A conversation with Michelle Barbeau and Brian Donnelly
When marketing leaders move into high-stakes, highly regulated industries such as healthcare and health sciences, they face a unique set of challenges: complex customer journeys, stringent compliance requirements, and the constant pressure to drive profitable growth while navigating industry transformation. Two executives who’ve mastered this balance recently shared their insights with Marketers That Matter® Advisor & Chief Community Officer Kathy Hollenhorst, revealing how strategic clarity, cross-functional alignment, and calculated risk-taking can drive remarkable turnarounds.
Michelle Barbeau serves as Chief Revenue Officer at eHealth, where she oversees marketing, business development, analytics, and sales for the online health insurance marketplace that has enrolled over 8 million people. After building her marketing foundation at General Mills and gaining healthcare experience at UnitedHealthcare and Optum, Barbeau joined eHealth three years ago to lead a comprehensive turnaround that has transformed the company’s brand and business results.
Brian Donnelly is the Chief Commercial Officer at Myriad Genetics, a global leader in molecular diagnostics, where he leads sales, marketing, product, and customer experience. A former attorney turned business leader, he has held multiple C-suite roles and brings more than two decades of cross-industry leadership across pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, genomics, and consumer health. Recognized by Forbes as one of the Top 50 Most Entrepreneurial CMOs in 2025, Donnelly applies a velocity-driven leadership framework that blends strategic clarity with speed to deliver growth and transformation.
Together, Barbeau and Donnelly deliver sharp insights on leveraging modern marketing approaches to accelerate growth in complex, regulated environments.”
The Turnaround Playbook: People, Process, Priorities
Both leaders built their careers around transformation, approaching turnarounds with systematic frameworks that prioritize strategic clarity above all else. Barbeau breaks down her approach into three key areas: “people, process, and priorities.” For a successful turnaround, she advises focusing on ensuring you’ve got the right structure, skill sets, capabilities, and ways of working in place.
When Barbeau joined eHealth, consumer insights revealed a disconnect between market need and brand awareness. The research showed how frustrated consumers were with the insurance shopping process. “One person talked about having to go to 35 different websites to try to navigate and compare plans,” she recalled. “And we were like, ‘We have that solution!’”
The insight led to a complete brand transformation. When focus group participants learned about eHealth’s capabilities, their reaction was immediate and powerful. “They said, I’ve never heard of eHealth, but this is amazing,’” Barbeau commented.
For Donnelly, every turnaround starts with clarity—making sure the entire organization knows exactly what matters so teams can move in sync. From there, speed becomes the multiplier, using that clarity to strip away friction and accelerate execution. He explained with an analogy: “if a hose is kinked you can crank up the pressure and get a slightly increased trickle, or you can fix the kink and let the water flow. Real growth comes from removing the friction in the system, not just from turning up the pressure.”
The key is identifying and removing friction points rather than simply applying more pressure to broken systems.
Driving Profitable Growth Through ROI Focus
Both leaders emphasized understanding of broad business impact rather than focusing solely on individual metrics. “ROI, ROI, ROI, ROI,” Barbeau stressed, noting that marketers sometimes get criticized for looking only at impressions or top-line growth. “You need to be best friends with your finance people,” she said, “because that’s how you’re going to drive true business impact.”
Donnelly reinforced this point, stressing that marketing must be framed as a capital allocation decision. Marketers should spend less time discussing inputs like impressions and more time discussing return on investment – such as lifetime value relative to customer acquisition cost. At previous companies, he embedded finance leaders into product and marketing decisions, enabling teams to rigorously model outcomes, align on assumptions, and secure buy-in on how investments would drive near- and long-term profitable growth.
This focus on financial partnership has shifted from being a nice-to-have to essential, as organizations demand greater accountability for marketing investments and their impact on sustainable growth.
The Power of Sales and Marketing Integration
The marketing leaders also spoke about the transformative power of breaking down silos. Barbeau described the breakthrough moment when eHealth unified sales and marketing under the same priorities and KPIs. They brought separate data teams together, implemented daily stand-ups between functions, and most importantly, shared ownership of conversion metrics.
“It can be very easy for sales to go, ‘Well, marketing is delivering really bad leads that we can’t convert,’ and for marketing to say, ‘Well, sales is just not able to convert them,’” Barbeau explained. But she said that when marketing and sales come together and share ownership of a metric that the finger-pointing stops and optimization begins.
Donnelly added in the benefit of structural alignment. “I find that when sales, marketing, and product are part of the same organization and aligned on strategic priorities it shifts the focus away from how individual functions are performing, and more towards the collective outcome. Everyone should be playing for the name on the front of the jersey.” For marketing professionals looking to better serve their sales counterparts, both leaders offered the same advice: spend time in the field. As Donnelly put it, whether inside or outside sales, “you have to get in front of customers if you want to ensure your marketing efforts land.”
