The B2B healthcare space can be pretty complex, but it’s also full of exciting opportunities for innovation and cutting-edge tech advancements.
In 2024 alone, health and biotech companies secured $5.6 billion in Series A funding from venture capitalists.
If you’re thinking about getting into the B2B healthcare world as a product marketing manager, there are some key skills that can help you not just get your foot in the door but succeed and grow in the role – and that’s what we’re going to explore in this article.
Segmentation and personas in B2B health tech
Before diving into the skills needed to succeed as a B2B health tech product marketer, it’s essential to understand the key audiences and personas that shape this industry. Each group has unique needs, challenges, and decision-making processes that influence how you position your product.
Here are the primary segments you’ll encounter:
- Hospitals and health systems: Large, complex organizations often include multiple facilities and departments. They prioritize scalability, compliance, and integration with existing electronic health record (EHR) systems.
- Specialty physician groups: These are smaller, focused practices, such as orthopedic clinics, dental practices, and dermatology offices. These groups often value ease of use, cost-effectiveness, and specialty-specific features.
- Diagnostic laboratories: Labs that perform testing for a wide range of diagnostic procedures. They look for solutions that improve turnaround time, accuracy, and interoperability with providers and EHR systems.
- Payers (insurance companies): These are the organizations that reimburse providers for medical services. They focus on cost containment, outcomes-based care, and data transparency.
The personas in B2B health tech
It’s super important to know who you’re actually talking to. In B2B health tech, there are a few key groups you’ll run into, and each one plays a different role in how your product is used, evaluated, and bought.
Patients: The end users
Even though they’re not the ones buying the product, patients are often the ones using it. Whether it’s a telehealth app, a patient portal, or a diagnostic tool, they’re interacting with the tech directly. A smooth, helpful experience for them is a big win. This makes patient satisfaction higher and helps the provider prioritize their health over dealing with troubleshooting tech issues.
Administrative staff: The everyday users
These are the folks on the ground – patient registration staff, admin teams, billing and coding specialists – who use your product to make their jobs easier and improve patient care. They’re submitting claims, managing schedules, and keeping things running. If your product helps them do that better, they’ll be your biggest advocates.
Executives and leaders: The buyers
This group includes the CFO, CIO, CTO, and other top-level decision-makers. They’re the ones signing off on the purchase, so they care about things like ROI, security, compliance, and how your product fits into the bigger picture. They’re not using the product day-to-day, but they’re making the call on whether it gets bought.
Essential skills for B2B health tech PMMs
To stand out in the B2B health tech industry, you need a strong mix of strategic, technical, and industry-specific skills. Let’s explore how you can build those skills.
Research like a pro
You need a solid understanding of the market landscape; that means it’s essential to do your homework on the key players, their workflows, and the challenges they face.
Staying up-to-date on the latest trends, innovations, and shifts in care delivery models will keep you ahead of the curve. Definitive Health, AIS Health, and KFF Health News are great resources to help you stay informed.
User vs. buyer insight
Another key part of research is recognizing the difference between the end users and the buyers. For example, clinicians or staff might be the ones using the product, while C-suite executives or other decision-makers are the ones making the purchase decisions.
By building detailed personas for each group and focusing on their unique goals, pain points, and decision-making processes, you can craft more targeted and effective messaging for each audience.
Regulatory knowledge
Regulatory knowledge is essential for product marketers in health tech. You need to be familiar with key regulations like HIPAA, which protects patient data, and the Affordable Care Act, which affects access to care and reimbursement. It’s important to ensure that your messaging and product positioning align with these regulations to stay compliant and effectively communicate the value of your product.
Competitive and technical awareness
Regularly conducting competitive analysis is crucial to staying ahead in the health tech market. It’s important to track market leaders and newcomers while understanding how your product integrates with electronic health record (EHR) systems and supports interoperability.
Having a solid grasp of the technical side of the industry will help you differentiate your product and make sure it meets the needs of the healthcare space.
Industry engagement
Staying active in the healthcare community is another important step to success as a product marketer.
