The room goes quiet the way rooms do when everyone already knows the answer and no one wants to say it out loud.
A founder stands at the front, clicker in hand, twelve slides deep into a device that works better than anything currently on a hospital shelf. The data is clean. The trial results are strong. Somewhere in the back, a procurement director leans toward a colleague and whispers the question that actually matters: “So why this one, and not the one we already use?”
Nobody in the room can answer it. Not because the science is weak. Because no one ever built the argument for why it should win.
The founder finishes. The applause is polite. The meeting ends the way these meetings usually end, with warm handshakes and a promise to follow up that both sides know won’t be kept. Everyone drives home telling themselves the product will speak for itself eventually. It won’t. It never does.
Meet Lorena Pineda Pérez
Lorena Pineda Pérez is the founder of 6 Degrees, a Barcelona-born commercial consultancy that works as a fractional CMO and export partner for medical device and health tech companies across Europe and the Gulf. She has spent fifteen years inside the exact silence described above, and she built her entire career around refusing to let it happen again.
Fifteen Years of Being Good at a Job That Wasn’t Hers
Lorena’s path started conventionally enough. A public relations and communications degree from the University of Barcelona, then a string of marketing roles that climbed steadily through the medical device world: Beabloo, Augmented Anatomy, Quibim, and years spent building the global brand at GC Aesthetics, where she took a name from nothing to international recognition in the aesthetic surgery market.
By every external measure, she was succeeding. Titles got bigger. Budgets got bigger. Rooms got more important. But something underneath it never quite settled.
She has described those fifteen years plainly: she was good at what she did, but she was never fully herself inside it. The roles fit the resume. They did not fit the person. Somewhere between one global marketing strategy and the next, she noticed the same failure repeating itself across nearly every company she touched: strong products, weak commercial stories, and founders who assumed the science would eventually do the talking on its own.
That repeated failure became her thesis. In 2023, she left the corporate structure entirely and founded 6 Degrees, built specifically to close the gap she had spent a decade and a half watching companies fall into. She calls it plugging in as an on-demand marketing, sales, and expansion team for companies that need senior commercial thinking but cannot yet justify a full-time hire. It sounds simple. It is, in practice, the thing almost no one in her industry does well.
The Uncomfortable Conversation Business
Ask Lorena what she believes, and she does not reach for a mission statement. She reaches for a principle she repeats often enough that it now sits directly on her LinkedIn banner: a fractional CMO who tells you what you need to hear.
“Loyalty doesn’t mean telling people what they want to hear, it means being clear when something isn’t working, even when it’s uncomfortable.”
That is not a personality quirk. It is the entire operating model of 6 Degrees. Most consulting relationships are built to soften bad news. Lorena built hers to deliver it faster, because in MedTech, a diplomatic silence can cost a company a year of runway it never gets back.
She has watched the pattern too many times to count: brilliant clinical data, a validated device, real early traction, and still no investor movement. The founders always ask the same question first. Can you look at our pitch deck. She tells them the deck was never the real problem.
“A pitch isn’t just a presentation. It’s the compressed version of your entire commercial strategy.”
If the positioning is unclear, she explains, investors feel it before they can even name it. The meeting ends politely. There’s no follow-up. And the founder walks away assuming it was a chemistry problem, when really it was a clarity problem.
Her current focus stretches across three fronts at once. She is relocating to Dubai this year to deepen 6 Degrees’ presence in the Gulf, a region she sees becoming essential for European companies that have already saturated their home markets. She is building out AI into her own commercial process, treating it as basic infrastructure rather than a novelty. And she has become an increasingly visible advocate for FemTech founders, a space she describes as one of medicine’s most underfunded corners, now finally catching institutional attention.
Across all three, one belief holds the center: a strong product is necessary, but it has stopped being sufficient. The companies that win are the ones that can prove they are investable, not merely visible.
The Pérez Playbook: 5 Lessons
Specialize sooner than feels comfortable. Depth builds authority faster than breadth ever will, and the leaders who matter most became genuinely hard to replace in one specific domain.
Approval is not adoption. Getting cleared to sell a product is a legal milestone. Building demand for it starts a year before that, not the day after.
Every stakeholder needs a different truth. A surgeon wants outcomes, procurement wants reduced risk, finance wants payback time, and using the same pitch on all three is how good products die quietly in committee.
Find a mentor for the truth, not the comfort. The most useful person in your first year isn’t the one validating your idea, it’s the one willing to tell you what’s actually wrong with it.
Clarity beats confidence in a pitch. Investors rarely reject a founder over chemistry. They reject a story they couldn’t quite follow, and mistake that confusion for doubt about the founder himself.
What the Room Finally Says
Picture that same boardroom again, months later. A different founder, a different device, but this time the deck opens differently. Before a single clinical slide, there’s a sentence naming exactly who buys, why, and what happens to their budget if they don’t.
The procurement director doesn’t lean over to whisper this time. She asks a direct question, and gets a direct answer.
That shift, from silence to argument, from hoping the science speaks to building the case that makes it heard, is the exact distance Lorena Pineda Pérez has spent her career closing. She didn’t do it by softening anything. She did it by refusing to let anyone in the room stay comfortable enough to avoid the truth in front of them.
The best products rarely lose to worse ones. They lose to silence.
Lorena Pineda Pérez, Founder of 6 Degrees, is based in Barcelona and expanding into Dubai. She works as a Fractional CMO for medical device and health tech companies across Europe and the Gulf, helping founders build the commercial strategy their science alone can’t carry. To connect with Lorena or learn more, visit her LinkedIn profile.
