Creating Brand Loyalty Throughout Your Distribution Channel

As a company that sells into private practices, you’re tasked with a unique challenge: reaching a sales target that consists of a wide variety of decision makers. Rather than an individual or even a compact group that makes the final call, you’re faced with a veritable ecosystem of stakeholders, all of whom have some say in the purchase decision.

This complex environment requires even more careful targeting and campaigning to every level and influencer within the supply chain. By consistently and strategically focusing your attention on each member, you create preference from end to end and secure the loyalty of your audience.

But strategies to reach each level differ. Marketing that’s meant to reach practitioners may not be as compelling to office managers. Thus, it’s important to truly know every type of influencer in your sales ecosystem, develop the right marketing messages, and make use of the appropriate channels to communicate with them most effectively.

Beyond this complexity, you have additional variances depending on whether your company sells directly or through a distributorship. This creates even more differences in how you focus your marketing.

The Direct Sales Influencers

In direct sales, you’ll find a number of influencers are at play, determining the outcome of your efforts. First, we’ll look at those that often hold most of the cards: purchasing groups and practitioners, and the connection between the two.

The Purchasing Group/Practitioner Relationship

If your target is medical or dental practices, you’ve certainly dealt with GPOs at some point. These groups are able to secure discounts for their practices by striking contracts with suppliers and distributors. This cuts costs for the practices, but it also makes the practitioners far less likely to buy outside of their GPO contract. Thus, if you’re not on the group purchasing contract, you’re not in the game. Or are you?

Practitioners and other decision makers may be persuaded to buy off-contract, or even push their GPO to start including certain products or companies in their contract. If there is enough demand for the product, the purchasing group may find it in their best interest to add them to the contract – or the practitioner may simply be motivated to buy on their own.

Again, this entirely depends on demand. There needs to be enough desire on the part of the practitioner or end user to get around the pull of purchasing group discounts. This can be accomplished through the messages you send both through your salespeople and your marketing materials.

Messaging that simply relays product features is far from compelling to practitioners. They have seen countless ads that list how a product is the best, fastest, most reliable, most cutting-edge, and so on. Instead, marketing needs to focus on communicating practical, yet innovative, answers to specific industry challenges.

Most practitioners go looking for new products in response to a problem that has arisen. Thus, you can draw in interest by first addressing the problem – then showing how your product is the solution. This creates a personal, relevant draw for the practitioner, which in turn gives rise to the demand. This method is useful even in practices without GPOs, as practitioners are significant stakeholders in every decision in every practice.

Your distributor has a number of brands it’s pushing in addition to your own. In general, the salespeople have no preference as to what brand they sell, as long as they’re able to sell as much product as possible. Therefore, the distributor sales team will often resort to pushing whatever is a sure sale.

Many companies create monetary incentives for the sales team to motivate them to sell their specific brand. The wrong type of incentive, however, may only succeed in cutting your own margins – and as soon as the incentive is gone, so is your sales increase. Instead, making use of unique and proven incentive strategies will serve to encourage and motivate the sales team in a more lasting way.

Yet another effective way to motivate the sales team is to make it as easy as possible for them to sell your product. By supplying your distributors with high-quality marketing materials (for example, original leavebehinds or specialized brochures) and in-depth training on the unique selling points of your product, you make it that much easier to sell, and the team will be confident they can close more sales.

Streamlining the sales process for your distributor also relies on the previously outlined strategies of targeting consumers and practitioners. If there is enough market interest, sales will come much more smoothly, and sales reps will want to push those products first.

Building Loyalty from Preference

Preference must be crafted at each point of contact within the sales cycle. By targeting every member of your ecosystem, you shape perceptions of your brand in consumers all the way to practitioners and other decision makers. This perception and visibility is what inevitably drives initial demand and, ultimately, brand choice.

From here, you can move forward to develop loyalty, as sales opportunities become long-lasting relationships. What started as a mere inclination can become the foundation of a high lifetime value customer base – and it all starts with a comprehensive plan that targets each and every player in the chain.