Distributors: Not for Marketing
Carlton Hoyt
Many life science tools manufacturers, especially smaller companies, have a tendency to push a lot of marketing responsibility on to their distributors. In most such cases, the manufacturer often retains some broad marketing responsibilities which are usually focused on branding or awareness (for example, advertising in scientific journals or websites) and leaves their distributors responsible for most or all aspects of lead generation and nurturing. Allow me to take a very clear stance: this is a massive mistake – one that costs life science tools companies and their distributors incredible amounts of lost potential product demand (and, in turn, revenue).
Your distributors strong point is not marketing your products. It’s selling your products. It doesn’t matter who your distributors are – they are salesmen first and marketers second. There is a very good reason for this.
Creating and distributing individual marketing communications is relatively cheap. Developing a highly effective content-oriented marketing strategy, framing the campaign architecture, then building and deploying such a campaign is a very laborious process that can require a very significant time commitment by highly skilled marketers. A distributor, with maybe dozens or hundreds of product lines, can not realistically be expected to take on that burden. Additionally, distributors’ internal competencies often strongly favor sales to marketing, and many smaller distributors lack sufficient in-house marketing skill to perform deep analyses on products (and, perhaps, markets) that are novel to them. As distribution contracts may be tenuous and temporary, distributors are rightfully hesitant to devote such resources to marketing.
Life science tools manufacturers would be far better served by creating holistic marketing strategies that map out how to take prospective customers through lead generation to the point of sale, defining what will be performed by themselves and what will be handed off to the distributor (if any). If the distributors will be responsible for any aspects of marketing, there should be a high degree of collaboration to ensure that the marketing efforts are synergistic and build a single, coherent campaign rather than a set of discreet, loosely-related components. In other words, it is acceptable for your distributors to execute parts of your marketing campaign, and indeed they may have marketing resources which can help manufacturers generate demand beyond what the manufacturers could generate on their own, but they should not be left to design the campaigns or key marketing messages.
While salesmen are certainly capable of generating leads, marketing is a much more efficient and effective tool for this purpose. Because life science tools manufacturers often leave lead generation to their distributors, who are heavily sales-oriented and almost always have a very limited incentive to invest heavily in marketing for any single product line, a lot of potential demand is never realized and both manufacturers and distributors suffer from sub-par sales.
A common failure in life science marketing is being too pushy. Marketers frequently try to force scientists into accepting their viewpoints by making bold claims and attempting to force marketing content upon them. This approach, however, misjudges the audience. Scientists are taught to be skeptical and to arrive at their own conclusions. When companies are selling scientific products to them, scientists approach a purchasing decision with that same level of skepticism. Bold claims and forcefully wielded content do not overcome that skepticism.
We see it again and again, and it’s often the fault of investors. A promising technology, a talented team, and what would otherwise be a great young company fail. A life science tool doesn’t become the blockbuster it was pitched as, and because the company was created with the vision of huge sales numbers that never materialized, it goes under. Often it doesn’t go under until multiple additional rounds of financing are pumped into the fledgling company. The company never goes into the black because everyone bet too big, and everyone loses.
