10 Elemental Strategies for Building a Successful Dealer Incentive Program
Dealer incentive programs are the initiatives taken by businesses to encourage their dealers and distributors to sell more by incentivizing their efforts. A dealership can be considered successful only when it adds value to the business as well as the dealers. Strong dealerships can bring unexpected growth to your business. However, you need to ensure the satisfaction of your dealers and distributor for this.
Even the most dedicated dealers can become less efficient at times. Although they work for their profit, it becomes necessary to encourage them to perform better. To keep them motivated for a longer period, the best way is to incentivize their performances.
You can build healthy competition among all your dealers or plan other types of incentive programs that align with your business.
1. Open-Ended Strategy
Under an open-ended incentive strategy, you can encourage your dealers to sell more than the previous year. Set a sales milestone slightly higher than their last year’s sales quota and offer attractive incentives for achieving their goal. These programs are budget friendly as you only need to reward the dealers on incremental sales.
You can also do it via a plateau-based incentive program. This type of program sets different goals and offers higher incentives for achieving higher goals. For example, set different milestones at 5%, 10%, and 15% of their last year’s sales. The higher milestone they achieve, the better incentives they receive.
2. Closed-Ended Strategy
This strategy is based on the concept of rewarding the highest-performing dealers. You can reward the top performers region-wise, category-wise, and based on other factors. Also, you need to plan whether you are going to offer these incentives monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, or yearly.
Along with the category-wise top performers, you can make your program more exciting by rewarding the overall topmost performers. If you are offering category-wise top performers incentives monthly, you can keep a different incentive scheme for the overall 3-5 top performers of the year.
3. New Product Introduction
When you launch a new product in the market, it becomes difficult to encourage your dealers to sell these new launches. They are already comfortable with selling the older ones and don’t want to complicate their process by learning about a new product. But with a well-planned incentive scheme, you can make your dealers sell these new products in the market.
It can be done by offering higher margins on these products as an introductory benefit. You can reward your dealers in the form of some monetary or non-monetary benefits for achieving a particular number of sales for a newly launched product.
4. Presales Incentives
When you give your dealers a yearly or half-yearly sales target, presales incentives can come in handy to help them stay motivated. While your dealers are focussing only on the yearly goal, you must focus on short-term as well as long-term sales goals. You can allow them to collect a part of their incentive commission in between. Or offer some small non-monetary gifts to remind them of the bigger incentive they can receive after achieving their goal.
5. Training Incentives
Educating and training your dealers is very important as they are the ones to deal with your end users. If they don’t have a thorough understanding of your products/services, they will not be able to explain them to the consumers. It affects them as well as your business.
So, creating dealer education programs and certifications becomes essential for every company, especially when you expect most of your revenue to come through dealers. But how can you make them enrol in these education programs?
Offer monetary incentives or certifications or other types of benefits upon completing an education program. After they complete the certification, you can send them on a fully-funded trip and ask them to visit your offices there. They can learn new things there and implement them after coming back.
6. Product-Specific Programs
When you want to boost sales for a particular product, the best way to do it is to offer additional margins or some incentives on it. Motivate your dealers to sell these products on a priority by offering them additional bonuses or rewards that they value.
However, you might be putting the sales of your other products at risk. So, implement such a scheme only when you need to push the sales for a particular product.
7. Split Incentives
A split incentive program can add excitement to your dealers’ programs and improve dealer productivity. You can ask two or more dealers from different locations to work together and achieve specific sales targets. This can be done by offering double bonuses to both dealers without any differentiation, i.e., each of the two dealers receives equal benefits upon reaching the target.
8. Dealer-Affinity Programs
To make the best-performing dealers valued, you can organise special meetups. Such meetups should provide the dealers with opportunities for networking, learning, and interacting with relevant managers at the company. Dealers from different locations and backgrounds can connect and learn from each other.
9. Sales Pusher Programs
To promote sales during a particular season, you can come up with short-term incentive schemes for your dealers. These schemes can either be target-based or performance-based. Offering bonuses or incentives based on short-term sales goals can be very effective in accelerating sales during a particular period.
10. Database Programs
The importance of customer data needs not be defined as every business is aware of it. This data will help you understand the interests of your customers and recommend products relevant to their needs. As your dealers are connecting directly with your consumers, you can collect customer data only through your dealers.
Incentivizing customer data collection by your dealers would be the best way to do it. The more data they collect, the more rewards they offer. Using your customer data in the right manner can be much more profitable for a business than you might have expected.
