or, like myself, have actually run a health tech company. There’s deep knowledge about this market, and particularly about how B2B healthcare buyers buy. We position ourselves as the pipeline growth partner for healthcare, with great emphasis on “partner.”

How Adam Built ABM as a Superpower in Healthcare

Aaron Burnett: Tell me about the ABM superpower. What gives you a particular edge in ABM for this market?

Adam Turinas: My career has three parts. The first was a couple of decades in the agency world — mostly B2C work, no healthcare. Then a physician friend and I started a healthcare technology company almost by accident. For about seven years, we were selling to hospitals, did pretty well, and eventually exited. We sold to Harris Healthcare, and then I wanted to go back to my first love, marketing.

When I set up Health Launchpad, I wanted to create the agency I really needed when I was selling to healthcare. To be honest, I didn’t understand healthcare buyers initially. I was using traditional B2B techniques that didn’t work, and we struggled.

When I started Health Launchpad, I had become familiar with ABM, and I thought: we’re going all in on this. Healthcare moves slower than enterprise SaaS, where ABM had already been around for a while. When I talked to organizations, they’d heard of ABM but didn’t really know much about it. So I decided to make us the experts. We partnered with HIMSS on an educational series, about six webinars on ABM in healthcare, and that started generating business.

I doubled down by writing a book on it, Total Customer Growth, with a former CMO of a health tech company. A colleague, Mark Erwick, who had been a CMO at several health tech companies and had been practicing ABM for 10 years, joined us. The team formulated not just the process, but also a technology offering we call “unbundled ABM”: a set of tools we provide as part of our service, so clients don’t need to buy a product like DemandBase right away.

The reason ABM is so critical in healthcare is that the average sales cycle is 13 months or longer, and there are more stakeholders involved than in almost any other industry. Our whole premise is to start with “who” — which accounts are you targeting? There are 6,000 hospitals organized into about 1,800 organizations, plus several hundred payer organizations. A large ABM campaign may target 300 accounts. From there, you map the buying group, build a plan to track engagement, identify who’s in market, and stay present as they move through their process.

Pure lead generation doesn’t work for sales cycles this long. Buyers are running their own process on their own timeline. Your job is to give them the information they need and to stay present and credible until they’re ready.

Why Healthcare B2B Is Different: Longer Cycles, Larger Committees

Aaron Burnett: ABM has been around for a long time. What’s uniquely difficult about it in healthcare?

Adam Turinas: Sales cycles are that much longer. The average CMO tenure in most industries is less than two years, in many cases, the length of a full healthcare sales cycle. In enterprise SaaS, you might get four sales cycles to prove your value. In healthcare, you may get one or two. That makes it even more important for healthcare marketing executives to demonstrate value and tie marketing influence to revenue, and that’s harder here than almost anywhere else.

In most B2B environments, you’re selling to business people, a CIO, a CFO, a banker. In healthcare, you’re also selling to physicians and nurses who may not have much commercial experience. They want different things. You need to make a clear ROI case to a business person while also creating content that’s deeply relevant to a clinician — content that shows you understand what it means to work as a physician.

And if you flip over to payers, you’re dealing with organizations that function more like financial institutions, even though they’re in healthcare. They also have chief medical officers who will weigh in, so you have to navigate both mindsets simultaneously.

Adoption of ABM has moved significantly. When we first benchmarked it in 2022, more than two-thirds of the market was interested but needed to be educated, and maybe 10% had actually adopted it. Now the vast majority have implemented ABM in some form through platforms like DemandBase, through agency partnerships, or by embedding ABM thinking into their go-to-market model.

Mapping the Full Buying Committee in Healthcare

Aaron Burnett: As you structure an ABM campaign and map out the constituents you need to reach, give us a sense of the universe of people you’re trying to reach. I imagine it’s far more nuanced than a typical B2B ABM context.

Adam Turinas: Take telehealth as an example. The champion, the main person initiating the purchase, could be the chief medical officer, the chief nursing officer, the chief medical informatics officer, or an operations leader. Sometimes it’s also IT: a CIO or VP of Applications. One of those roles is the champion; the others form the buying committee along with someone from finance and someone from purchasing.