I recommend attending healthcare conferences and following sources like HIMSS, Healthcare Brew, Becker’s Healthcare, Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA), and Fierce Healthcare to stay on top of thought leadership and emerging industry trends. Engaging with these sources will ensure you stay connected and informed about what’s happening in health tech.
How AI is transforming market research at Experian Health
At Experian Health, I use generative AI tools like ChatGPT for market research. What used to take days or even weeks can now be accomplished in hours, without sacrificing quality. It’s transformed the way I gather insights, spot trends, and make informed decisions.
Take the health tech landscape, for example – an industry evolving at lightning speed. New entrants pop up constantly, from niche players offering patient payment software to broader platforms delivering digital front door experiences.
Using AI, I can rapidly scan the field, map out the competitive landscape, and pinpoint key differentiators between vendors. It’s like having a real-time radar for who’s doing what – and why it matters.
AI also plays a big role in how I gather insights from our own teams. Whether we’re crafting a quick survey for sellers to gather competitive intelligence or polling them for buyer feedback, ChatGPT helps us build engaging, effective surveys in minutes. Even better, it shortens the time it takes to analyze results and glean insights.
Another powerful use case? Synthesizing massive amounts of information. From long Gong call transcripts to detailed analyst white papers or complex internal data sets, ChatGPT helps me organize, extract, and connect the dots. It surfaces the most relevant insights for our products and strategy, identifies patterns, and drastically speeds up analysis that would otherwise take days of manual work.
In short, AI doesn’t just help me do more, it helps me do better. It’s become an integral part of how we stay competitive, curious, and customer-focused.
Speak to the whole buying group – not just one stakeholder
In B2B health tech, the buying process isn’t driven by just one person. There are multiple stakeholders involved – each with different roles, goals, and motivations. If your messaging only targets one user or buyer, you’re missing the bigger picture.
To truly connect, your positioning needs to resonate across the entire buying group. That means understanding what matters to each persona and identifying your internal champion – the person most likely to advocate for your solution. Once you know who that is, tailor your messaging to align with their priorities and decision criteria.
How to get there:
- Shadow your customers to observe their workflows and uncover real pain points and jobs-to-be-done.
- Talk to your sales team. Ask them what kinds of messaging and materials resonate, and what objections they hear from different personas.
- Join Gong or call recordings to spot patterns – what questions are being asked? What criteria are buyers using to evaluate your product? How are they reacting to your current positioning?
Also, take note of:
- Common titles involved in the buying process
- What types of content resonate most (e.g., ROI calculators, case studies, security one-pagers)
- Objections that come up repeatedly
The more you understand the full buying committee, the better you can craft messaging that moves deals forward.
Tailoring messaging for different buyer mindsets at Experian Health
At Experian Health, we connect with every voice in the buying group. We rely on the Challenger Sales methodology to gain a deep understanding of our audience. Whether we’re engaging with blockers, talkers, or mobilizers, we tailor our approach to meet each stakeholder where they are.
To make this strategy actionable, we’ve built detailed buyer personas that highlight each individual’s jobs to be done. But we didn’t stop there. For each persona, we’ve developed Challenger reframes and commercial insight-driven messaging that aligns with their mindset – whether they’re skeptical, curious, or championing change.
When it comes time for demos, our teams are fully equipped. They know what questions to expect, what concerns might arise, and how to respond with answers rooted in each buyer’s unique role and priorities.
Navigating the long sales cycle in B2B health tech
In the world of B2B health tech, the sales cycle isn’t just long – it’s layered, complex, and often unpredictable. Deals can take months (or even longer) to close, and that’s largely due to a few key factors:
- Multiple stakeholders are involved in the decision-making process
- Competing internal priorities within healthcare organizations
- Thorough and often slow evaluation processes, especially when compliance, security, and integration are on the line
As a product marketer, your role doesn’t end after launch. You need to partner closely with your sales team to support every stage of the buyer’s journey. That means creating tailored content and sales enablement tools that speak to different personas, address objections, and reinforce your product’s value.
