My mother always told me proper planning prevents poor performance. It’s a cliché because it’s true, and nowhere is it truer than in a medical device launch. There are a few reasons a go-to-market playbook ends up unthought-through or poorly executed, but the most common one I see is that the engineering and manufacturing process delivers something that needs to be actioned quickly, and marketing gets bolted on at the end. It’s really worth taking a moment to plan out your go-to-market and decide what good actually looks like.
Before any of that, I want to ask a more fundamental question. Across my career, working with people launching products in MedTech and plenty of other industries, I’ve seen the same mistake over and over. People go looking for a solution first, instead of a problem.
Start with the problem, not the product
This got rammed home during my MBA. You have to start with the customer’s problem and solve that first, and you need to find that problem in the real world, not assume it. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to assume your new medical device started from a position of genuinely talking to customers, understanding them, and solving a real problem.
If it didn’t, no go-to-market playbook is going to save it.
The classic cautionary tale here is the hovercraft. Fascinating piece of technology. Genuinely fun. And a textbook example of a solution looking for a problem to solve. Not many hovercrafts get sold worldwide. I’d guess whoever invented it assumed it would go ballistic. It hasn’t. It’s a bit of a novelty.
This matters because the first principle of marketing is understanding your customer’s problem deeply before you go anywhere near the market. That gives you a genuine head start. I’d argue that most of the ideas that have crossed my desk and failed didn’t fail because of the marketing. They failed because the product or service didn’t properly solve a problem in the first place.
Where you can, an excellent way to go to market is by building some form of minimum viable product and testing whether people are actually prepared to buy it. If they’ll buy the minimum viable version, you’ll get a lot more people buying the enhanced, maximised version once it’s ready. I know this isn’t always possible with a MedTech device, given regulatory constraints, but the principle underneath it still holds: validate before you scale.
Why MedTech launches are structurally different
MedTech doesn’t play by the same rules as most product launches. Sales cycles are long. There are regulatory hurdles to clear before you’re even allowed to speak.
And once you’re through those, you’re dealing with a buying committee that can include clinicians, procurement people and end customers, all needing a different case made to them before launch. A generic go-to-market approach doesn’t account for any of that.
So let’s assume you’ve cleared the regulatory approval, and you’ve got clinical evidence and peer validation in hand. From there, you need clarity on three things: which audience segment you’re targeting first, what channels you’ll use to reach them, and what success in the first 90 days actually looks like.
Green shoots, not overnight success
Your product probably isn’t going to take off immediately. We obviously hope it does, but what you’re really looking for in the first 90 days is some form of encouragement, green shoots that speak to the veracity of your product. As you build on those, you’re able to generate more demand.
What are the green shoots you’re looking for? What validation do you actually need? What level of investment does that require? Are you doing a big hard launch, a soft launch, or a soft launch that builds into a hard one? Once you’ve got the validation you need, do you need to win over clinical champions first, who then go on to convince the procurement group?
The laundry list: what a proper playbook covers
Here’s what actually needs to be in place.
Positioning and messaging by audience. Clinician, procurement, customer. Three audiences, three different positionings, three different messages, and potentially different channels to deliver them through.
Content assets for each audience, at each stage of the sales cycle. Clinical evidence pieces for clinicians. Return on investment material for procurement. Case studies that can flex across both.
Channel strategy. Offline and online, above the line and below the line. Once you genuinely know who your audience is, you know where they spend their attention, and they become a lot easier to approach.
Sales enablement for your champion. If you’ve got a clinical champion inside the account, how are you arming them with what they need to walk into a buying committee meeting and hand over the information that makes the decision easy? This is often the difference between a device that sells itself internally and one that stalls at the last hurdle.
What good looks like in the first 90 days
Ground this in something concrete. Figure out the metrics that actually matter this early. Is it engagement? Pipeline signals? Is revenue even realistic in 90 days, or should you be measuring something earlier in the funnel? Getting this right gives you the ability to pivot fast if you’re not hitting your markers.
If you’ve genuinely got a product that solves a problem, priced appropriately, and you put it in front of the right people at the right time with the right message, backed by proper customer service, sales support, and the physical evidence people need to buy with confidence, you’re set up for a successful launch.
Miss one of those components and the whole thing gets harder than it needs to be. Take the time. Be rigorous. Get help if you need it.