Build The Most Effective Dealer Incentive Program
Dealer incentive programs must be simple and offer rewards valued by your dealers. You can reward the dealership or specific employees at the dealership. The brand’s relationship with the dealership plays an important role here. However, rewarding the dealers personally for their business and achievement is also important.
RewardPort can help you create and execute an effective dealer incentives program for your business. RewardPort offers you access to thousands of the latest rewards products and a quick setup for the program.
Frequently Asked Questions: -
Increasing profitability is a sum total of trust, value and costs. While cost reduction is important, it only serves as baseline hygiene, i.e., increasing the survivability of the dealer’s business during hard times. Gaining the trust of the consumers and offering value will ultimately improve the revenue potential for them.
Brand loyalty, defined as repeat purchases of a specific brand based on the perception of higher quality and better service than any competitor, is not price dependent. Companies with high brand loyalty grow revenues 2.5 times faster than their peers in the industry.
Any dealership which meets the minimum qualification criteria should be eligible to participate in the dealer incentive program. For example, regional dealerships, dealerships with a specified minimum turnover, etc., can be the criteria for qualification.
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How to Structure Your Dealer Incentive Program for Maximum Success?
In today’s highly competitive business world, it’s essential to motivate and incentivize your dealers to drive sales and maximize revenue. One effective way to achieve this goal is by implementing a dealer incentive program that rewards top-performing dealers and encourages others to improve their performance. However, structuring a successful dealer incentive program requires careful planning and execution.
In this blog, we will discuss how to structure your dealer incentive programs for maximum success.
What is a Dealer Incentive Program?
A dealer incentive program is a rewards program that motivates dealers to sell more of your products or services. It typically includes bonuses, discounts, or other incentives that encourage dealers to achieve specific sales targets or perform certain actions that benefit your business.
A dealer incentive program can be designed to reward dealers for various types of behavior, such as increasing sales, selling specific products or services, building relationships with customers, or improving customer satisfaction. The rewards can be monetary or non-monetary, such as exclusive access to new products or services, training opportunities, or recognition.
Why Implement a Dealer Incentive Program?
A dealer incentive program can provide several benefits to your business, such as:
- Boosting Sales: A well-designed dealer incentive program can motivate dealers to sell more of your products or services, leading to increased revenue and market share.
- Encouraging Customer Loyalty: By incentivizing dealers to build strong relationships with customers, you can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, leading to repeat business and positive word-of-mouth referrals.
- Improving Dealer Performance: By setting specific targets and rewarding top-performing dealers, you can encourage other dealers to improve their performance and increase their productivity.
- Strengthening Relationships with Dealers: By offering rewards and recognition to dealers, you can build stronger relationships with them, leading to a more collaborative and mutually beneficial partnership.
How to Structure a Successful Program?
1. Describe Your Goals
Like with any incentive scheme, start by outlining your goals in as much numerical detail as you can. The main goal keeps tabs on the exact outcomes you’re after, like higher sales. The secondary objective is to track the precise actions participants can take to accomplish the main goal.
Try to improve dealer salespeople’s participation in product training programs from the same time last year by more than 10% in the third quarter and achieve a 20% market share for a new product in its first full year of existence.
2. Decide Who and What is Important?
Determine which categories or which dealers, agents, or distributors are essential to your business if your organization sells through middlemen. Due to increasing retail consolidation, agents’ and representatives’ roles have diminished in the consumer business. When a small number of merchants hold a sizable part of the market, manufacturers no longer require hundreds of agents.
Also, it has become difficult for manufacturers of consumer goods to influence these massive merchants’ promotional strategies. But many business-to-business and consumer suppliers continue to channel a sizable portion of their volume through middlemen, and no incentive program will be successful until you identify the specific middlemen who are essential to it.
Also, specify how these target groups can assist you in achieving your goals, such as by stocking more merchandise, taking part in marketing, or training initiatives, putting up displays, joining marketing initiatives, or contributing customer datasets.
Typically, most of your business comes from your top 20% of dealers. So, the goal of incentive programs is to boost engagement among average performers as well as getting top achievers to push themselves more.
3. Find Out What's in it for Them
You must contend with many other businesses for the interest of your middlemen unless you have a strictly regulated group of agents that are dependent on your business. Everyone is continuously trying to think of compelling arguments for the middlemen to concentrate on their product.
