In the previous post, I examined the importance of an effective onboarding program for new medical distributors. In this article, I will focus on six best practices to produce a successful onboarding plan.
Let’s see together what I think is important for onboarding medical distributors:
1. Prevent misalignment
There is an old saying, “Prevention is better than cure,” which is valid also for commercial partnerships. We can all agree that partnership is working together to achieve common objectives and it is fundamental to understanding each other in a business relationship. For this reason, at the onboarding or even better before the onboarding, the two partners (supplier and distributor) should be clear about their respective priorities and goals.
As a supplier, you should establish what is important to you and communicate it clearly in order to avoid any misunderstanding. As a distributor, you should be clear regarding what you want from the supplier and identify the key success factors of your market.
After a mutually-agreed short time frame, the two partners should have an open discussion about what they consider the criteria of a successful relationship and how they consider the relationship with respect to these criteria.
For example, very simple things can produce frustration and disengagement like the time to receive a response to a query or the delivery time of orders and so on. Therefore, it is important to be aligned from the beginning on these simple things and on the more strategic issues.
As a supplier, you should have a clear picture of your distributors’ needs and motivations, in order to build a successful relationship. And this is the essence of partner focus.
2. Build a personal relationship
Although Covid-19 taught us that we can remotely do a lot, I think especially during the onboarding period, it is crucial to establish a personal relationship. And despite cultural differences among countries, my suggestion is to have direct communication as much as possible. Luckily, this can happen in various ways:
When trying to establish direct communication, emails are a fantastic way to exchange and communicate but, in this situation, they are not helpful. If you want to build up a personal relationship you need to personally meet your counterpart. Therefore, you should organize trips and meetings frequently.
Like emails (which I do not think is the better tool to build up a relationship), between phone calls and videoconferences the latter is much more effective. The reason is quite simple, videoconferencing with your partner is much closer to a face-to-face meeting.
During a videoconference, you will be able to see facial expressions, and verbal and non-verbal communication increasing the value of the exchange and promoting the development of a personal relationship.
3. Make yourself available
During the onboarding plan, you must make yourself available every time your partner needs you. In this critical phase, it is extremely important to reply in a very rapid way to any query your new partner may have.
You must also be flexible in accommodating your partner’s requests. For example, visits to important end users or KOLs, training sessions for its sales force and support for product evaluation. Being available will encourage your partner to ask you for all the possible needs they might have, to be comfortable with your products.
4. Train them to sell the product
Sales training is frequently underestimated as I have already discussed here. The goal of sales force training is to have a successful sales force and not a sales force with only fruitless product knowledge.
To have a successful onboarding you need to help your partner’s sales force to actually sell the product.
Therefore, you need to train them to identify the early adopters, uncover the needs and wants of the prospects, determine the stakeholders’ map and solve customers’ problems with your products.
5. Involve the senior management
I suggest involving the senior management from both sides to assure a commitment or establish a long-term and successful partnership. Management involvement is necessary if there is a misalignment between the expectations and the reality.
A good example is when there’s an insufficient number of sales calls generated by the distributor’s sales force or poor attendance to online training sessions. In these cases, you should escalate the information and make sure that the senior management uses his authority to realign on the mutually agreed objectives.
Another example of senior management involvement during the onboarding is to get approval from your distributors’ management to work “directly” with the individual salespeople having concrete opportunities with your products.
Getting permission is not easy and getting it frequently is not possible; however, you should encourage the management of your new distributor to trust you and show how you could bring value to their sales force.
6. Help them to sell
I’ve already explained that it is crucial for new distributors to obtain quick wins. Your goal during the onboarding plan is to facilitate early sales. If the distributor cannot sell during the first months because of a long selling cycle of your product, for example, in the case of big capital equipment; you need to find other intermediate indicators instead of actual sales.
Your goal must be to help them to have a predictable sales funnel. Then you must help the sales force to identify opportunities in the customer base, qualify prospects, disqualify non-prospects easily, move the best opportunities through the funnel and accelerate the selling cycle.
Final thought
A successful onboarding plan is key to developing a profitable partnership with your distributor. And the goal of onboarding medical distributors is to make it possible for your partner to achieve early market success. The six best practices I’ve discussed extensively in this guide will be very useful in helping you build a solid onboarding plan and position your partnership on the right path to achieve mutual success.
Do you agree with me on these practices? Have you tried any of these practices before now and care to share your experience?
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