7 Ways Life Sciences and Healthtech Companies Sabotage Their Own Marketing

If you’re marketing into healthcare or life sciences, the standard B2B playbook doesn’t really apply. At least not in the typical sense. That’s because your buyer is buying more than just software. They’re also buying risk reduction and a faster route to the outcomes their particular department or function is tasked with.

Take the clinical development group in pharma for example. Nobody in ClinOps is as excited about that new widget or a cleaner UI as you are. What they care about is faster site activation, surviving an FDA inspection instead of merely enduring it, or getting a candidate drug to a Phase 1 study. But what Regulatory cares about is different. What Medical Affairs cares about is different still. And don’t even get me started on IT. Every one of them wants to see proof, not just a rando claim on a rando slide.

Then there’s the dreaded pharma sales cycle itself, which drags on for months or years while you convince Legal, Procurement, Regulatory, and half a dozen other veto-holders that you’re worth the risk. That’s the real job of marketing in a GxP industry: reducing perceived risk for a committee of skeptics whose core job is to poke holes in your offering.

I spent a week last month writing about the specific ways many marketing teams get this wrong. Then I thought maybe I’d put the whole thing in one place, so here it is, compiled and cleaned up. Seven mistakes I see constantly in healthcare and life sciences marketing, and what to do instead.

Enjoy.

Mistake #1. Leading with features instead of the business problem

“Your customers don’t buy features, they buy solved problems.” I first wrote this sentence in Pragmatic Marketing Magazine (‘Value Propositions That Sell’, Winter 2015) almost a dozen years ago now and have been harping about it ever since.

That’s because the typical tech company product launch sequence is still backwards: the product manager tosses a feature deck over to marketing at the last minute. The ICP is defined, sort of. The positioning is defined, kind of but not really. The messaging gets written by AI. And as a result, what you get sounds exactly like as though it was written by an AI bot. As my co-founder Caitlin La Honta says, “You can’t Claude your way to good messaging.” Mostly what marketing has to work with is a list of features, functions and a generic market message, so that’s what the campaign becomes: platform architecture up front, API integrations highlighted, but no thinking about what customers care about. And that’s the gist of the problem: the process is wildly out of whack with how customers act.

Meanwhile, the VP of Clinical Operations you’re trying to reach is worrying about site activation lag, enrollment timelines slipping, whether the protocol is built on correct assumptions, and the fact that the study team is already two months behind plan. What you’re saying and what they’re actually worried about are two different things. Like I said, customers don’t buy features. They buy solved problems. I’ve been saying this for years and it hasn’t stopped being true.

Before anything gets built, product marketing should be answering one question: what is this person’s biggest problem, and what words do they personally use to describe it? Nobody in ClinOps has ever said the phrase “reduces activation friction.” You know what works better? Something like: “Your last three studies activated sites an average of six weeks slower than the protocol assumed, and that’s adding two months to your time to database lock.” That’s language a buyer recognizes. Their next move is to challenge you to prove it. And now you’re actually having the exact conversation you want to be having.

Mistake #2. Treating the entire buying committee like one audience

We all know this one - the one where everyone in the account gets the same deck and the same message. The trouble is that the buying committee isn’t one audience with one common goal. Usually it’s several departments with different, sometimes even competing, motivations. ClinOps wants to hear about site startup and enrollment. IT wants to hear about audit trails and 21 CFR Part 11. Then there’s Regulatory Affairs, Procurement, Legal, Medical Affairs, and Quality, each running their own priorities and scorecards. I used to work at a company where everyone called Legal the “sales mitigation team” because they would consistently block us on so many levels. Yikes! Crazy, right?

You need a distinct story for each function, ready to go before your sales team hits up that account. That might mean a validation package summary for IT and Quality written in the language of audit trails and electronic signatures, a data integrity and query resolution story for Biostatistics, and a submission and inspection-readiness story for Regulatory. Every stakeholder needs their own justification to bring back to their own boss. Don’t forget, in pharma procurement, risk reduction is often the gate-keeping purchase criterion. Get this right and you’re not just making your sales team happy, you’re giving them the ammunition to move the deal forward without you becoming the rate-limiting step.

Mistake #3. Writing your messaging before you’ve interviewed a single real buyer

Classic example: your positioning gets built around what someone assumes the head of Regulatory Affairs cares about, based on their strong opinion or some RFP mention at some point. Nobody actually sat down with the customer and asked what keeps them up the night before an FDA submission. Then everyone’s confused why the messaging sounds generic. The honest answer is that every competitor built theirs the exact same way.

