Episode Summary
In this episode of Behind the Process, host Will Goad sits down with Terrence Wiggins, Peripheral Marketing Leader at Cordis, to unpack what it really takes to bring cardiovascular and peripheral arterial technology to market. With more than 40 product launches under his belt, Terrence shares how he approaches unmet clinical need, competitive displacement, and the delicate art of aligning sales, marketing, medical education, and product development around a single go-to-market strategy.
The conversation moves from high-level launch philosophy to tactical execution — including a memorable turnaround story from Terrence’s time at Terumo, where he volunteered to relaunch an underperforming embolization coil line and grew it from 73% to 110% of plan over three years. Along the way, Terrence offers a vivid restaurant analogy for the sales-marketing relationship, breaks down the three levers that determine whether a new product displaces an incumbent, and previews a drug-eluting balloon launch he’s currently leading at Cordis.
The episode closes with practical advice for early-career marketers: use LinkedIn as a networking accelerator, raise your hand for the messy opportunities, build a real plan, and grind. Will also poses an open question to listeners drawn from RoboHead’s latest benchmark report — why is the creative review and approval process lagging behind the rest of the workflow?
Featured Guest
Guest: Terrence Wiggins
Role: Peripheral Marketing Leader
Company: Cordis
Background: Terrence has led more than 40 product launches across his MedTech career, including prior work at Terumo. At Cordis, he focuses on cardiovascular and peripheral arterial disease technology — catheters, wires, sheaths, stents, and drug-eluting balloons used by vascular surgeons, interventional radiologists, and interventional cardiologists. He’s currently leading a peripheral drug-eluting balloon launch expected to reach the U.S. market in the next year.
Where to find him: LinkedIn
Key Insights
Winning shelf space requires a triple threat: quality, value, and ease of use.
Terrence uses a grocery store analogy to explain how new products displace incumbents inside a hospital. Every hospital has finite “shelf space” — whether that’s inventory, consignment, or trunk stock — and choosing Product B over Product A requires demonstrating superiority on at least one of three dimensions: better quality, a stronger cost-benefit or willingness-to-pay story, or greater ease of use. When a product hits all three, displacement becomes inevitable. For marketing leaders in any B2B category with entrenched incumbents, this framework is a disciplined way to stress-test whether a value proposition is actually strong enough to move a buyer off the status quo.
Sales and marketing are the chef and the waiter — and both have to nail it.
One of the most memorable moments of the conversation is Terrence’s extended restaurant analogy: marketing is the chef building the message, the story, and the collateral; sales is the waiter delivering it to the customer. If the chef makes a bad steak, the waiter’s charm won’t save it. If the waiter is rude or uninformed, the best steak in the world doesn’t come back for a second visit. The takeaway for marketing leaders: field time is non-negotiable. You can’t build messaging that survives contact with C-suites, inventory managers, GPOs, and physicians unless you understand what your sales team is actually navigating in the real world.
There is no failure in a product launch — only learning and adaptation. Terrence’s mindset around launch execution is worth internalizing. FDA timelines shift, supply constraints emerge, competitors respond, and market dynamics change. Rather than framing missed dates as failures, he treats every launch as an evolving system that has to change with the market — “skate to where the puck is going.” This philosophy is particularly relevant for marketers operating in regulated or complex industries where perfect execution against the original plan is often impossible. The real KPI isn’t hitting the original launch date; it’s how quickly the team adapts when reality diverges from the plan.
Volunteering for the messy opportunity is a career accelerator.
The Terumo Azure embolization coils story is a masterclass in career strategy. The product was at 73% of plan, the previous manager had left, and Terrence walked into his boss’s office and asked for it. He then spent 90 days living out of airports and hospitals building a real plan — one that included an internal “IMBO experts” helper sales network, a physician treatment algorithm delivered through medical education, and upgraded sales training. The result: 73% → 96% → 105% → 110% over three years. The lesson for early-career marketers is that struggling products are actually low-downside, high-upside opportunities — the bar to improve is lower, and the visibility from turning something around is disproportionate.
Episode Highlights
The Benchmark Question: Why Is Feedback Lagging Behind Execution? [~00:00:51]
Will opens the episode by sharing a finding from RoboHead’s “Breaking the Feedback Loop” benchmark report: creative review and approval processes are 15% faster year-over-year, but the rest of the creative process is 50% faster. The gap raises an unresolved question for creative operations leaders — is the feedback loop fundamentally broken, or is approval always destined to lag execution? Will invites listeners to weigh in.
“The feedback loop, getting the approval, is not kind of keeping up with the speed of the rest of the improvement.” — Will Goad [~00:01:15]
The Grocery Store Analogy for Competitive Displacement [~00:06:04] Terrence walks through how he thinks about launching into a crowded hospital environment. With limited shelf space, a new product has to beat the incumbent on quality, cost-benefit, or ease of use — ideally all three. This moment crystallizes his product marketing philosophy and provides a clean framework any B2B marketer can borrow.
“It’s gotta be better quality than product A. Two, it’s gotta be some type of willingness to pay or some type of cost benefit. And then the third part, it’s gotta be maybe easier to use than product A. If you have the triple threat of all three, then clearly product B is gonna win.” — Terrence Wiggins [~00:06:35]
The Chef and Waiter: How Sales and Marketing Actually Work Together [~00:09:13]
Terrence delivers his restaurant analogy for the sales-marketing relationship, drawing on his early career as a waiter at a fine-dining golf club. The metaphor lands because it makes the interdependence tangible: neither role can succeed without the other, and communication between the kitchen and the floor determines whether the customer sends the steak back.
“If that steak is not ordered exactly how you want it and the waiter sends it too late, guess what? The customer’s sending it back to the kitchen.” — Terrence Wiggins [~00:10:04]
Previewing the Peripheral Drug-Eluting Balloon Launch [~00:12:19]
Terrence gives listeners a look at the launch he’s currently building at Cordis — a peripheral drug-eluting balloon using sirolimus, differentiated by its mechanism of action. He describes the cross-functional coordination required across sales, marketing, new product development, sales training, and medical education, and frames why he believes it will shift physician treatment algorithms.
“A drug-eluting balloon is not new, but the difference maker is the mechanism of action with the drug that we will be using… it’s gonna change physicians’ treatment algorithm, and that excites me.” — Terrence Wiggins [~00:13:16]
The Azure Coils Turnaround: A 73% to 110% Story [~00:17:20]
Terrence recounts volunteering to relaunch an underperforming embolization coil line at Terumo. He spent 90 days in the field building a marketing business plan, then executed against it with an internal expert sales network, a treatment algorithm delivered via medical education, and upgraded sales training. The result was three consecutive years of growth and, more importantly, new opportunities for Terrence himself.
“You can have all the knowledge… but you gotta look for the opportunities, and you gotta grind, right? You gotta ask and do it.” — Terrence Wiggins [~00:19:13]