Need go-to-market that sales actually uses? Book a 20-minute Fractional CMO consultation with Bill to align marketing, VOC, and field execution—so reps stop “pushing” and start solving.

- Visit https://meshagency.com/fcmo-fractional-cmo-fractional-marketing/ to learn more.

Pete Tortorelli (GM/Managing Director, Revvity) breaks down how to build life science sales teams that scientists actually trust. We cover application-specific selling, channel orchestration, hiring for integrity and curiosity, and why the best reps sometimes refer business to competitors.

Connect with Pete: linkedin.com/in/ptortorelli

00:00 Why life science sales fails without market awareness
00:10 Building sales teams scientists actually trust
01:55 From accidental sales teams to intentional design
05:07 How to sell to scientists without “selling”
07:43 Do life science sales reps need a science background
09:58 Tracking trends that reshape lab workflows
11:41 Selling by solving real lab pain points
17:21 Why integrity beats short-term revenue
27:39 When sales drives product innovation

Life science buyers aren’t shopping for hype; they’re validating hypotheses. Pete Tortorelli led Omni through growth and acquisition and now runs the business inside Revvity.

In this episode, he lays out how to build a sales model scientists respect: application-specific proof, honest discovery, and rigorous support from an app's “cavalry.”

We get tactical: how to use interrogative selling to find true constraints (budget, staffing, SOPs), when to cut bait, and why referring a misfit project to a competitor can earn long-term trust. On team-building, Pete favors integrity and curiosity over perfect CVs, then surrounds reps with fast, accurate answers.

Finally, we look forward. Your advantage isn’t a louder pitch; it’s a tighter proof.

3 Secrets to add to Pete’s Sales Model

1. Sales is your fastest learning loop — faster than product, faster than marketing.
In life science, sales isn’t just about closing deals; it’s about learning in real time. If you’re paying attention, sales will tell you things your dashboards never will — before you’ve spent months building the wrong thing.

The founders who win are the ones who treat sales as an intelligence engine, not just a revenue function. They expect their sales motion to surface insight weekly, not quarterly. If your sales conversations aren’t teaching you something new about your market regularly, that’s a systems problem.

2. Trust isn’t built by good intentions — it’s built by systems that hold up under pressure.
Everyone says they value integrity. That’s easy when things are going well. The real test comes when a rep is behind quota, a quarter is tight, or a big logo is dangling just out of reach. Trust doesn’t survive on values alone — it survives on structure.

Founders have to design systems that make honesty the default, even when it’s inconvenient. If you’re relying on “good people” without guardrails, you’re putting your reputation at risk without realizing it.

3. The real constraint in modern labs isn’t budget — it’s cognitive load.
It’s tempting to assume price is the blocker, but more often it’s mental bandwidth. Labs are understaffed, overworked, and drowning in complexity.

The products that win aren’t always the most powerful; they’re the ones that simplify life. Less explaining to a boss or a collaborator. If your product asks someone to think harder, it needs to replace something else entirely — otherwise it just adds friction, no matter how impressive it is on paper.

Follow Life Sci Continuum for real-world commercialization lessons from operators who’ve built, scaled, and learned the hard way.

Visit https://meshagency.com/fcmo-fractional-cmo-fractional-marketing/ to learn more.

#LifeScienceSales #MedTechGTM #CommercialE

Need product-market fit and pipeline fast? Book a 30-min MESH sprint audit with Bill. https://meshagency.com/lets-connect/

In this episode, Founder/CEO Mike Pyne, Medoh Health shares how he turned short-form video + AI into a doctor-specific knowledge platform that saves hours of repetitive patient Q&A. We cover testing in the clinic (not just the cloud), communicating by text vs. QR, when to hire (and not hire) sales, and the founder mindset for speed without sacrificing quality.

