A customer walks up to a pharmacy counter with a question about a cough that won't go away. The pharmacist or pharmacy assistant has perhaps ninety seconds. In that time they will ask two or three questions, decide whether this needs a doctor, and, if it doesn't, recommend something. Which product they recommend, and how convincingly, depends on what they happen to remember about the options on the shelf behind them.
Your brand's share of that moment is decided by someone you don't employ, don't manage and can't send on a training course. The same is true of the veterinary nurse suggesting a behavioural product, the distributor's sales rep presenting your device to a hospital buyer, and the optician's assistant recommending an eye care range. In partner and retail channels, product knowledge is a precondition of the recommendation, and brands that make it easy, quick and worthwhile for channel staff to learn give themselves a better chance of earning it. This piece covers why the usual approaches underperform, what works better, and how to measure it honestly, including what learning data can and cannot prove.
The person who recommends is not on your payroll
Life Sciences companies sell through more intermediaries than they sometimes admit. Consumer health brands rely on pharmacists and pharmacy assistants. Animal health relies on clinic teams. MedTech often works through distributors and dealers, especially outside the largest markets. Nutrition and specialist products go through dietitians, pharmacies and retailers. In every case, the last conversation before purchase is held by someone who works for someone else.
These people are not short of goodwill. They are short of time and attention. A pharmacy assistant might have dozens of brands competing for shelf space and mindshare in a single category. A distributor rep may carry hundreds of product codes from several manufacturers. Each brand wants them to know its story. Very few make that easy.
What is at stake is the recommendation itself. When channel staff understand the underlying problem (the type of cough, the cause of the cat's stress, the anatomy that makes one device a better fit) they recommend with confidence. When they don't, they default to the brand they know best, the one with the best margin, or the one the customer asked for.
MedTech distributors deserve a special mention. A distributor rep presenting your device to a hospital buyer or a procurement committee is effectively your field force in that market, often without ever having attended a surgery or seen the device used in complex anatomy. The recommendation they make, and the objections they can answer, set your share in markets where you may have no direct presence at all.
Don't treat these channels as one. In an OTC pharmacy, the pharmacist has a professional duty to the customer, carries several competing brands in each category, and may be bound by rules on what a manufacturer can offer pharmacy staff. In an animal-health clinic, the recommendation sits inside a consultation led by the vet, and the clinic owner decides what the team spends time on. A MedTech distributor is a contracted commercial partner, often with training obligations written into the distribution agreement and its own sales targets. The design principles below travel across all three. The permissions, incentives and data rules do not.
Why the usual channel training programs underperform
Most brands already invest in channel education. The formats are familiar: a detailed product training at the distributor's annual meeting, a webinar series for pharmacy teams, an e-learning module on a partner portal, a printed guide next to the till. Each has a place. Together they share three weaknesses.
They are long. Channel staff rarely have an uninterrupted hour, and when they do, they don't want to spend it on one manufacturer's module.
They are one-off. Murre and Dros's 2015 replication of Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve illustrates forgetting in a single-participant experiment using nonsense syllables. It tells us nothing precise about product details, but a webinar in March with nothing after it is a poor bet for May.
They are unmeasured. Attendance and completion can be counted. What people actually know, and whether it changes, usually can't. So the brand doesn't know which messages landed, which store or distributor team is strong, or which misconception is costing it recommendations.
A fair objection: channel staff will never engage with a brand's learning activity as much as the brand's own employees, so why invest heavily? We think that's right as a starting assumption and wrong as a conclusion. Engagement from an external audience has to be earned, and it can be, if the format respects their time and gives them something they value professionally.
What works better: short, competitive, useful the same day
From the channel programs we have run, four design principles make the difference.
Keep each interaction to a minute or two
A one-minute challenge, five questions in sixty seconds, fits into the gaps of a counter or a clinic day. A short piece of content linked to each question gives people the explanation when they want it, without forcing them through it first. The question does the work: retrieving an answer strengthens memory far more than rereading a leaflet.
Make it competitive, between people who know each other
Channel staff respond to competition with peers: one pharmacy against another in the same city, one distributor team against another, individuals against colleagues. A short, synchronised battle creates energy that a library of modules never does. Rankings and recognition for the winning team or store give people a reason to come back, and repeated play is what produces learning.
Teach the problem before the product
This is the principle brands find hardest. The instinct is to fill the program with brand messages: key features, pack sizes, claims. But channel staff recommend products to solve problems. If they understand the problem better, they will place the right product with far less persuasion. In our experience, the product block works best as the smaller, practical part of a program that is mostly about the condition, the patient or the animal.
