Marketing Is Not a Support Function

Why treating marketing as sales support is costing you deals.

The phrase that keeps showing up

"Marketing's a support function. Sales is what drives revenue."

I hear this in board meetings more than I should. Usually from someone who built their career when the commercial model worked differently. When reps could reach 80% of their target physicians. When persistence and relationship-building were enough.

That model is gone. And the language we use about marketing hasn't caught up.

When you call marketing a "support function," you're making a decision about where it sits in the organisation. Support functions get leftover budget. Support functions get consulted after strategy is set. Support functions don't have a seat when the real decisions get made.

And in healthcare, in 2026, that's a problem.

What changed

The numbers tell the story.

In 2008, pharmaceutical and medical device reps could access roughly 80% of the healthcare professionals they wanted to reach. The model was simple: hire good people, train them well, give them a territory, and let them build relationships.

Today, that access figure is somewhere between 24% and 44%, depending on whose research you trust and which specialties you're measuring.

That's not a decline. That's a collapse.

The reasons are familiar: time pressure on clinicians, institutional gatekeeping, remote work patterns, information overload. HCPs aren't refusing to engage. They're triaging ruthlessly. They have twelve minutes a day, four days a week, for supplier interactions. Everything else gets filtered.

And here's what that means for commercial teams: the traditional sales model has hit a ceiling.

You can hire more reps. You can train them better. You can optimise their routes and give them better CRM tools. You can measure activity more precisely.

None of it fixes the fundamental problem: your targets aren't available for the conversations your model depends on.

The demand problem disguised as a sales problem

Most healthcare companies respond to this pressure by investing in sales.

More headcount. More training. Better tools. Tighter management. Activity metrics that ensure reps are "doing the work."

The activity metrics improve. The results don't.

Because the problem isn't effort. The problem is demand.

The surgeon you can't get in front of? They're still making decisions. They're still adopting new products, changing protocols, recommending solutions to colleagues. They're just doing it without you in the room.

They're searching. They're reading. They're asking peers. They're attending conferences (selectively). They're watching videos. They're forming opinions about who understands their problems and who doesn't.

If you're not showing up in those moments, you're invisible. And no amount of sales training fixes invisible.

What marketing actually does

When marketing is treated as a support function, it gets given a specific brief: make materials that help sales.

Brochures.

Slide decks.

Exhibition stands.

Product sheets.

The occasional LinkedIn post.

This is marketing as internal print shop. It's reactive, tactical, and disconnected from revenue.

When marketing is treated as demand generation, the brief changes entirely.

The question isn't "what do sales need?" It's "how do we create the conditions where sales conversations can happen?"

That means:

Reaching people before they're ready to talk.

The HCP who won't take a sales call will read an article. They'll watch a video. They'll notice who seems to understand their world and who's just pushing product.

Building recognition that compounds.

When a prospect finally does take a meeting, they should already know who you are. They should have seen your thinking. They should arrive pre-sold on something, even if it's just "these people seem to get it."

Creating pull, not just push.

The best commercial outcomes I've seen happen when prospects reach out, not when reps finally break through. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because marketing created demand.

Equipping sales with more than materials.

Insights about what's landing. Intelligence about what prospects care about. Warm introductions from engaged audiences. Context that makes the first conversation easier.

None of this is "support." It's the primary mechanism by which modern healthcare companies create revenue.

The organisational problem

Here's the uncomfortable bit.

In most healthcare companies, marketing doesn't have the authority, budget, or mandate to do demand generation properly.

Marketing reports to sales, or sits parallel with inadequate budget, or gets brought in after commercial strategy is already set. Marketing leaders aren't in the room when target customer decisions are made. Marketing success is measured in outputs (campaigns launched, materials produced) rather than outcomes (pipeline influenced, deals accelerated).

This isn't a criticism of marketing teams. It's a structural problem.

When you treat marketing as support, you get support-level investment and support-level results. Then you wonder why the sales team can't hit their numbers.

The companies I've seen break through this have done something specific: they've elevated marketing to a strategic function with real accountability for demand.

Not leads. Demand.

That means budget that reflects the actual job. That means a seat in commercial planning. That means metrics tied to revenue, not activity. That means permission to invest in things that pay off over quarters, not weeks.

What this looks like in practice

A medical device company I worked with had twelve salespeople and a marketing team of two. The marketing team spent most of their time on reactive requests: update this brochure, build that stand, create slides for this presentation.

Sales results were inconsistent. Some reps hit target, others struggled with identical products in similar territories. The assumption was that the struggling reps needed more training.

When we looked closer, the pattern was different. The successful reps had figured out how to create their own demand. They were active on LinkedIn. They'd built reputations in their territories. Prospects came to them pre-warmed.

The struggling reps were relying on cold outreach into a market that had stopped taking cold outreach.

The fix wasn't sales training. It was repositioning marketing from support to demand generation. Building the company's presence so that all reps benefited from recognition, not just the ones who'd figured it out themselves.

Twelve months later: conversion improved from 18% to 31%. Sales cycles shortened. The "struggling" reps started hitting target.

The product hadn't changed. The territories hadn't changed. What changed was whether prospects had heard of them before the first conversation.

The question to ask

If you're a commercial leader in healthcare, here's the diagnostic question:

When your sales team gets a meeting, how often does the prospect already know who you are?

If the answer is "rarely," you don't have a sales problem. You have a demand problem. And demand problems don't get solved by hiring more reps or training harder.

They get solved by marketing. Real marketing. Not the support-function version.

What to do about it

Three starting points:

Audit how marketing time gets spent.

What percentage is reactive (responding to sales requests) versus proactive (building demand)? If it's heavily weighted to reactive, the structure is wrong.

Look at where pipeline actually comes from.

Not where sales says it comes from. Where it actually originates. If most closed deals trace back to outbound sales activity, you're working harder than you need to. If they trace back to inbound interest, referrals, or reputation, invest more there.

Ask what marketing would do with more budget and more authority.

If the answer is "more of the same," you might have a strategy problem. If the answer is "things we're not currently able to do," you might have a structural problem.

The companies that figure this out don't just survive the attention collapse. They win because of it. While competitors fight for shrinking access, they're building demand that brings prospects to them.

Marketing isn't support. It's the lever most healthcare companies aren't pulling.

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Michael Colling-Tuck is the founder of AGENCY, a healthcare marketing consultancy that helps medical device, pharma, and digital health companies create demand for products that deserve recognition.

If you're wondering whether you have a sales problem or a demand problem, book a free 30-minute call: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ1TmpCB37Eo3CVX2ANRhnZu1xUCX4OdW7M6_zJY2PGJVip3qQO_reZjYOq9eEPDUMO0CUCa-1-g