Your Thought Leadership Already Exists (You're Just Hiding It)
- Michael Colling-Tuck
- Sep 1
- 5 min read
Why brilliant healthcare innovations get buried under boring sales pitches - and what I learned from watching companies get it spectacularly right.
I had coffee with a CEO last month whose company makes a genuinely brilliant diagnostic device. Twenty minutes into his pitch about "advanced algorithmic processing capabilities," I stopped him.
"Hang on," I said. "Why did you build this thing in the first place?"
His entire demeanour changed. For the next hour, he told me about sitting in emergency departments watching clinicians struggle with diagnostic uncertainty, about patients getting unnecessary procedures because existing tests couldn't provide clear answers, about the clinical insight that led his team to approach the problem completely differently.
It was absolutely fascinating. This wasn't marketing speak—this was deep clinical understanding driving elegant problem-solving.
"That," I told him, "is your thought leadership."
He looked confused. "But we haven't written any white papers yet."
The Thing Everyone Gets Wrong About Thought Leadership
Here's what I've learned after two decades working across healthcare manufacturing: Your thought leadership isn't something you need to create. It already exists.
Most healthcare products aren't born in marketing departments, they emerge from brilliant minds who understand genuine clinical problems and develop intelligent solutions. These innovators possess profound insights about why current approaches fail and how outcomes can be improved.
The expertise is already there, sitting in your R&D labs, embedded in your design rationale, living in the minds of the people who actually built your innovations.
The problem is most often that somewhere between the lab and the sales conversation, these insights get buried under layers of feature specifications and competitive comparisons.
I call this organisational amnesia, I've seen it, lived it in corporates, and it's costing companies millions in lost opportunities.
Five Levels of Getting It Right (Or Spectacularly Wrong)
Through my work with healthcare manufacturers globally, I've seen five distinct approaches to deploying inherent expertise. The business results vary dramatically.
1: The Feature & Advantage Trap
You know these companies. Their sales teams sound like walking Wikipedia entries.
"Our titanium coating is 23% more osseointegrated than competitor X."
It's the least sophisticated approach, and frankly, it's boring everyone to death.
2: The Executive Disconnect
These companies create brilliant thought leadership at the C-suite level while their sales teams remain stuck in product mode. I've seen CEOs give genuinely insightful conference presentations about healthcare transformation, then watched their field team leave inspired and then go back to pitching device features the next day. The cognitive dissonance is painful.
3: The Strategic Integration
The smarter companies understand that their original design rationale should drive sales conversations. They train teams to blend strategic insights with product demonstrations.
Take Intuitive Surgical. Their reps don't just demonstrate the da Vinci system; they discuss minimally invasive surgery evolution, surgeon training requirements, and hospital workflow transformation. This is now being appraised even by the current health secretary as a leading technology. They've preserved the strategic thinking that made robotic surgery necessary.
There will, of course, always be the issue that execution varies wildly because some representatives deploy insights brilliantly, while others revert to product demos when pressed. It works, but inconsistently. But that's where playbooks can help to guide people towards.
4: The Digital Evolvement
Forward-thinking companies scale their insights beyond what sales teams can deliver alone. They build comprehensive online education platforms that establish their authority and help customers apply their strategic frameworks.
The website functions as a thought leadership platform, not just a product catalogue. Customers research challenges using the company's insights before ever talking to sales.
Level 5: The Complete Ecosystem
Then there are companies like Exact Sciences that have created entire ecosystems around their core insights.
They built comprehensive colorectal cancer screening education, trained gastroenterologists as screening advocates, created patient materials that physicians use in conversations, and developed direct-to-consumer education about screening barriers.
The result? Patients actively seek providers who offer their approach. Providers want to become "screening centres of excellence." The medical community advocates for accessible screening.
Their original design insights that screening should be accessible and non-invasive, and now drives market behaviour across all stakeholders.
That's not marketing. That's market transformation.
What I Learned From Watching This Evolution
Three things became clear as I worked with companies across these five levels:
First, the insights always exist. Every successful healthcare innovation emerges from a deep understanding of clinical challenges. The expertise is already there; it just gets buried in commercialisation.
Second, deployment is everything. Having insights doesn't matter if your commercial teams can't deploy them effectively. The sophisticated companies systematically preserve and scale their original thinking.
Third, it transforms customer relationships. Instead of competing on features and price, you're competing on expertise and strategic value. Instead of responding to RFPs, you're shaping how customers think about their challenges.
Why Healthcare Professionals Actually Want Your Insights
But here's something else I've learned that explains why thought leadership works so well in healthcare: Healthcare professionals are professionally obligated to seek it out.
Think about it. Every clinician has:
Clinical obligations to know alternative approaches and validate that their current methods are optimal
Research responsibilities to stay current with evolving philosophies and methodologies
Patient ethics require them to consider every viable option for better outcomes
This is why the traditional sales-led approach worked so brilliantly for decades. Healthcare professionals actually wanted to see knowledgeable reps because they were valuable information sources. The rep wasn't an interruption; they were a professional service.
Good healthcare sales reps were essentially curated information delivery systems. They brought relevant clinical insights that fit into busy schedules, offered access to further education, connected clinicians to broader professional conversations, and served as filters for what was worth their limited attention.
The relationship worked because it was mutually beneficial. Clinicians got professional development delivered efficiently. Companies got access to decision-makers who were genuinely interested in hearing about better approaches.
The Digital Transition Crisis
Most companies have moved online but haven't replicated the value equation that made the original model work.
Time-constrained clinicians still have the same professional obligations, but now they're supposed to navigate product-catalogue websites, attend generic webinars that waste their time, and self-curate from noise instead of having intelligent reps filter for relevance.
The professional need hasn't changed; only the delivery mechanism has. Clinicians still need to fulfil their professional obligations. They're still ethically bound to consider better options for their patients.
But they're doing it online, often badly supported by companies who've forgotten why healthcare professionals engaged with them in the first place.
The companies that crack this are those that build online experiences worthy of healthcare professionals' professional obligations.
Market leaders in pharma are already there and med tech is waking up to this.
Why This Creates Sustainable Competitive Advantage
Once customers view you as the strategic authority in your field, competitive features become largely irrelevant.
Think about it. When a customer sees you as the expert who understands their challenges best, they're not comparing your specifications to competitor X. They're asking, "How should we approach this problem?" and assuming your solution is the logical answer.
This creates what I call "default provider status." Instead of being evaluated against alternatives, you become the standard against which alternatives are measured.
More importantly, insight-based relationships are nearly impossible for competitors to replicate quickly.
They can copy your product features in 12-18 months. They can't replicate 20 years of clinical insight and relationship building overnight.
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I spend my time helping healthcare manufacturers deploy their inherent expertise for strategic commercial advantage. After twenty years across five continents, I've learned that the best thought leadership already exists—it's just usually hidden behind boring feature lists.
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