And yes – patience is essential. Deals may stall, go dark, or fall off the radar entirely. But that doesn’t mean they’re lost. Re-engagement is part of the game. When a deal goes quiet, revisit it with fresh insights, updated content, or a new angle that speaks to the buyer’s evolving needs.
Ways to move a deal forward
Here are a few strategies to help accelerate momentum:
- Share case studies or ROI calculators that speak directly to the buyer’s pain points
- Offer personalized demos or executive briefings to re-engage stakeholders
- Provide security and compliance one-pagers to ease IT and legal concerns
- Equip sales with objection-handling guides and persona-specific messaging
- Use Gong or CRM insights to identify where deals are stalling and why
How Experian Health’s product marketing team drives sales success
At Experian Health, our product marketing team is deeply embedded in the sales process, regularly joining sales calls to track deal momentum, identify sticking points, and gather firsthand insight into where deals may be stalling.
We also make listening to Gong recordings a regular part of our routine, listening for patterns in client objections, uncovering competitive alternatives, and identifying concerns around price, quality, or implementation. These insights are gold, helping us fine-tune our messaging and stay a step ahead.
We’ve built strong go-to-market feedback loops across the business. Whether it’s a seller on a tough call, a solution engineer flagging a feature gap, or a customer success manager hearing whispers about a competitor – we take it all in. These real-world signals help us understand where our deals are vulnerable and how we can course-correct.
And personally? As a product marketer, I’m always on the lookout. I scout competitor demos, analyze their presentations, dig through their websites, and partner with sellers to learn what they’re seeing out in the field. What’s working for them? How are they positioning themselves? Where might we be falling short?
Here’s a checklist of sales enablement materials you can use for the different stages of the marketing funnel:
- Awareness: Educational content like healthcare trend blogs and industry infographics
- Consideration: Clinical case studies and webinars that highlight product benefits
- Decision: ROI calculators and workflow integration demos to support buying decisions
- Post-sale: Onboarding guides for hospital staff and success stories to reinforce value
Metrics that matter in B2B health tech product marketing
In B2B health tech, success isn’t just about launching a great product – it’s about tracking the right metrics at every stage of the buyer’s journey. These metrics help you understand what’s working, where prospects are dropping off, and how to optimize your strategy for better engagement and conversion.
Let’s break it down by stage.
Awareness stage
At this stage, your goal is to attract attention and educate your audience. You’re building brand recognition and trust.
Key metrics:
- Whitepaper downloads: A sign that your content is resonating with industry professionals.
- Website traffic: Especially to product pages, blog posts, and gated content.
- Lead generation: Number of new contacts captured through forms, events, or content offers.
Consideration stage
Now your prospects are evaluating solutions. They’re comparing vendors, asking questions, and looking for proof.
Key metrics:
- Webinar sign-ups and attendance: Indicates interest in learning more.
- Demo requests: A strong signal of intent.
- Reference calls: When prospects want to speak with current customers.
- RFP requests: A clear sign that you’re in the running.
Decision stage
This is where deals are won or lost. Your job is to support sales and remove friction.
Key metrics:
- Sales cycle length: How long it takes to close a deal.
- Conversion rate from demo to close: Measures how well your product and messaging are landing.
- Objection handling success: How often your materials help overcome buyer concerns.
- Influence of marketing on closed-won deals: Attribution matters!
Collaboration is key
Cross-functional collaboration is key to success as a product marketing manager – no matter the industry. To make it work, create a tiger team with stakeholders from product management, development, sales, and customer success. Meet consistently to share updates and track progress. Stay aligned on business goals and listen actively to each other. That’s how you build momentum and move forward together.
That’s a wrap!
If you’re considering a PMM career in the health tech space, now’s the time to dive in. The industry is challenging, but also packed with opportunities for innovation and growth. Stay sharp, keep learning, and stay connected with the evolving needs of your customers.
With these insights in hand, you’re ready to take the next step in your career.
