Go-to-Market in the Healthcare Market

It's sometimes difficult to explain what I do. But last weekend a friend asked me a different version of the question: how soon should a business invest in what you offer? My honest answer — as soon as possible — came with an admission that most businesses, especially early-stage startups, put "marketing" at the bottom of the to-do list.

That's not new or surprising. Chief Marketing Officers are famously the last C-suite seat to get filled, even at well-established organizations. But being deprioritized doesn't make the work any less important. And for a startup, it's arguably more important, not less. To explain why, let's talk about Go-to-Market strategy.

What does go-to-market strategy mean?

The language of "go-to-market architecture" entered the business vocabulary in a 1990 Harvard Business Review article by Rowland T. Moriarty and Ursula Moran. Their subject was the growing complexity of selling in a world where media, sales, and distribution channels were rapidly evolving. Their warning still lands. Most companies, they observed, add new channels and methods "without a clear and realistic vision of an ultimate 'go to market' architecture." Those decisions get made "separately and independently — and often swiftly as well." The result: companies "stumbling over their hastily constructed, overlapping" systems.

Spoiler alert: the business and consumer landscape has only gotten more complicated since 1990.

Like all business-speak, GTM can be made as convoluted as the person explaining it wants it to be. But at its core, it's about answering a few clear questions. Who are you selling to? How is your product positioned relative to the other options? How will you reach your audience, and what are you saying to them? And then it's about watching how the market actually responds and refining, continuously, to get better results.

In a mature organization, this is the work of a senior marketing executive. But whether or not you have a CMO, the work still has to be done.

Skip it and you don't avoid the cost. You just pay it in different ways — in wasted spend, mixed signals, tactics with no discernible return on investment, and a product nobody quite understands how to buy. And yet I've watched countless startups spend freely on a website or a slick product demo while never investing in a coherent GTM strategy. They'll fund the things that feel like progress and skip the thinking that would make those things work.

The healthcare sector irony

Here's where healthcare comes in, because this is where the misconception runs deepest. There's a persistent belief, especially in B2B healthcare, that this kind of thinking is for consumer brands. That GTM strategy is something you need if you're selling beer or sneakers, but not if you're selling a clinical platform to a health system. But it's the opposite. The more complex and fragmented your market, the more this discipline matters. And nothing is more complex than the healthcare sector.

Consider what "the market" even means for a healthcare product. The same solution might be sold to health plans, to self-insured employers, to provider organizations, and sometimes to patients directly — each one a distinct buyer with its own motivations, budget cycle, and definition of value. A health plan wants total cost of care. An employer wants healthier, more productive employees. A provider wants clinical workflow that doesn't add burden. A patient wants to feel better. Same product, four completely different value propositions.

The irony is that consumer goods usually come with the bigger marketing budget, because getting the product into people's hands is innately understood as mission-critical. In healthcare B2B, where the buying journey is harder, longer, and involves more people, the GTM investment is often treated as optional. Ironically, the sector that needs the discipline most tends to fund it least.

I honestly don't care if you call it marketing. Call it whatever you like. But if you want your product to succeed in a market, the work has to be done, even for a pre-revenue startup. Maybe especially then. I can assure you it's work that investors care about. And in healthcare, it's work that separates the companies that grow from the ones that just get built.