Connect with Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-d-pyne-627864136/

00:00 – Why medical information fails patients
04:15 – What patients actually want from medical content
08:30 – Building the “TikTok for medical information”
12:45 – How to earn trust in patient education
17:20 – Using patient feedback to improve healthcare content
21:45 – What keeps patients engaged with medical information
26:10 – Why short-form medical education works
30:35 – Balancing accuracy, speed, and attention in healthcare
35:10 – Scaling a patient-first medical platform
39:20 – Lessons for building patient-centered health products

What happens when you mix short-form video, a pile of patient questions, and a founder obsessed with real-world feedback? Mike Pyne, Founder & CEO of Medoh Health, walks us through his journey from medtech sales and marketing at Smith+Nephew to building a platform that digitizes a doctor’s knowledge and delivers it to patients 24/7.

Mike kept hearing the same thing in clinics: doctors repeat themselves all day and patients still leave with uncertainty. The winning combo: doctor-specific short videos plus AI that answers only from the doctor’s own content and documents.

We dig into building in the clinic, not just in the cloud: direct patient interviews, text-first delivery (ditch the QR friction), and shipping fast while staying safe. Mike shares the hiring calculus (why you shouldn’t add sales until PMF), how to delegate without losing speed, and how the phrase “TikTok for medical info” unlocked stakeholder understanding. If you’re a founder in healthtech or any regulated space, this is a masterclass in iterative learning and pragmatic velocity.

Three Practical Pro Tips

1. Design for the moment your customer stops paying attention
One thing that shows up between the lines of Mike’s story is this uncomfortable truth: momentum stalls because life moves on. Patients forget. Clinicians get pulled into the next room. Founders assume adoption happens just because something is valuable. It doesn’t.

As a founder, your real design challenge is what happens after the conversation ends. The teams that win plan explicitly for that drop. If your product only works when people are focused, it won’t survive contact with reality.

2. Separate “people like it” from “people will actually use it.”
Founders get great at collecting positive feedback. “This is awesome.” “I’d totally use this.” “This would save us so much time.” And then… nothing changes. No behavior shift. No habit formation. No adoption.

They miss the mark because they’re confusing agreement with integration. The hard work lives in understanding how something fits into a real workflow, not an ideal one. Who owns it when the founder isn’t around?

3. Treat distribution as a trust decision, not a tech decision
Mike’s QR-code lesson is a classic founder trap: building something logical instead of something human. People adopt tools because they arrive through channels they already trust. No one actually cares about elegance.

As a founder, it’s worth stepping back and asking: If adoption requires users to learn a new behavior and trust a new channel at the same time, you’ve doubled the risk.

Book a 30-min MESH sprint audit with Bill. https://meshagency.com/lets-connect/

#DigitalHealth #MedTechMarketing #ProductMarke

Have the engineering plan but need the market plan? Hire a Fractional CMO to de-risk launch and accelerate adoption.

Book a strategy call. https://meshagency.com/fcmo-fractional-cmo-fractional-marketing/

President/CEO Tim Looney (Northeast Biomedical) breaks down the engineering plan founders actually need (DHF, phased reviews, and right-sized documentation) to move faster without tripping FDA/CE. We cover startup blind spots, big-company constraints, and how to “do it right once” so you don’t pay for DHF remediation later.

Tim’s LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlooney/

00:00 Why med device engineering fails
00:16 Who is Tim Looney
03:04 What founders miss in early engineering
06:11 Why the FDA rejects “it’s all in my head”
08:13 Hidden tests and documentation you must plan for
12:24 Move fast the right way
15:53 How phased engineering speeds up approvals
20:23 How to avoid costly founder mistakes
24:44 Why the system blocks unprepared founders
27:11 Case study on fast clearance done correctly

In medtech, “move fast and break things” breaks people. Tim Looney leads Northeast Biomedical, a product development and contract manufacturing firm that lives where speed meets compliance. In this episode, Tim explains the engineering plan most founders skip: phase-gated reviews, checklists that prevent “oops” moments at submission, and documentation that’s lean early but complete enough to avoid costly DHF remediation. We unpack startup blind spots (biocompatibility, shelf-life, packaging, verification), how larger companies get stuck in resource bottlenecks, and why the fastest path to clearance is often meticulous—just not bloated. Tim also shares a class-III European dossier story that moved in weeks because the package was complete, plus practical guidance for early founders on prototypes, notebooks, and IP strategy. If you’re building the next device, this conversation is your map to “right the first time.”

