The Animal Health and Nutrition industry has a complex supply chain from the manufacturer to the end user. This is true for veterinary drugs, vaccines, and feed additives. Depending on the nature of your product, it may be difficult to define who’s a channel partner and who’s an end user. There’s no right or wrong answer here; it all depends on what choices your company makes related to their winning aspiration, where to play, and how to win.
The manufacturer’s marketing team must work closely with their channel partners to ensure that their value proposition messages reach the end user unadulterated. To achieve this goal, most companies train the partner’s sales force and provide technical support directly to the end user. Still, those efforts may fall short, particularly if your brand carries a big premium price, its message is overly technical, or both. In fact, sometimes marketers attempt to justify their premium price by making the brand’s message even more technical, which makes the problem worse.
At the same time, the marketing team must work hard to keep their channel partners motivated and engaged with their initiatives. You should resist the temptation of viewing your channel partners as “the necessary evil” of your go-to-market strategy. Instead, notice and recognize the tremendous value that they add to your brand and company. According to Niall Devitt, writing for socialmediatoday.com, “(channel) partners can be a key differentiator in developing, communicating, and delivering value to your customers. They can help fill holes in your value proposition, extending the strength of the total offering to your target customers.”
In this article, I will present some ideas for achieving these two goals, drawing from lessons learned over the years working with different types of channel partners in the Animal Health and Nutrition industry.
Common incentives don’t tap the full potential of your channel partners – you must get them excited and motivated to promote your brand’s message.
The common wisdom is that channel partners only care about selling what’s easy to sell, what they can make a lot of money from, and what costs little to service. Most channel partners care deeply about the success of their customers and take pride in providing good service, be it in the form of on-time delivery or an internationally recognized expert who comes for a one-on-one meeting with their best customers.
A few years ago, I helped a brand team plan the launch of a novel dairy and beef cattle product in Australia. The success of the launch depended entirely on the enthusiastic engagement of the channel partner, as they would be the brand’s ambassadors, responsible for importing the product, distributing it throughout the country, and providing all manner of services to two types of intermediaries (supplement makers and finished feed manufacturers) and to the end users (dairy farmers, extensive beef ranchers, and feedlot operators).
The way the brand team found to engage them was through a series of online planning sessions and by working with a local ad agency to create a launch campaign. The channel partner appreciated that the brand team took their input to heart and designed the launch according to what would make the most sense for the local market, from choosing the target segments to the details of how to communicate with Aussie ranchers.
The result was so successful that the Australian launch campaign became a model for many other important dairy and beef markets, including South Africa, Brazil, and the USA. The secret of that initial success was clearly the engagement of the channel partner, who saw the potential of the new product in their market and invested significant resources to promote it in that big and diverse market.
Your channel partners will always rely on your expertise to solve their customer’s problems
Listening to your channel partner’s input is clearly important. Still, nothing substitutes for the expertise of the end user’s problems that your brand promises to solve. This is something that only you can provide, and the channel partner will watch very closely how well you deliver it. If they see that you (or your technical experts) really understand their customer’s problems and propose a complete solution package beyond the brand’s message, their motivation to sell your brand will increase by many orders of magnitude.
This is a lesson I learned working with veterinary vaccines for farm animals. Vaccines are critically important in food animal operations to prevent the spreading of infectious diseases that can decimate the herds and the farmer’s profits. If your brand solves an important and complex problem that requires many layers of technical explanation, you will have to provide expertise. Do it, and your channel partner will be a very motivated champion of your brand. Fail to do it, and the channel partner will give up promoting it because they don’t want to get entangled in technical issues they don’t understand.
Integrate your marketing communication strategy with theirs for the best results.
A third strategy to motivate your channel partners is to organize your marketing communication campaigns together with them. This is true for all types of communication campaigns: live events, industry conferences, trade shows, advertising campaigns, and every other type of media you choose to deploy. Many times, the partner will expect you to take the lead while they provide local support, whereas other times, they may take the lead and expect you to provide special resources (co-sponsoring the campaign, for example, or bringing a global key opinion leader to speak at a conference).
Either way, don’t miss the opportunity of working closely with your channel partner. Not only will they appreciate the true partnership shown, but the quality of your relationship with them will grow, bringing greater success in the future.
In summary, channel partners can be motivated to become your brand champions. They complement your strengths in ways that enhance your brand’s value proposition. Engage them in planning and executing your marketing initiative, provide the needed expertise to solve their customer’s problems, and integrate your communication strategy with theirs to achieve optimal results for your brand and for the overall success of the partnership.
If you are ready to implement marketing strategies that motivate your channel partners by focusing on their customer’s success, contact us .
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