From 16 Years in B2B Animal Health Marketing, Here’s What Veterinary Clinics Actually Want From Industry Partners
We’ve been in the industry since 2010, and one thing is for sure: animal health has always been an exciting market. Change is rapid, innovation has been exciting, and veterinary clinics have always needed strong industry partners.
When we say ‘industry partner,’ we’re not talking about suppliers who simply push product. We’re talking about an actual, committed industry partnership. Veterinary clinics weathered the COVID storm, seeing incredible growth, while other industries floundered. Setting unrealistic expectations for forward-looking growth and causing serious burnout.
Here are the facts. Veterinary staffing shortages are better than they were, but to call them good would be an overstatement. Mental health and burnout remain hot topics in vet med due to the aforementioned staffing pinch. Client expectations are growing, and the veterinary teams are hustling to keep up with the times.
You hear it right? They need a partner. Not noise vying for their attention that is already stretched too thin. Those companies in animal health who provide value are the ones who will earn the time, attention, and dollars of these time-starved heroes.
We’ve got a few tips to help you identify what veterinarians want based on our years of watching the industry evolve.
Here’s what veterinarians REALLY want.
Free, Frequent, and Practical Virtual Education
You want sales. They want to know how to practice better medicine. If you teach them how to practice better medicine and your product is a part of that puzzle, we can win. Virtual education is a low-pressure way to start a relationship with a prospect.
Typically, veterinarians begin their product exploration journey with education. Common formats include webinars, downloads, quizzes, checklists, or videos. These work best when your product is positioned as a component of a multimodal solution, so veterinarians can learn pearls of information on how to improve overall care.
Clinical case studies are especially powerful, allowing veterinarians to see real-world outcomes and envision how your product might fit into their existing treatment protocols.
Producing educational content can feel like a big lift, but in our experience, it’s a stage of the funnel that you simply cannot bypass. Unless your product is super standard-of-care and your sale is very transactional, you’ll need to spend time and effort developing educational content.
For novel products, the educational demand is even higher, and prospects will likely require multiple educational touches before they’re ready for a conversation. Veterinarians are risk-averse and like to do their homework before agreeing to a sales conversation.
In-Person Lunch and Learns
I know, I know. You’re worried that people will just invite you in for lunch. The team doesn’t want to spend the time. We’ve heard it all, but the reality is that lunch-and-learns work. You need a qualification process before stepping in with a tower of pizzas, for sure, but a well-qualified lunch-and-learn can be a major sales generator. Why do they work:
You can educate the whole team. Decision-making processes in the veterinary clinic are increasingly done by committee. Concluding a single meeting with the whole staff can accelerate your sales process.
The presentation can be tailored to the team’s needs based on their biggest concerns. Common themes are workflow adaptations, clinical efficacy, and ROI or pricing.
Access to the entire team gives you the chance for a highly interactive forum that can speed up the sales process.
These meetings build trust and often feel more collaborative than transactional.
On a phone call, the prospect can cut you off after 5 minutes. The commitment for a lunch-and-learn is typically 60 minutes, giving you enough time to plan your approach.
A lunch-and-learn doesn’t just mean showing up with some Panera and hoping for the best. Successful lunch-and-learns are rehearsed and carefully planned to lead to the sales conversation. Come equipped with offers that incentivize the prospect to agree to the next steps or to the sale at the lunch-and-learn.
A Partner Who “Gets” Their Workflow
This doesn’t just mean they understand how to implement new technologies. It means they understand when veterinarians are busy, when it’s appropriate to schedule a meeting, who to invite to the meeting, and when it’s okay to text because they are simply too busy for email, etc.
In our experience, the best partners know that they need to ask for communication channel preferences and cadences at the start of the relationship. Veterinarians appreciate flexibility and understanding of what their day-to-day looks like. In summary, respect their time. That trust-building will go a long way.
If a veterinarian does decide to move forward with your technology, they expect support with implementation. Think through the entire customer experience. Veterinarians talk, and if your customer support is poor…it won’t be a secret for long.
Post-Sale Pet Owner Communication Support
You educate the veterinarian, and then it falls on the veterinarian to educate the pet owner. You may have heard that veterinarians love pet owner handouts. You heard correctly. Provide turnkey client educational resources to help lighten the veterinarian's load. Helpful tools include:
Ready to publish social media posts
Client education videos
Client brochures and posters
Detailed education handouts
Screening forms if appropriate
Text to put on the website to promote the new service
Successful veterinary marketing often included B2B2C support. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, give us a shout; we’ve got a lot of experience creating these toolkits.
Make the Market a Better Place
Veterinarians are driven by purpose: to heal. They want partners who share the same level of commitment to the industry. Find a cause that aligns with your company’s goals and those of your target audience to find some common ground in which to earn trust. Some organizations to investigate if you’re new to the industry:
Here are a Few Things Veterinarians Definitely DON’T WANT
Overly aggressive sales tactics. We commonly see folks enter animal health who already have a product in human healthcare. Sometimes those companies have sales teams who work in human healthcare and try to cross over into the veterinary domain with aggressive tactics. They simply don’t work. The demographic of vet med is different. Their motivations are different. Being aggressive is a sure way to prove you are NOT a partner.
Marketing that is high on snazz and low on clinical context. Veterinarians would be fine skipping the fluff and getting down to the nuts and bolts of clinical relevance.
Ignoring their team. Ohhhh yeah! They don’t love it when you ignore veterinarian technicians, why? Because they’re part of the team, and chances are, whatever you are selling, they will be part of the day-to-day implementation. They are big on teamwork and treat everyone on the staff like they’re gold.
Dropping by when you should know it’s a bad time, or not ‘reading the room’ when you DO drop by, and it’s clearly a bad time.
Proceeding on your cookie-cutter talk track when they’ve got something specific in mind they want to discuss. They are time-starved; if they’ve got a specific question, it's better to spend the time on what they want rather than blindly marching through the script.
Noise. You need to provide value; if what you are approaching them with isn’t valuable…try again.
Veterinary Marketing Works Best When it Actually Feels like a Partnership
Veterinary teams are not looking for more sales pitches. They are looking for partners who understand their environment and help them deliver better care.
For B2B animal health marketers, this requires a shift in perspective. Successful veterinary marketing is not about pushing products; it’s about supporting the clinics that use them.
Build a strong foundational relationship in this market,t and you’ll have a customer for life. Come in too hot with blinders on, and you’ll find it a tough nut to crack.
If you need help navigating the nuances of the animal health market, give us a shout! We have been doing it since 2010, after all.