https://meshagency.com/fcmo-fractional-cmo-fractional-marketing/

#MedTech #MedicalDevices #GoToMarket

Not seeing investor-grade pipeline from your science? Bill is the Fractional CMO for complex medtech & life-sci GTM. Book a 20-min diagnostic. https://meshagency.com/fcmo-fractional-cmo-fractional-marketing/

• Connect with Dave Iannetta on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-iannetta/
• Subscribe to Bill Schick’s Newsletter on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7154518390324281344

00:00 The IPO Playbook
02:30 Being Unprepared for IPO
04:30 Data & Market Validation
06:05 FDA Changes in 2025
09:27 Tips for Creating an IPO Deck
13:23 Messaging for IPO

About this episode: Early funding rounds reward vision, but the IPO process rewards verification. David joins me again to walk through the journey from institutional capital to public offering and shows how every assumption that once lived in a slide note must now survive legal discovery. He recalls deals that stalled because total-addressable-market figures lacked primary sources and others that crumbled when an FDA setback forced a last-minute pivot the team could not explain. His core message: a marketer’s real job at this level is to translate complex clinical value into a dollar-based opportunity that bankers can model and retail investors can grasp in two sentences.

Three IPO Musts:
1. Treat market sizing the way a biostatistician treats a primary endpoint. Start with bottom-up data such as procedure volumes from CMS, epidemiology registries, or detailed purchase-order pulls from group-purchasing organizations. Build the model cell by cell so any analyst can trace volume, price, and adoption-rate assumptions back to a public document or a signed customer quote. Keep totals in three buckets—total addressable market, serviceable market, and realistically obtainable share—so you are never accused of using a single inflated figure. A grounded model not only survives diligence but also shapes banker sentiment; if you claim a four-billion-dollar market and the underwriters later pin it at one, you can lose half your valuation before the first road-show slide appears.

2. Create a living archive for every assumption that feeds your financials. Store PDFs of journal articles, invoices that justify cost inputs, raw spreadsheets, and even audio transcripts of expert interviews in a well-indexed data room. Each time a figure changes—perhaps because new coding data arrive or the FDA requests a larger trial—update the archive and note the version in your working deck. Bankers, lawyers, and syndicate analysts will audit each cell in your spreadsheet against its original source; if you have to scramble for proof after the S-1 is filed you will burn weeks, pay extra legal fees, and lose the momentum that makes an IPO window attractive in the first place.

3. Build your narrative as a living document that flexes with every regulatory update or clinical read-out. Investors do not punish a company for hitting a speed bump; they punish it for ignoring the bump or pretending it did not happen. Hold regular “story scrubs” where marketing, clinical, and finance teams rewrite the pitch deck in light of the latest data, resize the market if endpoints shift, and script a clear path forward. Practising this iterative storytelling prevents the deer-in-the-headlights moment when a diligence call surfaces new questions and shows investors that the team can navigate uncertainty as confidently as it develops science.

For more specialized help with growth, check out my firm, Mesh.
https://meshagency.com/

#IPOReady #LifeScienceMarketing #MarketSizing

Ready to launch faster? A fractional CMO can help. Talk to MESH. https://meshagency.com/fcmo-fractional-cmo-fractional-marketing/

Founder Peter Attia built Family Vitals, an iOS app that helps families securely organize, collaborate on, and understand their medical records—without reinventing a risky data stack. We cover validation before code, scoping to ship, leveraging Apple Health, surviving App Store review, and why security is the feature. Great listen for solo founders and health-tech teams.

