Executive: Justin Steinman, Chief Marketing Officer
Company: ModMed
Industry: Healthcare SaaS; specialty EHR, practice management
Company Snapshot: PE-backed, fast-growing platform serving 40,000+ specialty providers across 15+ specialties.
Format: CMO Journeys Interview
In This Article
- Why It Matters
- Their Path, in Short
- Big Themes From the Conversation
- How They Choose the Right Agency Partners
- What Stood Out
- The Inside Scoop
Why It Matters
Justin Steinman is the Chief Marketing Officer of ModMed, a specialty-focused healthcare SaaS company that supports tens of thousands of providers with EHR, practice management, revenue cycle, patient engagement, and AI-driven tools. He has spent much of his career moving between healthcare, data platforms, and software, often wearing both the CMO and GM hat at the same time. That mix gives him a rare view of how story, numbers, and operations all fit together. For agencies, his journey is a masterclass in what a modern, operator-minded CMO looks for in partners—and how he actually makes those decisions.
Their Path, in Short
Justin didn’t start in marketing or healthcare. He started as an English and history major who fell in love with storytelling at a college newspaper. Running The Daily Dartmouth, he learned to write on deadline, accept edits from tough editors, and motivate dozens of unpaid student volunteers to ship a paper five days a week. That’s where he first learned how to lead, empower, and hold a high bar for quality without crushing people in the process.
After business school, he joined Novell and stepped into the world of enterprise technology. Over time, he gravitated toward healthcare and healthcare IT and stayed there. He talks about himself as a storyteller who wants to understand people’s challenges and then figure out how the company he works for can help improve their quality of life—not just their efficiency or revenue. People buy from people, he says, and stories that speak to emotional needs beat “corporate gobbledygook” every time.
At Definitive Healthcare, he sat on top of a massive healthcare data set and launched a podcast, “definitively speaking.” Each episode used real data as a jumping-off point for conversations with industry leaders. The show wasn’t a product pitch. For him, success was simple: if someone walked away thinking the podcast was interesting and connected Definitive Healthcare with data in their mind, the job was done.
He has also led as both a GM and a CMO, owning P&L while running brand and demand. That experience shaped how he thinks about marketing as a lever for growth and how he talks to other operators about pipeline, bookings, and awareness in ways they actually understand. Along the way, he’s led high-stakes moments such as a full company rebrand at Insora Health, where the business changed its name from Therapy Brands. For those “once in a company’s life” moves, he’s turned to agencies with deep repetition and expertise.
Today, as CMO of ModMed, he’s energized by two things: a culture he describes as full of decent people with low ego, and a product he genuinely believes in. He points to an AI product demo he ran live, unscripted, for fifteen minutes on stage in front of 1,200 customers. It worked so well that ModMed put that unedited demo video on the front page of its website. For someone who admits he has “sold some vaporware” earlier in his software career, that kind of reality is a big deal.
Big Themes From the Conversation
One theme that comes up again and again with Justin is storytelling. He calls himself a storyteller and says he’s always been drawn to learning about people and sharing what he learns. In his view, each person is “the collection of their stories,” and the same is true for brands. He believes that if you can connect with a buyer on a human level, you can cut through the buzzwords that usually clog B2B marketing.
Another theme is craft—especially the craft of writing. He talks about getting rewritten early in his newspaper days by people who now write for places like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. That experience taught him how to write and how to take feedback. It also taught him how to enforce quality while still appreciating people’s effort. Those lessons show up in how he leads teams under pressure now.
Justin also sees marketing as a customer-service business. His “customers” are not just buyers and physicians; they’re internal teams too: product management, sales, sales engineering, HR, finance, even investors. Having lived in a GM seat, he understands the pressure of “trying to hit my number and using marketing as a lever.” That’s why he pushes his team to translate complex marketing activity into simple, operator-friendly metrics like pipeline coverage, SQLs, bookings, and clear brand health numbers such as awareness and consideration.
Scale is another recurring idea. Justin thinks in systems. He talks about building a marketing organization where everyone in the company has a single point of contact into “the marketing machine.” He organizes around core functions like product marketing, marketing operations, demand generation, corporate marketing, and partner marketing. Then he connects those to ModMed’s own structure—product teams on one side, specialties and sales segments on the other—so that planning becomes one integrated story, not a set of disconnected campaigns.
