The key to a veterinary practice’s long-term financial success lies in building and maintaining healthy, profitable, and long-lasting client relationships. Building and managing successful client relationships requires that the practice strive sincerely to serve all the needs of the client’s pet throughout its life. When a client experiences any need associated with the pet, whether it is to treat a particular illness or accident, board the pet when the client is traveling, take care of its grooming needs, or purchase medications or nutritious food for it, the practice manager’s goal should be to get the client to seek out your veterinary practice without considering any of your competitors. This is where selling complementary products and services effectively based on understanding the logic behind pricing
them can have powerful benefits.

Many products and services that are offered by a veterinary practice are complementary; that is, they are purchased and consumed together by the client for their pet. When one particular item is sold by the practice, and it stimulates demand for other items, the items are complements. Consider the example of pet vaccinations. When a dog owner decides to vaccinate their pet with a rabies vaccine at your practice, it increases the likelihood that they will also purchase other vaccines like DHLPP and Bordetella to protect their dog from other diseases. Buying just one vaccine will fail to achieve the client’s goal of protecting their pet’s health; purchasing all the vaccines together will lead them to achieve this goal. In this example, the dog vaccines are complementary products because the demand
for the rabies vaccine increased the client’s demand for the DHLPP, Bordetella, and other dog vaccines, and vice versa.

In this best practice tool, we will consider the importance of complementary products and services for a veterinary practice that is interested in building and maintaining profitable client relationships. We will consider three principles of complementary pricing strategy and describe the different pricing strategies that the practice manager can use to emphasize and sell complementary products and services effectively to clients. These methods include creating a low-price image or a high-value price image for the practice’s brand, using the “razor-blade pricing” model, and offering complementary price promotions such as loss-leader discounts and bundle-based discounts.