Peter Attia, founder of Family Vitals: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-attia-90945052/
Family Vitals: https://www.familyvitals.com/

00:00 Why this app began, family pain to product idea
02:14 What Family Vitals does (iOS, collaboration, AI)
04:18 Solo founder build, whiteboard to design to code with AI
07:25 Why iOS first, cost, HIPAA, and not hosting data
10:02 MVP focus and early validation (surveys, willingness to pay)
15:10 Tech surprises and Apple review realities
19:34 Platform leverage, Apple Health vs rebuilding integrations
20:11 What he would do differently, talk to devs, prelaunch list, outsource brand
28:35 Setbacks and plan B during review
30:20 Security and trust, document everything, treat data as core

Peter, a software engineer with a data/analytics background, built Family Vitals, an iOS app that lets families securely store, organize, and collaborate on medical records, notes, images, and lab reports—while pulling data via Apple Health from thousands of clinics and hospitals. He explains why he chose iOS first (security posture, cost, infrastructure leverage), how AI sped up 30–40% of the busywork (but not the architecture), and why scoping ruthlessly was the only way to ship.

We dig into market validation (conversations + survey with the “sandwich generation”), navigating a multi-month App Store review for medical data, and the choice to use the platform’s rails rather than roll his own HIPAA-heavy backend. Peter shares what he’d change—start lead collection months earlier and partner on branding/positioning sooner—and leaves builders with a clear mantra: validate early, document security, and stack your work so launch momentum isn’t an accident.

3 Founder Moves Peter Used to Ship Faster

Tip 1 — Validate before you code (and build a waitlist):
Run 15–25 quick interviews with your target “family manager” persona + a lightweight 4–6 question survey to size the pain and test willingness to pay. Stand up a 1-page teaser + email capture and drive $10–$20/day traffic for two weeks. Green-light if you see ≥50–60% positive intent, ≥20% signup rate, and clear top-5 “must-have” features. Parking-lot the rest for later.

Tip 2 — Ruthless scope via platform leverage:
Pick ONE platform that removes risk. For health data, iOS first can unlock HealthKit/Apple Health connectivity, native security rails, and faster build loops. Design your MVP around the smallest end-to-end journey (e.g., import record → add note → share with family) and trim anything that slows App Review.

Tip 3 — Security-first from Day 0 (document everything):
Assume regulators, platforms, and partners will ask “how do you protect PHI?” Create a living security pack: data-flow diagram, storage decisions (avoid holding what you don’t need), access controls, audit trails, breach response, and privacy policy. Align features to what platforms will approve now (text-only chat before advanced agents, etc.). This prep shortens review cycles and builds user trust you can market—screenshots of your security posture, not just UI.

Need go-to-market firepower? Book MESH. https://meshagency.com/fcmo-fractional-cmo-fractional-marketing/

#HealthTech #FounderJourney #DigitalHealth

Find out how a Fractional CMO can get the right questions answered from the right audience. https://meshagency.com/fcmo-fractional-cmo-fractional-marketing/
- Connect with Bill https://www.linkedin.com/in/founderandcdo/

Jim MacLeod Designer-turned-marketer, brand systems builder, and author of The Visual Marketer—a field guide that translates design fundamentals for marketers and founders.
- Connect with Jim MacLeod: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmacleod/
- Jim’s Book: https://book.jimmacleod.com/

Struggling to make great tech look inevitable? Bring in MESH as your fractional CMO to turn brand, web, and product storytelling into qualified pipeline.

Designer-turned-full-stack marketer Jim MacLeod breaks down why “good enough” visuals stall growth, how he led a 90-day rebrand without losing brand equity, and the small design choices that decide whether your product gets tried…or ignored.

00:00 Intro — brand fragmentation & growth roadblocks
01:12 Meet Jim Macleod — design, marketing & brand systems
04:17 Case study — 90-day rebrand under Apple-style deadlines
08:27 Why keep the purple? Modernizing without losing equity
12:25 Outdated design vs. innovative tech — fixing the disconnect
16:08 Sales decks & storytelling — shaping the brand narrative
18:10 Customer support as brand — protecting what matters in acquisitions
20:32 Bridging design & marketing — lessons from The Visual Marketer
25:00 Three essentials founders can’t DIY: logo, colors, consistency
31:00 Why first impressions matter — design as trust and credibility
35:09 Trade shows & booth design — why presentation drives traffic
39:10 When to invest in brand — moving beyond referrals
42:12 Copy vs. design — which comes first, and why both matter
45:57 Final thoughts, book link & wrap-up

Founders swear “the tech sells itself.” Buyers don’t. In this episode, Jim MacLeod shows how small visual decisions snowball into trust, attention, and adoption. He walks us through a compressed 90-day rebrand, explaining why his team kept the legacy color (because the market already mapped it to credibility) while modernizing everything around it.