Most intermediaries will ultimately act in their customers’ and businesses’ best interests, which may not always be your best interests. Smart suppliers are aware that they must provide middlemen with programs that enable them to achieve their objectives of raising sales and earnings.
Consider hosting a customer council prior to rolling out any incentive programs. Bring the best distributors, agents, and dealers to an all-expenses-paid gathering to learn about their unique requirements and worries. Although most middlemen would claim that increasing sales and profits are their top priorities, this does not necessarily indicate that increasing margin or commission by 1% will result in a material rise in sales.
Dealers and distributors frequently respond more positively to initiatives that assist them in solving core issues, such as reducing competition, enhancing salesperson training and retention, cultivating consumer loyalty, or increasing sales of a particular product or service category.
Additionally keep in mind that encouraging a dealer or distributor to carry large quantities of merchandise that never sells through is ineffective.
4. Structure the Program
It’s time to decide exactly what you want your middleman to do at this point. Usually, businesses ask them to stock or promote more of an existing product or take part in cooperative marketing initiatives.
However, what draws the middlemen in? Their suppliers all want them to carry more inventory and provide more market support for it. You ought to have left your meeting with important distributors or agents with further ideas for assisting them in achieving their goals.
You’ll improve performance among the middle 60% of dealers who can produce the most incremental volume by keeping your program straightforward. Finally, watch out for programs that manipulate sales by encouraging middlemen to make significant purchases or sales efforts during a program but nothing else before or after the qualifying time.
Select from Valuable Rewards
Make sure you can stick to the launch date you choose when choosing a launch date for your program. At RewardPort your program is managed from start to finish with hassle free solutions with full transparency.
The option of highly valued digital rewards further enhances our reward portfolio you can use regardless of geographies and regional boundaries.
Frequently Asked Questions: -
Dealer incentive programs are a way to reward top performers and let them know how much you appreciate what they do for the business. Customers who are loyal to you and your business will benefit from improved customer service and enduring business connections with your sales representatives.
The three types of dealer incentive programs are:
- Volume-Based Incentive Programs
- Performance-Based Incentive Programs
- Targeted Incentive Programs
Manufacturers utilize dealer incentives as a financial incentive to encourage dealers to market a specific product by providing discounts on that product. These corporate sales approach typically entails lowering the price a dealer pays to purchase an item from a manufacturer, which raises the dealer's profit when the item is sold.
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4 Successful Strategies to Strengthen Your Dealer Relationships
You as an organization have a variety of options for providing goods or services to your clients. You can sell them through retailers, brick-and-mortar stores, or an internet store. Another choice employed by many manufacturers to handle their sales is a dealer or distributor network.
Many businesses rely on dealer networks to sell their goods and serve as the regional face and subject matter experts for their brands. Dealers offer that confidential interaction that fosters devoted patronage and, ultimately, boosts sales.
You must support your dealers’ success if you want them to sell your goods and support your brand with their steadfast advocacy. You must offer them mutualist resources and tools that will strengthen their capacity as entrepreneurs, brand gurus, and salespeople.
Online-Offline Trading
Since traditional eCommerce avoids the accounts, you want to connect with, online sales cause channel conflict by frequently upsetting the relationships your team has worked so hard to establish.
However, a new type of online-to-offline commerce that incorporates dealers into the checkout process with the option of store pickup or local dealer delivery can assist you and your retailers in achieving your business objectives. This creates a win-win situation for you, your dealers, and the customer by helping your brand convert online customers and giving conversion statistics to marketing teams to improve their marketing spend.
It also helps retailers attract fresh traffic and sales to their stores to turn over their inventory. Your dealers now gain from your investments in digital marketing as well.
Self-Serve B2B Trading
Dealers can’t carry everything, but they may provide offline consumers with a superb representative sample to authenticate and confirm whatever product or brand they may wish to purchase. This frequently results in merchants showrooming, the practice of displaying products offline and accepting B2B orders for delivery in-person.
With a B2B Commerce platform, you can give salespeople trust in your brand by ensuring that they can view inventory availability so they can pitch products without worrying about lengthy consumer wait times susceptible to cancellations and missed sales.
Market Information
Market insights can assist your dealers in identifying what their potential next greatest seller will be. Your products will look better on the showroom floor, and you will receive your next purchase order more quickly if you can assist dealers in choosing which products to carry in their store or showcase.
You may easily identify the best sellers in the market using digital data created from online transactions, which will help your dealer reach more customers in their target market and show your dedication as a business partner with common objectives.