You’ll often get a chief quality officer involved as well, someone typically from nursing who tracks the organization’s performance against CMS measures. They want to make sure whatever is adopted will help meet those measures and secure Medicare reimbursement. Beyond that, you’ll be vetted by security and compliance. And then there’s the user group: the medical executive committee, potentially 10 to 20 physicians, and a nursing committee with five to ten people.

I talked to a marketer in our network who was head of marketing at a telehealth company. She pulled up 12 months of DemandBase data showing how individuals from a target health system showed up over time: first one person, then two or three, then four or five. Once they entered the sales process, it jumped to 10. At the end it was about 20 different people.

When I was running my clinical communications company, we’d often be presenting to 20 people in a room. You had to figure out beforehand: is this more of a clinical crowd, so do I bring my partner who was a physician? Or is this more of an IT crowd, so do I need to bring the CTO? You have to adapt. And because the process is so long, people change jobs, organizations merge. I had a deal with Meridian Health where we got very close and lost. Then we got very close with Hackensack and lost again. About two years after our first meetings with either organization, the two merged. We were brought back in by the chief innovation officer, went through an 18-month process from scratch, and eventually won the deal. We signed — and the very next week, a new nursing executive joined who later said that if she’d arrived a week earlier, she would have killed the deal and gone with Epic.

This is what our clients and their salespeople live with daily.

Relationships and Trust as Competitive Advantage

Adam Turinas: People don’t really understand the importance of relationships and trust. I saw that firsthand. Coming up through the traditional agency world, particularly at agencies like Ogilvy & Mather, you learn the importance of long-term relationships. Ogilvy had a relationship with IBM that lasted 30 years.

Between leaving the big agency world and starting my tech company, I worked for an organization that assessed agency performance for companies like Novartis and McDonald’s. It was always striking how many experienced agency people didn’t get that.

Building Health Launchpad, we focus on hiring people with deep experience who understand the value of relationships. Our people are expensive as a result. But we earn grown-up relationships with our clients, ones where we have the right to be considered a strategic partner. We may not always deliver the results they hoped for, but it wouldn’t be for lack of trying or lack of trust.

ABX: Turning Clients into Strategic Partners

Aaron Burnett: You’ve also talked about what you call ABX, the experience after you win the sale.

Adam Turinas: We were on-site recently with one of our oldest clients — we’ve been working with them for five years. There were about eight of us in the room, and over the course of the day, about a dozen client-side people joined. People who had been working together remotely for years finally got to meet in person. All I could think was: I wish we’d done that sooner.

We try very hard in every client relationship to earn the right to be considered a partner which means more than delivering leads. It means saying, “We think there are things that need to improve on your website,” or “This product feature seems to be working really well — have you considered this angle?” That’s what partnership actually looks like.

Connecting Marketing to Revenue with Deal Stories

Aaron Burnett: You said you’re looking to deliver more than just leads. In our digital advertising work, we integrate with clients’ CRMs and optimize for the moment a lead actually becomes a customer, made possible because we have a BAA and a HIPAA-compliant data warehouse. Are you building similar measurement frameworks that create intermediate signals showing these leads developed into clients with a specific estimated lifetime value, and informing how you continue to go to market?

Adam Turinas: We do. I would say measurement tends to drop off at the point a prospect gets handed to sales. Our clients may have been engaging a prospect for seven or eight months before the handoff, and then there’s another seven or eight months of actually closing the deal.

But one of the things we’ve helped clients develop are deal stories. Narratives that trace how a healthcare system became a client from the very beginning. It’s interesting to watch the reaction from sales when they see all the touch points laid out. They say, “Okay it wasn’t just the conversation at HIMSS. There were six months of content downloads, ad exposure, and an SDR call before they were even willing to meet.” And what we’re seeing with longer-term clients is the full revenue picture: a deal that started at $500,000 has expanded to $2 million over two years. That’s what gives marketing real credibility with leadership.

AI Adoption in Health Tech Marketing: From Tactics to Strategy

Adam Turinas: I run a network of health tech marketers, about 300 people now. We meet monthly, usually 30 to 40 people across two sessions. AI has been the top topic for the last two years, and we’ve been benchmarking adoption. The shift has been clear: from “we know we need to do something about this” to organizations actually having a defined AI strategy.