Brand Swagger: Jim’s 3 No-BS Design Wins

- 1) Codify your visual system—once.
Stop “designing from scratch” every asset. Build a one-page brand kit that nails your type hierarchy, color roles, spacing grid, icon style, motion rules, and image treatment (e.g., duotone, depth, lighting). Turn those into tokens in your CMS/Slide master so the choices are baked in. Result: faster production, fewer off-brand detours, and a look that’s unmistakably you across web, decks, UI, and booths.

- 2) Color with intent, not taste.
Pick an ownable anchor color (distinct in your category), pair it with two neutrals for clinical credibility, and reserve one accent for calls-to-action and data highlights. Pressure test it in the wild: accessibility contrast, print vs. screen, scrubs/OR lighting, tradeshow LEDs, and dark mode. If it fails anywhere your buyers live, it’s not your color system—it’s a liability.

- 3) Design the first impression you can’t afford to miss.
Prioritize the touchpoints that actually sell: homepage hero, product shell/packaging, sales deck front half, and 10×10 tradeshow booth. Make them story-led (problem → outcome → proof), ruthless on clarity (one idea per screen), and visually scannable at six feet. Then measure like a grown-up: booth dwell time, deck completion rate, hero click-through, and demo requests tied to those assets. If it doesn’t move pipeline, it’s just decoration.

For more specialized help with growth, check out my firm, Mesh.
https://meshagency.com/

#DesignThatSells #MedTechMarketing #FractionalCMO

Find out how a Fractional CMO can get the right questions answered from the right audience. https://meshagency.com/fcmo-fractional-cmo-fractional-marketing/

Connect with Bill https://www.linkedin.com/in/founderandcdo/

Connect with Dave Kern https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-kern-dkny/

Product stalls aren’t engineering problems—they’re listening problems. Dave Kern joins us to unpack practical Voice of Customer (VOC), why brand awareness matters before the sales call, and simple, low-cost ways to validate direction without bias.

00:00 Brand awareness & Why VOC isn’t optional
01:36 Meet David Kern — data over opinions
05:15 VOC 101: quant vs. qual, why it matters
07:25 Case study: “our users aren’t on social”… until the data says they are
12:49 From low awareness to lift: education-first digital done right
15:25 What sales wishes prospects knew before the meeting
18:10 Simplify the science; visuals that help, not distract
22:53 Getting buy-in: start small → scale VOC
26:09 Selling into systems: trust, advocates & avoiding “me-too”
31:08 Quick wins: tap networks + one-question polls
40:39 Segmentation, hidden influencers & avoiding bias
47:31 Wrap-up

Too many teams “build it and they will come.”

They won’t.

Dave Kern breaks down how Voice of Customer turns foggy assumptions into crisp direction—so marketing educates, sales accelerates, and product lands. We talk brand warm-up (why strangers won’t buy), short educational content that stops the scroll, and how to run quick, bias-resistant validation without a six-figure research budget. Dave shares practical patterns: use social polls to test beliefs fast, ask the Five Whys to get past surface answers, and interview the people who didn’t buy to find the real friction. We also cover avoiding KOL-only echo chambers, sizing the true reachable audience, and framing VOC for execs who want outcomes, not research theater.