Enable Sales Representatives Online
The link between a sales representative and a dealer is unique and occasionally greater than the brand itself. It requires a lot of human effort to capture a dealer’s attention, including face-to-face interactions when the sales representative serves as a consultant to the account, assisting them in making the best selections for their shop or market.
Giving your sales representatives fast access to the data they require digitally can make or break how well they communicate with their accounts. For sales representatives to close more deals and increase showroom floor space so that they may be seen and purchased by more customers, they must be given the proper tools to influence dealers in person.
Dealers are the public face of your business and can be a powerful marketing tool. When people believe your business values and inform them, they will be most successful. By better understanding their requirements and concerns, staying in constant contact with them, and developing practical business tools with them, your marketing team may deepen and improve the relationship with your dealer network and work together to convert more customers.
If your business wants to stay competitive in today’s changing environment, investing in your dealer marketing and tools is not just a wise move, it’s also the only move. They could, after all, sell anyone’s product, including private labels from abroad. Make it impossible for them to reject a valued partner in their success by giving them a better motive to sell your goods.
Conclusion
RewardPort hopes that these pointers either confirm your current procedures or encourage you to support your distributors with resources that will facilitate their work and, ultimately, lead to better success in terms of global product promotion and sales.
RewardPort is aware of how difficult it may be to locate trustworthy distributors to increase your company’s global market presence; for this reason, we are regarded as industry specialists that can direct you in the proper direction. If you want to be introduced, please get in touch with us!
Frequently Asked Questions: -
In loyalty programs for card dealerships, the customers are encouraged to use the services of a particular authorized service centre or rent a car from a particular place again and again. They get loyalty points every time they avail any of the above services from the same dealer.
The eligibility requirements for the dealer reward programs are generally not fixed and can vary from brand to brand. To know the eligibility for a particular company’s reward programs, you can directly contact them and ask them about all terms & conditions that need to be fulfilled.
Dealer Partners work together with a business to expand their reach and sell their products/services, whereas a reseller purchases products from a business and sells them at higher prices to consumers.
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Top 11 Dealer Incentive Program Ideas for 2023
A dealer incentive program encourages your channel partners, distributors, and resellers to adopt specific behaviours. The program should reward them with worthwhile incentives for acting as per the need of the business from time to time.
Depending on your market, channel partners can take on a variety of forms and come from a variety of industries. They may be distributors, resellers, independent retailers, affiliates, or even value-added service providers. Consider using channel partner software to make locating them simpler.
In essence, anyone who markets your brand but does not actively support your company can be a partner. Through channel partner programmes, you can most effectively make sure that they are elevating your brand above the competition.
1. Rebates
Rebates are sales-driven incentives that motivate your dealer incentive program to increase their sales of your goods. They are compensated with a portion of the sale. Rebates can be categorised based on the type of consumer and a corporate goal.
- Retention discount
- Blend rebate
- volume discount
- growth subsidy
The most typical incentive scheme is rebates. You’ve probably used one in the past. Consider purchasing a television on Black Friday. You’ll frequently need to send in a form to receive your discount from the sticker price. This implies that you make the whole payment at the register and get your rebate later.
2. Sales Performance Incentive Funds (SPIFs)
SPIFs are intended to motivate the sales force of your dealer incentive program to favourably promote your brand above rivals in exchange for a reward. These bonuses go to the actual sales representative (not the partner).
SPIFs are a great tool to motivate your channel partners or dealers to work more, especially during sluggish or off-peak periods. Knowing how to utilise them effectively and which sales incentives work best to encourage sales habits are the key skills. Here are some examples:
- Credit cards
- Tickets for entertainment
- Hi-tech devices
- Weekend vacation
- Executive lunch
3. Market Development Funds (MDF)
MDFs are tools you provide to your dealer incentive programs to aid in their marketing and sales initiatives. These rewards could be monetary, knowledge based, or response based.
MDFs are used by marketers in your channel partner teams for a variety of projects, frequently to raise local brand awareness. Here are some instances of how they might employ MDFs:
- Support webinars
- Radio ads
- Start a marketing campaign
- Reserve a space at a trade expo
4. Deal Registration Incentives
Arrange a referral program for partners with a finder’s fee or referral fee as the referral program incentive.
Channel partners typically register online, where you can assess the quality of the lead and choose to accept or reject it. If accepted, your partner has a specific amount of time to complete the transaction before losing their incentive. Never forget that a partnership requires two people to be successful. Always assist your partners in closing the deal during this time by offering support.
