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Marketing is (also) education: how to align sales and marketing in animal health?

In the field of animal health, the marketing and sales functions will always benefit from working in synergy, as the complexity of products requires a detailed understanding from all the players.

Gregory Casseleux and Christophe Magaud (Wolf Learning Consulting), who both have many years’ combined experience in marketing and sales in the animal health sector, share with us their vision of the key to growth: working collaboratively and co-creating tools to serve common objectives. When marketing and sales work together to achieve a common sales development objective, the likelihood of getting a signature on the dotted line increases by 67% ^[1]. Let’s unpack this essential interdepartmental approach with these two vet company directors!

Where do the discrepancies between marketing and sales departments come from?

Christophe Magaud – Ahead of the project implementation, the marketing team will have everything clearly mapped out according to the final objective, whereas the sales team can look at it through a customer lens to raise likely objections. This is a natural outcome as the sales team will analyse their best possible path to success. This difference between the teams can potentially lead to misalignment and inefficiency.

Grégory Casseleux – Both departments have the same ambition: to bring value to their customers, sell their company’s solutions and contribute to shared growth, but with different approaches. On the marketing side, this involves brand creation and management, as well as the implementation of activation campaigns; on the sales side, it means seeking to offer direct solutions to customers’ challenges. Their responsibilities overlap, and tensions between them often arise from a lack of communication. But because their activities are so closely linked, synergy is the key to optimum performance. This is even more crucial given that we’re talking about health here. So it’s crucial that everyone speak with one voice, with a scientific backed message that reflects a firm understanding of customer needs as well as of the animal health biosphere.

Christophe Magaud – The marketing function needs to explain the “why” of its’ campaign “clearly and with confidence”. In this way, it encourages the sales team to understand and view the project through marketing eyes with everything at stake. This is all the more important as products and services, like the customer context, become increasingly complex. That’s why it’s in the marketing team’s interest to work closely with sales management on adoption models and skills development. All this needs to be anticipated, both in terms of tools and training, as part of a partnership approach.

How can we align the objectives of these two functions ?

Grégory Casseleux – The key to success is collaboration. By working together at a very early stage, marketing and sales benefit from their complementary profiles, with marketing being more creative and sales more pragmatic. We need to listen carefully and adjust sales strategy according to the field. The marketing plan and sales support tools benefit from being co-developed with those who are in direct contact with customers. The product launches that work best are co-created with the input of the two functions, marketing and sales. Analysing results post implementation is also important to see the shared objectives achieved. It shows the value of both marketing’s efforts to enrich the sales strategy and the performance of sales staff in winning the trust of their customers.

Let’s take a concrete example: a campaign to launch a drug to treat heart failure in dogs. To ensure that the right message was delivered, marketing commissioned a training course, which sales staff rolled out to their customers in collaboration with the animal health company’s technical field vets. The training aimed to help vets diagnose heart failure more effectively from chest x-rays. The vets, trained by the sales team, achieved three times more sales of the drug than those who had not taken the training: by identifying cases of heart failure better (or earlier), they prescribed more of the drug. This is tangible proof of a successful roll-out, resulting from the synergy between marketing and sales, which enabled an effective training strategy to be put in place.

Christophe Magaud – When marketing and sales teams emerge from a sales seminar training session feeling totally aligned and ready to set off on a campaign together, it’s a success! But it’s not that simple. With limited training time and a wide range of subjects to cover, sales staff must take onboard many highly technical concepts, over and above their basic sales knowledge, in order to convince their veterinary customers, who have a wide range of scientific skills. That’s why training needs to be rethought and optimised, using more inverted teaching methods. How does this work? It involves preparing the training time beforehand and remotely, with practical exercises and group training, all coupled with tools that will help the salesperson to raise awareness among their own customers, or at least to convince them. The results and impact of the campaigns must then be measured using campaign performance indicators (KPIs), right from the start.

This example shows the value of training in harmonising marketing and sales objectives. Is this the rule?

Grégory Casseleux – As Christophe Magaud mentioned, the role of marketing is not just about brand image. It is also responsible for devising effective product messages. A successful product launch therefore requires both a strong brand and effective training strategies around the product and its ecosystem. Looking at it from this point of view, the training of stakeholders is key. Another example of this, is when a veterinary laboratory expanded its’ product range to include medical devices. Suddenly, the sales staff found themselves selling rental contracts for these devices in addition to medicines. To support them, the marketing department targeted training across all strata of the company. First of all, the global strategic teams were trained, enabling them to educate the laboratory’s local marketing, sales and veterinary teams about the product and its market. The training also covered the sales force’s interactions with veterinary clinics. The sales force didn’t just sell the devices, they showed them how they worked and how they could help them in their day-to-day work. This cascade of training helped to align the objectives of the company’s entire value chain. That’s what made this launch such a success. Christophe Magaud – In the context of this type of innovative launch, which leads to a change of habit for the sales force and a change of practice for the veterinary customer, it is essential to provide new information to help them understand and therefore absorb this learning. Sales staff will only be effective in selling a product if they understand its principles and the issues involved. They will be more confident when dealing with their customers. The marketing team can then become an ally of change by offering tools to train the sales team and help them more effectively engage their customers to bring about changes in their practices and behaviours. This is where marketing plays its role of conviction, via training, encouraging us to assert that “marketing is also education“. This point is all the more important as products become increasingly technological and complex. Animal health companies are moving away from product marketing and towards customer marketing, to incorporate the concept of comprehensive services, which means that the role of the salesperson needs to evolve, so that he or she is now in a position to provide meaningful advice to the customer.

^[1] “7 problèmes (et leurs solutions) dans la relation entre la vente et le marketing“, BtoB Leaders, 2021.