Stop Guessing, Start Hearing: Dave Kern’s 3 VoC Power Plays
Tip 1 — Pre-commit to the decision your question will drive:
Before you draft a survey or book interviews, list the 3–5 product/marketing decisions you’ll make based on the answers (e.g., “If ≥60% say X, we build Feature A first”). Use a tight, 10-question cap, apply the Five Whys to 2–3 core items, and split audiences (KOLs vs. everyday users). Aim for a fast N=20 “sanity pass” via short calls + one-click social polls; anonymize responses so titles don’t sway outcomes.
Tip 2 — Warm the market while you listen (90-day runway):
Run education-first content (problem → science → implication) in paid/organic social to the exact audience you’re interviewing. Ask sales, “What do you wish they knew before you walk in?” and turn that into 60–120s explainers. Tag everything with UTMs, equip reps with the same assets, and track leading indicators (video completions, return visitors, branded search) so brand lift and VoC learnings compound.
Tip 3 — Design out bias in the room and the sample:
Don’t let KOLs speak for the market. Include “no” and “lost” accounts, set a quota for late-majority users, and add 3–5 disconfirming interviews. In workshops use silent ideation → dot-vote to equalize voices, time-box discussion, and name a single decision-maker with a decision deadline. Document assumptions in a one-pager and “red team” them before you spend.

Burning budget on noise? Audit with an FCMO → keep what works.
https://meshagency.com/fcmo-fractional-cmo-fractional-marketing/

#VoiceOfCustomer #MedtechMarketing #GoToMarket

Partner sprawl stalling progress? A Fractional CMO prioritizes what moves revenue now. https://meshagency.com/fcmo-fractional-cmo-fractional-marketing/

Connect with Greg Lange
https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-lange-70bab04/

Early-stage medtech moves faster with the right partners. Greg Lange (Symbex) shares how to de-risk early, pick partners you can trust, and keep product + commercialization in lockstep. We cover founder archetypes, when to bring in reg/reimbursement, and the operating cadence that avoids “beautiful dead ends.”

00:00 – Who’s Greg & what Symbex does — design + commercialization under one roof
03:00 – Why partnerships matter — big-co vs startup dynamics; treat partners like partners
08:30 – The Maine case — MVP first, then V2; commercialization before “perfect”
13:30 – Founder archetypes — clinician, engineer, entrepreneur; typical misses and how to cover them
20:00 – When to bring in experts — reg, reimbursement, competitive scan; sprint without blinders
27:30 – Partner-first strategy — recruiting talent & capital by selling the vision early
33:00 – How to choose partners — trust signals, communication, no-surprises rule, say-no credibility
40:00 – Requirements & communication — MV-requirements, cadence, shared dashboards
46:00 – Budget & burn — share constraints, co-scope the work, optimize for speed-to-learning
50:00 – Three practical tips — align on mission, quarter-by-quarter deliverables, treat partners like key hires

Founder Field Manual: Three Moves That Save You Months

1) Start With the Story, Not the Spec.
Before you sprint into building, write the one-page vision that explains why this exists, who it’s for, and how it wins. Share it with three people who would buy, use, or fund it and ask, “What’s missing?” This gives partners a north star, helps you say no to shiny objects, and turns early collaborators into advocates—because they can see where you’re going and how they fit.

2) De-Risk in Days, Not Quarters.
Run a “week-one gauntlet”: a quick regulatory path read, a reimbursement/payor sanity check, and a 10-call voice-of-customer sprint. You’re not seeking perfection—just red-flag hunting. If a pathway, payment, or workflow blocker pops, pivot your scope now (MVP to masterpiece). This keeps burn pointed at validation instead of vanity, and it arms you with credible evidence when you talk to investors.

3) Choose Partners Like Co-Founders.
Don’t outsource and hope—co-build and verify. Use a minimum viable requirements doc (one page is fine) and a no-surprises cadence (weekly 30-min sync + transparent task board). Favor partners who push back with alternatives (“no, and here’s the path”) over order-takers. Share your constraints—including budget—so they can design scope that actually ships. Trust, speed, and clear accountability beat rock-star resumes every time.
Founder energy is real—but so are bottlenecks. Greg Lange, President & CEO at Symbex, breaks down how early-stage teams can use partnerships to de-risk, shorten timelines, and build products the market will actually buy. We cover founder archetypes (clinician, engineer, entrepreneur), when to bring in regulatory/reimbursement, what a “good partner” looks like, and why sharing your budget is a trust signal—not a weakness.

#MedTech #Partnerships #Startup