Programs for deal registration are an excellent technique to examine consumer behaviour to pinpoint and improve a successful sales cycle.
5. Discounts on Wholesale Products
You work with a variety of customer categories while using B2B wholesale incentives. As a result, each sort of consumer should have a somewhat distinct incentive scheme. Most businesses base their dealer incentive programs and rewards on the amount and frequency of their purchases.
The best way to manage the many packages is to make pricing and term lists for each client or persona. By doing this, you can make sure that you’re always charging your partners fairly.
Depending on how much demand your partner is experiencing, your channel partners may request that you provide a quantity-based discount. Based on the overall order, or total value, of the things you ordered, you would establish pricing tiers.
6. Cross Marketing
The method involves networking with channel sales partners and cross-promotion. The sale of channels involves cooperation. Because a rising tide raises all boats, you benefit when your spouse succeeds. This can involve connecting on LinkedIn and promoting your partner’s marketing and campaigns in tandem on social media.
Channel sales inevitably involve networking. Partnerships will grow stronger if you are connected on social media and provide the groundwork for a real relationship. Your working relationship will be built on a foundation of connected channel sales techniques.
7. Have the sales and marketing materials available
Make sure your partners have the tools they need to succeed while leveraging channel sales. Collateral must be accessible and distributed across channel sales partners, whether it be sales kits for resellers/distributors or end-user marketing materials.
Marketing collateral: The leads for channel sales are brought in by marketing teams. To increase awareness of their products and services, manufacturers and suppliers can control the messaging associated with their brand by employing marketing materials.
Sales Support Materials: Sales training resources help speed up growth and guarantee that your channel partners can effectively explain a product’s or service’s value proposition. Competitive data sheets, interactive webinars, sales scripts, client testimonials, and other marketing materials are examples of this type of collateral.
8. Upsell Meaningful Connections
Put quality before quantity. Organisations frequently look to enhance their partners while trying to grow channel sales. Quality must always take precedence over quantity, though. Before going out to make new friends, concentrate on strengthening your current connections. How can you improve the sales performance of your present partners?
9. Communication
The solution to this problem’s primary cause lies in effective communication. Since so many variables are at play, such as consistency, availability, frequency, or even confusion now of contact, cross-channel communication can be challenging.
Additionally, there are numerous parties involved in channel sales, and while they often have the same goals, different companies represent various viewpoints. As a result, the messaging is inconsistent throughout the channel.
Like incentives and incentive schemes, communication breakdowns within your channels need to be obvious. Partners should be aware of who to contact about concerns.
10. Explain Rewards & Incentive Programmes
Incentive schemes are typical in channel sales. Give your partners valuable incentives, and they’ll work hard for you. Even though most channel sales partners currently have incentive and reward programs, it’s surprising how frequently they can be disorganised and hence useless.
Metrics for incentive schemes for channel sales must be made explicit. This entails having clear expectations for each channel’s sales and revenue yield, which should be supported by adequate research.
To build incentive programs, a precise assessment of each sales channel’s potential, including the number of potential consumers, the size of those customers, and the revenue potential are required.
11. Put Quality Before Quantity
More partners are not always better than reliable partners. Retaining your current partners is far more cost-effective than finding new ones, especially if you’re in the manufacturing sector and working with channel partners.
The world of manufacturing is small. Finding a new mate is expensive, and there aren’t that many of them out there. Invest in your channel partners when you find them. Give your channel partners the tools and encouragement they need to succeed.
Conclusion
At RewardPort we curate programs, especially for your dealers with a dedicated team of expert marketers ensuring repeat sales. Our programs are cost-effective and customised as per your needs.
Frequently Asked Questions: -
Offering incentives to your dealers can have the following benefits:
- Motivates them to sell more and consequently, your revenue goes up
- A strong relationship between you and your dealer
- Dealers work harder to earn more incentives.
To create a dealer incentive program, you first need to identify your goals and be very clear about what you want to achieve with this program. After that, set a budget and decide the rewards or incentives accordingly. The rewards can be monetary as well as non-monetary. Just keep in mind that the incentives are good enough to motivate your dealers.
The terms of the dealer incentives programs can be flexible, and you can decide the same on your own for your dealers. A few things that you need to include in the terms are:
- The requirements: Keep the eligibility for incentives higher than the sales achieved by your dealers in the last year.
- The rewards: Also mention clearly what type of rewards/incentives you are going to offer.
- The rules: You can add some general rules as well. But make sure to keep them simple and easy to understand.