Consider this: You worked hard to find and select a new commercial partner in an uncovered market. You and your new distributor invested time and resources to establish what both expect to be a long-term, profitable and fruitful commercial relationship.
All the prerequisites are fulfilled, the distribution agreement is signed, and the regulatory departments are working together in harmony to register the products.
Well… the worst thing you and your partner can do is consider the partnership well-founded and drive attention to something else.
As a supplier, you have the responsibility to help your distributor capitalize on “quick” wins in the first months of the relationship. This is why it’s necessary to show you how to make the best first impression with your new medical distributor and establish a successful partnership.
The importance of the first moves
Successful commercial partnerships between suppliers and distributors are founded on early successes. This is because what the two partners do and achieve in the first months of the relationship will have a strong impact on the partnership’s success.
If your partner (the distributor) will not make sales or any other significant commercial results quickly, it will lose interest or turn its focus to something else for example other products.
Consequently, all the resources, time, money, efforts, etc., you put into selecting and recruiting will have been for nothing.
A better approach will be to help your distributor achieve early success by providing a solid onboarding process and implementing other tips I’ll share with you shortly.
Remember, not having early success create a series of risks:
- Reputational risk: especially if the misstep is repeated in several territories, other potential distributors might get the information and they will not consider you as a key partner.
- The risk of losing the momentum: losing the momentum of the early months and losing commercial opportunities makes your competitors stronger in that specific market. Powerful competitors make the job of your distributor tougher and more demanding.
- Relationship exit risk: eventually if the relationship is not satisfactory you may need to exit. We all know that exiting a business relationship has important direct and indirect costs.
While a solid onboarding process is standard when recruiting a new member of the team, in my experience, it is a not-so-common practice in medical distributor management, but it can make a big difference.
Onboarding your new distributor
The onboarding process of a new distributor in the medical business is frequently considered as a bit of product training, alignment between the two supply departments, some marketing materials localization and sharing a few commercial practices and success stories.
In my opinion, good onboarding requires more than this.
The objective of the onboarding is to enable your partner to perform all the activities necessary to sell your product into its market. These next steps are therefore crucial in a successful onboarding:
First impression count
The investment required for a solid onboarding process will produce a good first impression. And as we all know you will not have another chance to make a good first impression.
Moreover, especially if negative, first impressions are very difficult to change. Therefore, being unprofessional, approximative and passive during the onboarding process is not acceptable. Unless you are satisfied with a modest engagement and consequently, mediocre results.
An ideal onboarding process from the supplier side should allow for gathering important market insights, information regarding the partner structure with its strong and weak points, how the sales organization works and relevant knowledge about the distributor’s customer base, accounts segmentation, KOL management, etc.
From the distributor side, the ideal onboarding should produce complete know-how of the therapeutic area, a deep knowledge of the products and competition, a clear understanding of the value proposition and the full management of the selling process.
Low hanging fruits
At the beginning of the relationship, your goal is to facilitate as much as you can for the distributor to make money and have success. And there is one way to do this; working closely with the partner’s sales reps to identify the most evident target.
In this phase, targeting is key. This is because if the sales rep does not sell the product easily, he/she will become insecure and hesitant about your product line, making the promotion of the product even more difficult in the future and favoring other product lines in the distributor portfolio.
The most obvious target in this phase is the distributor’s customers that fit the early adopters’ profile of your product. Therefore, you need to work with your partner to help identify better prospects in their customer base.
Basically, what you should do together with your new partner is co-develop a detailed profile of the target customer and a call template that will make the distributor’s sales force comfortable making the first few introductory calls.
I used the term co-develop because although you should be proactive in the onboarding process it is fundamental to have the partner participating and sharing market and customer information.
Product training is definitively part of this critical process; however, the training is not just about the features and benefits of your product, you should train them on selling your product.
It is critical to make them identify the symptoms and needs that make their customers open to try your solution. Therefore, develop qualifying questions and related messages favoring the introduction of the product to the accounts.
Final thoughts
As I have already said good distributors are not commodities. Therefore, finding and selecting distributors in the medical business is a complex task. As in all relationships, the first months are critical for long-term success.
In my opinion, the onboarding process and its importance are frequently underestimated. For a small medium-sized enterprise in the medical business, it is much better to have fewer distributors producing good results than many producing negligible sales. Make sure that your new distributor is making sales in the first months by providing a complete onboarding program. This is the way to make the best first impression with your distributor.
What do you think about onboarding new distributors? Share your thoughts in the section below, and if you like the content of this blog, don’t forget to subscribe or connect on LinkedIn for more updates.