The Role of Marketing in Commercial Readiness

In most device companies, marketing arrives late to the launch. The product is built, the regulatory path is mapped, the sales team is being hired, and then someone says, “We need messaging.” Instead of shaping the launch strategy, marketing is left to create demand for a product that has already been defined. That order is backward, and it is a major reason strong devices struggle to gain traction once they hit the market.

I spent more than two decades watching this play out at Roche and I see the same thing now across growth-stage MedTech: the product works, early pilots look good, and deals reach late stages, and then sit there. So, the team does what teams often do: more outreach, more content, a sharper pitch. But activity does not fix a decision that nobody made in the first place.

Here is the part worth considering: In commercial readiness, marketing’s most valuable job is not promotion—it is validation. Long before there is a campaign, marketing should be chasing down the questions that decide whether the device sells. Who owns the budget? What are they  trying to fix this quarter, not on a slide but on their real to-do list? What has to get bumped to make room for this? What proof does each person in the room need before they sign off?

The work that gets cut first when money gets tight are validation, market research, and real-world evidence. It feels expensive and slow, so teams put it off and figure they will learn once they are selling; They almost never do. And this is exactly how big companies win without being first to market. They let a smaller player spend time and cash educating the market, watch what converts, and fast follow with the evidence already in hand. They are not more clever, but better funded on the unglamorous stuff, like buyer research and economic proof, and they take the category from the smaller company that opened it.

Devices make this harder than software because you are almost never selling to a single person. The clinician who loves the device does not control the budget and is not on the hook if it disappoints.

Procurement worries about risk, operations worries about workflow, and finance worries about the P&L. What convinces one person can alarm another. Marketing has to make the value translate across all of them. When it doesn’t, the story falls apart and a buyer reads that as risk.

Focus on validation early and the whole launch feels different. Reps are not starting every conversation from scratch. Pricing holds up under pressure because it is tied to something the buyer already tracks. Pilots get built to move through approval, not just to prove the product works in a friendly demo.

The analysis was never the hard part. It is holding the line on the budget for evidence when investors are pushing for momentum and the product team just wants a date on the calendar. Scaling a commercial system that is out of alignment doesn’t make you faster; it only helps you miss faster and for a lot more money.

Get the validation right and the campaign becomes much easier to build. Start there before the launch and treat evidence as the first commercial decision you make—not the last. That is how you turn a launch into a market move.