Give them something they can use this afternoon
The best channel questions are the ones that improve the next customer conversation, whatever product ends up being recommended. That builds trust. It also makes the brand the one that helped staff do their job better, which is a stronger position than the brand that sent the most promotional material.
Channel staff recommend products to solve problems. If they understand the problem better, they will place the right product with far less persuasion.
A program we ran, and what it taught us about channels
In 2022 we ran a four-day battle for an animal health company with veterinary clinic teams in Spain, around a range of products that clinics recommend rather than prescribe. Participation was voluntary, and the audience owed the brand nothing. 1,173 clinic staff took part and generated about 67,000 answers. Four fifths of the questions were about cats, not about the product.
Two things stood out. First, reach: a short, competitive format pulled in more than a thousand external professionals in four days. Second, the limits of a single short window. We identified 12,339 knowledge gaps at first attempt and verified 19% of them as closed. Several of the most commercially important misconceptions, including advice on feeding bowls in multi-cat homes and how to play with a kitten, barely moved. The questions simply didn't come back to the same people often enough in four days for most gaps to close.
The lesson we took for any channel program: the competitive burst earns attention, and a period of light reinforcement afterwards is what gives gaps a chance to close. Even then, a gap closed in the game shows what someone knows, not what they say at the counter, and nothing in that program measured recommendations or sales.
Measure the channel the way you would measure your own field
Once channel staff are answering questions regularly, you get something most brands have never had: a view of what the channel knows. That view is worth using properly.
- Readiness by store, distributor, region and topic, so account teams know where to spend their visits.
- The specific facts channel staff most often get wrong, which often reveal a problem in the brand's own materials.
- Gaps that close with repetition, and the stubborn misconceptions that need a conversation with your own rep or KAM.
- Participation patterns, which tell you which partners are engaged and which have gone quiet.
We measure a gap the strict way: one person wrong on one question at first attempt, and closed only when that same person gets it right later. That stops you from confusing a rising average, driven by new and stronger participants, with real improvement.
Link those measures with sell-out data where you can, and read the link as a hypothesis, not a result. A region where readiness is low and sell-out is lagging gives your commercial team something specific to test. Sell-out also moves with price, stock, promotions and the partner's own priorities, so don't attribute it to learning. If you want evidence on recommendations, measure them separately, for example with mystery shopping or partner-reported observations.
Settle the partner questions before launch
Because channel staff work for someone else, five questions need answers before a single question goes live.
- Participation: invitations usually go through the partner (the pharmacy group, the clinic owner, the distributor's sales manager), and taking part should be genuinely voluntary.
- Data ownership: individual results belong to people you don't employ. Agree with the partner, and in your privacy notice, what each side sees; often the brand sees aggregates by store or team, and the partner sees its own people.
- Local approval: content goes through your local medical-legal review, and in some markets the partner's own compliance too.
- Incentives: prizes for pharmacists, vets or clinic staff can fall under local rules on inducements. Recognition and professional value are safer than gifts, and still work.
- The relationship: the partner carries your competitors. A program that helps staff with the customer's problem, whatever gets recommended, is easier for a partner to support than a brand push.
Your own field team is part of the channel program
Channel programs are often run by marketing or trade teams, with the brand's own reps on the sidelines. That is a missed opportunity. The rep or KAM who visits the pharmacy, clinic or distributor is the natural person to follow up on what the program reveals.
If a region's pharmacies consistently misunderstand when to refer a customer to a doctor, the rep can raise it in the next visit, with a simple explanation and approved material. If a distributor's team is weak on the patient selection criteria for a device, the KAM can run a short session with the distributor's sales manager. The program provides the diagnosis. Your people deliver the treatment.
It also works the other way round. Your own field team should know the same problem-first content at least as well as the channel staff they visit. Nothing undermines a brand faster than a pharmacy assistant who scored higher than the manufacturer's rep in the same challenge.
Start with a channel-readiness pilot
You don't need a pan-European channel academy to begin. Run a pilot with one category, one partner group and one moment: the cough and cold season in a pharmacy chain, a range extension in a group of clinics, a new device entering one distributor's portfolio. Write down, with your medical or technical experts, the twenty facts about the problem and the product that most affect the recommendation. Open with a short battle, follow with four to six weeks of light reinforcement, and verify closure person by person. Report three things separately: participation, gaps verified closed, and, if you can arrange it, a small behaviour check such as mystery shopping. Track sell-out as context, not as proof.
Match the pilot to your sector. If you work in animal health, the clinic program above is the closest reference. For pharmacy or distributor channels, set your own baseline rather than borrowing its numbers.
That is the kind of pilot we design and run with Atrivity for pharmacy, clinic and distributor channels.
The question to take to your next channel planning meeting is short: what does the person at the counter need to understand for our product to be the obvious recommendation, and how would we know whether they do?