Barbeau agreed: “There are no better people on the front lines of knowing what the consumer needs than your sales team,” she said. This collaboration unlocks insights into where consumers get stuck, enabling marketing to solve problems before they even reach the sales stage.
AI as Accelerator, Not Replacement
The marketing executives view AI as enhancing human capabilities rather than replacing them. At eHealth, the organization recently launched AI agents for customer service calls despite initial skepticism. The results have been remarkable, she said. “I have listened to calls where the AI agent matches the tone and pace and cadence of the inbound caller,” she said.
Donnelly emphasized AI as a force multiplier for sales and marketing—connecting the dots across the customer journey to sharpen marketing effectiveness and elevate sales execution. On the marketing side, he pointed to companies embedding AI throughout the funnel, from content generation and testing to advanced performance marketing models that optimize spend in real time. For sales teams, AI can improve territory design, prioritize accounts, and support pre-call planning, ultimately helping reps be more productive and effective. The goal, Donnelly stressed, is to strip away undifferentiated work so teams can focus on what matters most: the customer.”
Navigating Regulated Industries
Working in healthcare requires navigating complex regulatory environments, but both leaders emphasized that understanding constraints enables greater speed and boldness. Barbeau noted that at eHealth, TV ads require approval from individual insurance carriers and then face a 45-day review process with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Donnelly, who began his career as an attorney, explained that clarity on boundaries creates confidence: “There is power in understanding where the guardrails are, because it allows you to move faster and with more courage in what you choose to execute.” To illustrate, he described playing tag in the dark with his kids: “At first, it’s unsettling—you bump into furniture and move cautiously to avoid getting hurt. But after a few rounds, once you’ve mapped the room, you can move with confidence and speed—and the game not only becomes more fun, but your odds of success increase dramatically.
The insight: “When you know the landscape and define the guardrails for your team, everyone understands what’s in and out of bounds—and that clarity enables faster execution. Ambiguity, by contrast, slows progress and often leads to worse outcomes.”
Guardrails and Growth
As the conversation concluded, the leaders offered final thoughts that encapsulates their approach to leadership in high-stakes industries. Barbeau emphasized the marketer’s unique role: “Be that agent of change in your organization and for your consumer.”
Donnelly’s closing message perfectly captured the balance required for success in regulated, complex industries: “Complexity is a constant. Speed is a choice. The leaders who deliver outsized results simplify the noise, align their teams, and enable their organizations to act with courage.”
About the Visionaries
Brian Donnelly, Chief Commercial Officer, Myriad Genetics
Brian Donnelly has served as Chief Commercial Officer at Myriad Genetics, a global leader in molecular diagnostics, since 2025. He oversees sales, marketing, product, and customer experience, focused on improving patient outcomes and driving business growth across the oncology, women’s health, and neuroscience business units. Before joining Myriad, he was Chief Commercial Officer at Ancestry.com and President of AncestryDNA, leading the consumer genomics and subscription businesses.
A former attorney turned business leader, Donnelly has held multiple C-suite roles and senior leadership positions at Amazon, Illumina, and GlaxoSmithKline. He brings more than two decades of cross-industry experience spanning pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, genomics, consumer health, and digital platforms.
Recognized by Forbes as one of the Top 50 Most Entrepreneurial CMOs in 2025, Donnelly applies a velocity-driven leadership playbook that combines strategic clarity and speed to deliver growth and transformation in high-stakes industries
Michelle Barbeau, Chief Revenue Officer, eHealth
Michelle Barbeau has served as the Chief Revenue Officer at eHealth, a leading online private health insurance marketplace since January 2024. Barbeau has developed consumer-centric strategies that enhance brand visibility, accelerate customer acquisition, and drive loyalty through integrated e-commerce and telephonic experiences.
Barbeau joined eHealth in September 2022 as Chief Marketing Officer where she led omni-channel marketing and launched eHealth’s first brand campaign, which played a key role in helping eHealth return to profitable growth on an adjusted EBITDA basis. Barbeau’s leadership earned eHealth the 2024 Healthcare Marketing Impact Award for Integrated Campaign of the Year from Modern Healthcare and Ad Age.
With 25 years of experience, Barbeau’s career spans leadership roles at AbleTo, a virtual behavioral health provider and subsidiary of Optum Ventures, UnitedHealthcare, and General Mills, where she drove transformation and operational excellence. Barbeau built AbleTo’s marketing function, transformed teams at UnitedHealthcare, and led iconic brands like Yoplait, Pillsbury, and Betty Crocker at General Mills.
Visionaries airs live on Zoom every month and is brought to you in partnership with The Wall Street Journal. In each episode, two new Visionaries share their game plan and how that impacts today’s teams, talent, and you.
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