Some are buying platforms like Jasper for content and workflow. Others, like us, are building their own workflows and vector stores. One example that stands out is Nick Panai, until recently the CMO of Inovalon. They’ve built an agentic workflow for paid search and a system they call “agentic opportunity scoring.” It looks at historical data on their best customers and uses that to score early-pipeline deals by their likelihood of becoming highly profitable. That’s the level of differentiation I find most interesting.

The spectrum runs from a small number of companies building custom AI systems down to organizations still using AI only tactically. But AI applied to pipeline intelligence and revenue prediction is where the real competitive advantage is being built.

Market Disruption and Shifting Buyer Behavior

Aaron Burnett: Have you seen catalyzing events that have dramatically shifted the frames of reference for buying committees? For us, it was new HHS guidance on third-party tracking and the definition of PHI at the end of 2022.

Adam Turinas: Let me walk through the waves. First there was COVID, which bifurcated the market completely — either everything was shut down, or, if you were a telehealth platform, buyers were moving fast. Then came the post-COVID normalization, where organizations tried to return to something like normal, and telehealth companies had to reckon with the fact that the accelerated buying behavior wasn’t permanent.

In the last couple of years, two things stand out. The change in administration and the uncertainty around OBBA and Medicaid cuts have slowed buying significantly and created real disruption. On the other side, AI is driving urgent investment and healthcare systems are adopting it quickly because it addresses pressing problems: back-office efficiency, the digital front door patient experience, and physician burnout.

Ambient AI tools like Abridge and DeepScribe, the HIPAA-compliant equivalents of what we use for recording calls, have a hugely positive impact on physician satisfaction. That’s before we even get to the impact AI is having in specialties like radiology.

So we’re living in a bifurcated market: if you’re selling AI, the question is how fast you can move. For the rest of the market, things may be moving even slower than before. The side effect has been significant leadership turnover in healthcare technology marketing. There wasn’t a week last year when I didn’t hear about someone in my network losing their job. It’s still going on.

What Healthcare Marketers Are Getting Wrong and What to Do Instead

Aaron Burnett: What do you see that healthcare marketers aren’t seeing? What are they not paying attention to that would be most valuable?

Adam Turinas: Three or four years ago, the answer was clear: get your head around ABM, because traditional lead gen doesn’t work for these sales cycles. A year ago, I would have said stop using AI tactically and start thinking about it strategically and systemically. Both of those things most marketers are now doing.

The recurring challenge, and this hasn’t changed in the six years I’ve been running this community, is demonstrating the value of marketing to leadership. It’s the single biggest challenge. There are marketers who’ve cracked the code on it, and the level of interest is extraordinary. I did a podcast episode recently called “Connecting Marketing to Revenue.” It’s been our most listened-to episode, and people keep coming back to it.

Why the Inbound Model Is Broken and What’s Replacing It

Adam Turinas: The competitive opportunity right now is recognizing that the traditional inbound model is broken. For the first four or five years of Health Launchpad, 50% of business came from referrals and 50% from SEO and LinkedIn. Over the last 18 months, we saw inbound start declining as buyers shifted to LLMs for research. So we went all in on optimizing our content and website for LLMs.

We bifurcated our content strategy: thought leadership built around the podcast, and written content designed to be read by humans but structured so LLMs will cite it. We’re seeing articles get cited within two weeks. Inbound now accounts for about 70% of our demand, increasingly driven by the podcast and LLM citations.

If you’re a marketer trying to gain competitive advantage in the next two years, go all in on optimizing for LLMs. You can see that pay off quickly. A podcast is also worth the investment but LLM optimization is where I’d start.

The Takeaway for Healthcare B2B Marketers

Aaron Burnett: The thing Adam said that I keep coming back to is this: in healthcare, the buyer is always in control of the timeline. Your job isn’t to speed that up — it’s to be the most credible, most present option when they’re finally ready to move. That takes content and nurture sequences that hold up over 13 months or longer, and a measurement framework that gives leadership something real to look at long before the deal closes.

You’ll find Adam Turinas on LinkedIn and at healthlaunchpad.com. I’m Aaron Burnett. See you next time on The Digital Clinic.

Sponsored by Wheelhouse DMG