Driving indirect or external sales teams can be quite tedious and difficult. The difficulty lies in holding your employee’s attention and with being constantly flooded with products and programs from other parties, it gets tougher especially when it comes to making your agenda align with their requirements! To capture their engagement, vendors offer a variety of channel partner incentive programs. Why does it work? It’s because incentives have always been a driving force for the generation of results in every field. Based on research from the Incentive Research Foundation, it was found that incentives can heighten performance by up to 44 percent. Actual incentives are most commonly performance-based and aim to improve productivity or yield your partner base. Channel incentives are used to reward partners for modifying their behavior and are likely to be null once the behavior is modified or changed.
This blog is intended to provide a new structure for considering sales incentives that can help you with a tangible improvement and the efficiency of your incentive investment can pose to create a competitive advantage. To further explain effective channel incentive ideas, it is necessary to understand what a channel incentive denotes. A channel incentive campaign is an offering made to channel partners which motivates, promotes, and encourages a desired or specific type of behavior. It is most often focused on a specific product based on a specific period. The form of such an incentive is usually a bonus or reward that is offered in the form of monetary or some other kind of medium.
Here below are some of the most effective channel incentive ideas to deploy in 2019 for a successful brand:
1. Channel loyalty through layered incentives
The advantage of tiers and thresholds is their prime focus which is always on growth. The agenda is to track not only how a reseller has performed with a single product in a single transaction, but how they have performed with it through a quarter, months, or years for a better understanding. Ultimately, once a firm reaches a particular threshold, it can become a reliable partner and can leverage that status to increase its rewards.
2. Alignment
A channel incentive program is referred to as an extension of your business’s sales and marketing strategy. It is meant to reflect and drive the venture, communication, and performance that you initially set out to achieve. There are different requirements for every channel loyalty program and a channel referral program must project the qualification criteria which may be applicable.
3. Automation
It is essential to make sure to approve claims and issue rewards promptly. Your channel partners are likely to have a stringent eye on how quickly you respond and initiate matters, so considering making your schemes automated can aid in the seamless and fast flow of data in both ways.
4. Marketing Development funds
It is essential to make sure to approve claims and issue rewards promptly. Your channel partners are likely to have a stringent eye on how quickly you respond and initiate matters, so considering making your schemes automated can aid in the seamless and fast flow of data in both ways.
5. Insight and ROI
It is important to understand that every channel incentive scheme has to be designed in a way that garners detailed customer information which can further help in improving your marketing strategy at large.
It is hence, important to realize that design and launch are very essential for the success of your channel sales incentive scheme as it is responsible for defining your ability to run it productively and enabling you to learn and understand what may work for you and what might not!
