Angela Martin is a Fractional Chief Commercial & Growth Systems Officer who helps Consumer Packaged Goods and healthcare companies replace stalled momentum with disciplined, forward progress. She bridges commercial, marketing, and IT teams to align strategy, systems, and customer experience, ensuring growth plans translate into actual results.
In this blog, Angela shares strategies that help companies move from mid-market approaches to enterprise-level systems. The key takeaway for both healthcare and CPG? Commercialization succeeds or fails based on clarity and alignment.
How to Run a $250M Business Unit
Angela was promoted to lead a $250M business unit at Cantel after just 8 months in the role and industry. She shares what she delivered and how.
What she delivered: “Trust accelerates when uncertainty is decreasing. You come in and everything’s uncertain but the trust starts to accelerate when you’re steadfast on reducing people’s uncertainty about the market and about how that business unit is going to perform.”
Voice of customer first: “In those first 8 months I really focused on the voice of the consumer. I’ll never forget my superior had said ‘okay we’re ready. We need a talk track. I need you to get a talk track to sales.’ And I said ‘okay sounds good. We’re going to get a listening track first.’”
Why this mattered: “This focus on ambulatory surgery centers was new. We were great at hospital, not so sure about ASC, hadn’t been doing very well. And so I needed the insights in order to drive the strategy, the strategy to then drive the tactics.”
Transparent about trade-offs: “Getting really clear about the trade-offs, be very transparent about the trade-offs. This is the approach but here are the trade-offs. Not going to take a price decrease on our products across the board—I think that’s a good thing—but the trade-off is going to be hey need some investment over here.”
“For me it’s not about trying to look impressive. It’s just more about acknowledging what the risks are and reducing that for the executive team. I like to clarify performance drivers. Here’s what I think is going to make our business perform and make the priorities really explicit.”
The difference between CMO-level thinking and marketing technicians: “When leaders feel that the business is more predictable and they feel aligned to the strategy, then the trust really follows. It can’t just be about the impressions. We have to be focused on how we grow that business.”
Why Product Launches Stall and How to Fix Them
Angela has powered over $52M in product launches at companies like PepsiCo, Mayo Clinic, and Harley-Davidson. Here are the patterns she sees.
The number one reason launches stall: “Companies confuse product readiness with commercial team readiness. Product is ready? Great, go. But if that commercial readiness hasn’t been built out, that’s where we get in trouble.”
The typical broken sequence: Engineering done, product managers done, marketing positioned, sales trained at the end—boom, everyone expects revenue to follow.
“But revenue is not a byproduct of a launch. It’s the result of activation, a lot of activation.”
The gap shows up in three places: No clear definition of the primary revenue segment. No quantified economic case for the buyer. And no 90-day activation plan for sales and marketing tightly aligned together.
“When I lead launches, I like to focus on building that bridge from development all the way to revenue. That bridge includes having that clear target, having a clear use case, having the economic value articulated clearly in a way that sales is not just informed but sales has punched it a bit and they feel like yes, I can actually defend this.”
Pre-launch sales enablement: “You’ve armed the sales team with not just what marketing thinks is great materials, but with what the sales team is feeling empowered by. And then [do] that 90-day activation sprint with really clear KPIs.”
“Launch—it’s not a date. It’s an event. It’s a revenue event. It’s teamwork. Organizations that treat it that way are really much better at closing that gap between here’s a product, here’s innovation, oh and here’s income.”
90-Day Activation vs Annual Planning
Angela creates 90-day growth activation roadmaps that compress time to revenue.
The fundamental difference: “I love annual plans, but they’re really trying to optimize for predictability. And a 90-day activation roadmap really is optimizing for learning and the velocity at which we learn.”
Traditional annual planning locks in assumptions early and disperses resources across too many initiatives. “That’s fine. It can also mean a delay in course correction and a delay against learning because everybody’s still cemented to hitting that annual plan.”
The 90-day approach: “A 90-day activation roadmap is identifying the highest growth hypotheses and leveraging those. We want to concentrate our resources on that specific lever for a period of time and learn. We’re going to build in these feedback loops of: we are expecting to hear this, or learn this. And what did we learn. From that you’re speeding up that cycle of learning. The intention, of course, is to compress the time to revenue because you’re accelerating that learning and decision cycle.”
The principle: “Revenue grows faster when decisions move faster than the market is shifting. If you compress it down to 90 days, then that 90-day cadence can really force learning, therefore force clarity and give you that focus that you need to really shift the revenue growth.”
Mayo Clinic’s Digital Transformation and Rebrand Strategy
At Mayo Clinic Laboratories, Angela led the digital transformation for internal systems, external systems AND and rebrand at the same time. She explains why this was needed and how it drove revenue.
What inspired the change: “We spent a lot of time clarifying our position relative to the competitors LabCorp, Quest. We then took that as an opportunity to say, hey we’ve got to modernize our digital ordering practices so that we are up there with the creme de la creme of the big guys, and redefined the internal tools under the hood as well.”
“We went through digital transformation related to our MarTech stack, looking at the IT systems underneath. I partnered closely with our systems architecture and IT teams to define that and to realign it.”