That story, for ModMed, is the “AI powered practice.” It’s a single idea that can flex. A dermatology marketer can talk about building an AI-powered dermatology practice. A product marketer can talk about building an AI-powered practice with specific tools like the EMR or an AI ambient solution. Justin’s line is simple: if you stand for everything, you stand for nothing. One master story, with smart customization, is how he keeps the company focused.
Finally, his leadership philosophy is grounded in bringing people along. He shares advice from an early mentor: it can be better to get 80% of the way to your destination with 100% of the people on board than to arrive alone. He’s honest that he used to be in a hurry and didn’t always care about the wake he left behind. Now he thinks constantly about how to meet people where they are, see the other side of the table, and build a team that actively chooses to follow.
Watch CMO Journeys Interview
How They Choose the Right Agency Partners
When I asked Justin how he thinks about agency partners, he didn’t jump to buzzwords. He started with a simple idea: agencies exist to bring expertise he doesn’t have, and in some cases shouldn’t build, in-house.
He points to large language models as a clear example. In his mind, a modern website has to “talk to people, Google search and all the different LLMs,” and those systems collect and use data in different ways. He knows he’s not the only CMO wrestling with questions like, “How do I optimize my website for LLMs?” Rather than chase a single in-house expert, he’d rather work with a paid search or performance agency that is already trying to solve that problem for dozens of clients. That way he gets pattern recognition and fresh thinking that are impossible for one company alone.
He treats big, episodic moments the same way. When he led a full rebrand—changing Therapy Brands into Insora Health—he knew this was not something to figure out from scratch. It was a “once in a company history” move, and he wanted partners who had done it “one, two, 300 times.” Experience at that scale matters more to him than trying to patch together an internal playbook on the fly.
So where does he actually find agencies? He leans hard on his network. He has friends who are CMOs all over the place, and he reaches out with very specific questions. He doesn’t just ask who they hired; he asks who they looked at. He wants the full selection set, because the agency that did not fit a friend’s culture or business might be a perfect fit for his. From there, he and his team build a list that can reach twenty or more firms, draft an RFP, and start exploratory conversations.
Once he’s meeting agencies, the usual industry trophies barely register. Awards and rankings do not move him. He says he does not care “in the slightest” where an agency sits on someone else’s list. He is looking for talent, expertise, and a collaborative partner attitude. Just as important, he is looking for cultural fit—because, as he puts it, agency-client relationships are a lot like dating. A laid-back, highly creative shop is going to be miserable with a hard-charging client that “doesn’t care about your feelings,” and the reverse is true as well.
To judge fit and credibility, he goes straight to the work. Previous work is the number one factor. He looks at what’s on an agency’s site and asks for more samples on calls. He also studies their thought leadership. If they write, publish, or host a podcast, he will read and listen. For him, that content shows what an agency cares about and how it thinks. If a team cares enough to put real ideas into the world, he can start to understand them through his own filters rather than someone else’s ranking.
And he gives back in the same way. When other leaders call him for agency advice, he shares who worked well for him and who was in his consideration set, along with what each did well or not so well. The goal is always the same: find the right match on both sides.
What Stood Out
Two things stand out when you hear Justin talk. The first is how much faith he has in ModMed’s product. He jokes that, like many software marketers, he has sold “some vaporware” in his time. In contrast, he trusted ModMed’s AI product enough to run a live, unscripted fifteen-minute demo on stage in front of 1,200 people and then feature that unedited demo on the company’s homepage. That kind of confidence says a lot about how real he believes the value is.
The second is his humility about leadership. He is open about being in a rush earlier in his career and not always noticing the wake he created. The line that guides him now is simple: it can be better to get 80% of the way to your destination with 100% of the people on board than to get all the way there alone. He also reminds himself that “a leader without any followers is just some guy walking down the street.” It’s a disarming, human way of saying that results matter—but so does how you bring people with you.
The Inside Scoop
This article focuses on the journey, the leadership philosophy, and how this CMO works with agency partners. To access the exclusive analysis, including priorities, initiatives, and opportunities, become a Next Big Win Pro member.
