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Saul Marquez
Company
Outcomes Rocket
Location
San Diego, California, United States
Bio
Saul Marquez is the founder and CEO of Outcomes Rocket, a healthcare-exclusive market research, media, advisory, and marketing firm that helps med-tech and health-tech companies accelerate growth. A former medical device corporate executive turned entrepreneur, Saul has spent over a decade working at the intersection of healthcare, marketing, sales, and technology. He advises healthcare leaders on practical execution, how to turn strategy into measurable pipeline, revenue, and market credibility, rather than theoretical frameworks that never leave the slide deck. Saul is best known as the host of the Outcomes Rocket Podcast, one of the longest-running healthcare podcasts, with nearly 2,000 episodes featuring executives, founders, clinicians, and investors across the healthcare ecosystem. He also co-hosts and produces additional shows focused on healthcare marketing leadership and payer-focused insights. Through Outcomes Rocket, Saul works with health tech, medtech, payer-adjacent, and provider-focused organizations on go-to-market strategy, account-based marketing, executive thought leadership, podcasts, PR, and speaking-led growth initiatives. His work emphasizes clarity, focus, and follow-through, helping teams cut through noise and execute with confidence.
Saul Marquez is the founder and...
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Outcomes Rocket works with healthcare founders, leaders, and brands to help them maximize their market potential. If you're a leader seeking to grow brand recognition and secure market dominance, you're speaking our language. Let's talk.
Outcomes Rocket works with healthcare founders,...
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Actionable Takeaways
Marketing failure is a business failure problem:
The statistics Saul opens with — 50% of businesses gone at five years, 97% gone at ten — are not abstract. The number one cause of failure is lack of product demand. That’s a marketing problem. Treating marketing as something anyone on the street can do, while expecting a lawyer or accountant to be a specialist, is the root inconsistency. The stakes are not about brand or awareness — they’re about organizational survival.
Most marketers are competing on intuition:
Only 28% of marketers document their content strategy, per McKinsey research cited in the episode. That means 72% of the market is operating on hunches. For any business willing to go through the Discover and Define phases — documenting personas, pain points, competitive differentiators, and a strategic roadmap — the competitive field shrinks dramatically. You’re no longer competing with the whole market; you’re competing with the 28% who bothered to do the homework.
Strategy before tactics, always:
The Sun Tzu principle Saul references: tactics are noise before the war is lost. In marketing, the equivalent is launching ads, starting a podcast, or running email campaigns before understanding who you’re talking to, what their pain points are, and what differentiates you. The 3D Framework is explicitly designed to force the strategy work first — Discover and Define — so that the Deliver phase has a foundation to build on rather than amplifying undirected effort.
Owned before earned, earned before paid:
The sequencing of the Deliver phase matters as much as the phase itself. Owned marketing (website, SEO, podcast, social) establishes the infrastructure you control. Earned marketing (other people’s stages — podcast appearances, op-eds, conference talks) builds credibility and external reach. Paid marketing only becomes efficient once the funnel is working — because paid accelerates an existing system; it can’t create one from scratch.
AI without strategy creates AI Frankenstein:
Saul’s Fast Company article names the pattern: teams deploying AI for content creation without a documented ‘bible’ of agreed-upon personas, pain points, and company uniques end up with inconsistent, scattered messaging that reflects no coherent strategy. AI is a multiplier — it amplifies whatever is already in the system. Without a documented foundation, it amplifies confusion at scale. The discipline required is the same as before AI; AI just makes the gap between disciplined and undisciplined organizations wider.
Healthcare’s scale and complexity is the moat:
A $4.7 trillion industry with multi-layer regulation — from zero-regulation wellness products to tightly controlled pharmaceuticals and medical devices, with state-level variations on top of national standards — is not a place where a generalist agency can operate effectively. The same complexity that makes healthcare intimidating for outsiders is what makes deep specialization extremely defensible. For any healthcare vendor, working with an agency that has to be educated about GDPR, California privacy law, and FDA marketing guidelines is a liability.
Conversation Highlights
Saul Marquez is the CEO of Outcomes Rocket, a healthcare-exclusive marketing, media, and advisory firm he founded roughly three years ago after a career in medical devices. The firm has worked with over 100 healthcare brands, employs a 25-person remote-first team across the US, Europe, Latin America, and Asia, and focuses specifically on medical device and health tech companies with $5M+ in revenue. In this episode, Saul unpacks why 97% of businesses fail by the ten-year mark — and why the root cause is almost always a marketing problem. He walks through the 3D Framework (Discover, Define, Deliver), the Owned / Earned / Paid marketing taxonomy, and the “AI Frankenstein” risk he wrote about for Fast Company — the danger of deploying AI without a documented strategy foundation.
Topics Discussed
- Business failure statistics: 50% of businesses fail at five years; 97% fail at ten years; the number one cause is lack of product demand — which Saul frames as fundamentally a marketing problem
- Why healthcare demands specialization: US healthcare represents 18% of GDP, equivalent to $4.7 trillion annually — larger than the entire German economy — with regulatory complexity that requires deep category expertise
- Saul’s background: spent years in medical devices as salesperson and marketer before founding Outcomes Rocket approximately three years ago
- The 3D Framework: Discover (understand landscape, personas, competitors, company uniques), Define (build blueprint and roadmap), Deliver (execute across owned, earned, and paid)
- Why most marketers start at Deliver and skip Discover and Define: the Sun Tzu principle applied — tactics without strategy amplify noise
- McKinsey research: only 28% of marketers document their content strategy — meaning 72% are competing on intuition alone
- The Owned / Earned / Paid taxonomy: owned is everything you control (website, podcast, social, SEO); earned is other people’s stages (OPS) — podcast appearances, op-eds, physical stages; paid is only deployed after owned and earned are functioning
- Why paid should come last: without a working funnel, paid spend doesn’t produce predictable results — you’re paying to send people somewhere that isn’t ready to convert them
- Client profile: healthcare vendors (medical devices, health tech/SaaS) selling to health systems, insurance companies, payers, and pharma; typically $5M+ in revenue
- Primary focus areas: medical devices and health tech (SaaS); also serves providers, pharma, and consulting clients
- AI and the Frankenstein warning: Saul’s Fast Company article “AI Frankenstein” cautions that AI amplifies mistakes when deployed without strategy; content teams using AI without a documented personas/uniques bible produce inconsistent, unfocused output
- 2026 company theme: execution — cutting through AI froth with consistent delivery; expanding micro-influencer marketing as a new reach channel
- Geographic focus: primarily US; UK and Germany work done on request for existing US clients; GDPR and state-level compliance (California strictest) navigated carefully
- Team: 25 people; strategists, account managers, graphics, video, audio production, and web development; remote-first, HQ San Diego