Connecting brand to revenue: “And then we aligned our brand narrative with those measurable commercial outcomes: really truly driving revenue and having better customer experiences, and then we measured that. Because brand changes and brand name changes are just commercial architecture and can be expensive. It [a rebrand] could just be viewed as expensive art.”
“So what we did was really mapped that brand promise very directly to: simplified access for our customers, [improved] physician decision confidence, as well as the executive C-suite of these big health systems seeing that our tools are top of the line and our brand is top of the line.”
The goal wasn’t awareness: “We already had a ton of awareness as Mayo Clinic. It was truly the revenue conversion by having better clarity, better tools, better access, and a brand that really stood for confidence and for trust.”
“When we dropped the new brand name and people go, aha this is a company I know and trust, and when they go to buy they have a great experience through the whole process. The outcome is not only do they recognize us and they start the buying process, but they finish the buying process and you get more revenue.”
“It’s a lot of work, but that’s what it takes. That’s what it takes to really elevate and push the revenue to that clear alignment from your people, your process, your technology and all your marketing. All of it’s got to sing off that same sheet.”
How PepsiCo Launched a New Product into Costco
At PepsiCo, Angela launched a new brand into Costco despite being told it couldn’t be done.
Why large organizations move slowly: “I think sometimes it [large companies] get this bad rap that it’s like ‘oh it’s because my people are lacking effort.’ I think that’s not necessarily true. I think they move slowly because of ambiguity and the larger the organization gets, inherently, it’s the telephone game. There’s more ambiguity and ambiguity creates friction.”
The opportunity was dismissed as too complex. “Good luck getting a product to the market specific to Costco within a big company like PepsiCo. PepsiCo has got too many other initiatives going on.”
Angela’s approach: “What I really just tried to focus on is removing that ambiguity so that your project gets moved along because it’s really crystal clear what you’re trying to do.”
The execution framework: Define non-negotiables through intense customer focus groups. Narrow the scope to a highly specific test—one product with 2 flavors. Build an internal coalition early with clear storytelling about the risk. Button up the retailer story with homework and a risk-mitigated data case.
“All of that adds up to a bit of precision. Speed at scale really comes from that diligence and that precision. When stakeholders understand the risk, they understand the upside, they understand the boundaries clearly, and there’s less ambiguity, decisions can accelerate.”
The lesson: “It wasn’t pushing harder or pushing louder. It was about structuring the decisions in a way that it became easier to say yes.”
CPG and Healthcare: What Really Sells Products
Angela has led commercialization in both CPG (PepsiCo, Sara Lee, Kimberly-Clark) and healthcare (Mayo Clinic, Cantel Medical, Laborie).
The fundamental difference: “The buying dynamic. In CPG you’re optimizing for velocity and emotional pull. The buyer is often just one person making a relatively low risk decision influenced by the brand, the placement, and the price. And in CPG distribution scale matters enormously.”
In healthcare: “You’re selling into layered risk. There are multiple stakeholders—the clinician, an administrator, procurement, finance, sometimes regulatory. Inevitably the buying cycle is longer and the risk tolerance is much lower. The proof and the credibility threshold is much higher.”
What stays the same: “Commercialization succeeds or fails based on clarity and alignment. The work always starts with defining that one clear problem and one clear economic value story. If the internal teams like sales and marketing can’t articulate the value in that same language, the market won’t hear it clearly either.”
“While the sales motion changes dramatically, the core discipline of marketing does not. You still need sharp segmentation, a unified front around the value narrative, as well as commercial readiness before launch.”
The failures Angela sees in both sectors: “Leaders get trapped when they believe that the product being done means the market is ready, but it doesn’t. We have to get clarity internally.”
“The constant across industries is: revenue accelerates when the organization aligns behind one clear economic story, a defensible value story. And sales and marketing are singing from that same sheet of music.”
About Angela Martin: Fractional Chief Commercial & Growth Systems Officer
Angela Martin is a Fractional Chief Commercial & Growth Systems Officer specializing in Consumer Packaged Goods and healthcare companies. She helps organizations replace stalled momentum with disciplined, forward progress by bridging commercial and IT teams to align strategy, systems, and customer experience.
She looks at data, listens to the customer and team members to see the full landscape of strategy, systems, incentives, and then navigates complex interpersonal dynamics to align people and initiatives toward successful execution. She unblocks stalled initiatives by resolving cross-functional friction, designs go-to-market architecture that supports scalable revenue, and creates 90-day activation roadmaps that compress time-to-revenue. The result is clearer commercial readiness, aligned teams around a single economic value story, and product launches that drive revenue rather than stall between development and market.
Proof: Powered $52M+ in product launches. Led a $250M business unit at Cantel. Turned around GI business with +789.9% large capital sales growth. Launched new brand into Costco at PepsiCo despite being told it was impossible.
If you want an expert who led marketing and commercialization at PepsiCo, Mayo Clinic, Cantel, and Harley-Davidson, you want Angela.
Next Steps: Schedule a brief intro call to share your goals and challenges. https://scheduler.zoom.us/corinne-cavanaugh/exploratory-w-corinne
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