The fix is kinda boring, but it works: talk to the people who actually do the job! This would include the ones running a competitor’s system and the ones who evaluated you and bought elsewhere, or didn’t buy at all. Let a Director of Regulatory Affairs describe, in their own words, what a bad outcome actually costs their team. What comes out of those conversations may not be perfectly polished but to hell with that. It performs better anyway because it’s built from what a real customer said, in the tone they actually use (not your usual tech-speak run through a positioning template on ChatGPT.)

Mistake #4. Treating “AI-powered” as a positioning strategy

Walk any recent industry conference floor, BioIT World, DIA, SCOPE, and count the booth banners that say “AI-powered” or “agentic cloud for XYZ”. That head of Biometrics or Discovery has sat through so many of these pitches that the phrase has stopped meaning anything. The company leads with model architecture and training data and a promise to revolutionize the department, and the buyer has heard the identical claim from the last three vendors, none of whom could actually prove it. This isn’t some random bullshit statement I’m making here - I’ve actually heard a biotech COO say that to a sales rep once. Yikes!

What works better? Lead with the outcome, in the numbers the study team already tracks, backed by a specific example from a comparable customer. “At [company], this cut protocol deviation detection from weeks to days” is a sentence your buyer understands instantly, no translation required. That’s what I call evidence-based marketing. Remember that nobody is buying AI for the sake of AI. What they’re buying is a faster, better or more reliable way to hit their goals.

Mistake #5. Leaving compliance out of the pitch until someone asks

If 21 CFR Part 11 compliance, audit trail completeness, or GxP validation doesn’t come up until IT or Quality asks directly, three meetings in, you’ve already lost ground. By that point the buyer isn’t just wondering about compliance, they’re wondering what else you didn’t mention up front. To be clear, I’m not arguing that compliance should be your value proposition. Hell no, it should almost never be. In a regulated industry like biopharma, compliance is table stakes, not a differentiator. But silence on the topic isn’t exactly your best chess move either.

Your compliance story needs to be clear and confident from the start, even if it’s a small, early part of the pitch rather than the headline. Show how the platform supports Part 11, what the validation package includes, and how the audit trail holds up under an FDA or EMA inspection. Raising it early signals that you belong at the table and that you’re not going to waste anyone’s time working up to an inevitable objection.

Mistake #6. Publishing thought leadership with no actual point of view

This one might be my favorite to complain about. Half of “thought leadership” in this space is a rehash of what everyone’s been saying for the past decade: decentralized trials, digital transformation, blah blah blah. It’s 2026 and still being presented as though it’s a novel idea that no one has heard of yet. The other half is a cheap product pitch that’s not even well disguised. Want actual thought leadership? Look at what Ram Yalamanchili over at Tilda Research is doing, or George Magrath at Opus Genetics. Those guys are at the cutting edge of thinking in their respective fields, and they’re not afraid to push the envelope with their POVs. That’s thought leadership.

Come in with an actual opinion on something that matters, and don’t be afraid if people push back. You want some disagreement. If everyone nods along, it isn’t thought leadership. And that head of development is never going to forward it to their own boss, let alone read past the first paragraph. Take a real position and the right people will pay attention, which is the entire point of publishing anything in the first place.

Mistake #7. Using the same regulatory messaging everywhere in the world

Talking to an APAC prospect about 21 CFR Part 11 when their studies are running in China and Europe isn’t a simple miss. You’ve undercut your sales team before they even start. “Right message, right audience” also means matching the regulatory reality of the region you’re actually talking to.

A European buyer wants to know how you handle EMA’s GCP expectations, how your data practices align with GDPR, and how submissions work across multiple regulators at once. If you want a European regulatory lead to trust you, the answers need to be built for them from the start, not adapted from a US-first deck at the last minute.

The common thread

Every one of these traces back to the same root cause: marketing that starts from a product-centric point of view instead of the buyer’s actual situation. Life sciences and healthcare buyers are more skeptical than most. Not just because they are operate in an evidence-based medical and scientific world, but because they’ve been burned by claims before. And their own jobs are on the line if they pick wrong. So forget the bold claims. Focus on understanding what each stakeholder told you matters to them (in their own words, not your new sales guy’s words) and come with evidence to back up your arguments.

I’m Abdul, co-founder of Sirona Marketing, a commercialization partner for healthtech and life sciences companies. If you need help with your GTM and marketing, we can help. If we can’t, we know people who can.