Sales partner channel incentives are used by many businesses to lead behaviours. They’re used to stop old behaviors in your customers, change their buying habits and behaviours and shift your partners to a new practice. Better sales channel incentives can also help you change your value proposition for the better along with changing partner and customer behaviour.
An Example
The sales channel incentive that we’ve chosen involves discounts to change customer behaviour. If your company manufactures a brand of crisps, and they’re not doing very well in sales, you could have a promotional sale of that brand of crisps at the local grocery store. Customers may purchase the brand due to competitive and lower prices, but what will make them stick to it will be the flavour of the crisps.
If they do decide to buy your brand of crisps even after the promotion is over, that would mean that the sales channel incentive worked. But if your brand of crisps isn’t as flavourful as anticipated, customers would choose to buy regular crisps that they were buying before the promotion. That means your incentive failed.
If you are adopting a similar strategy for your partners, the incentive should be able to make a lasting impact on the partners; possibly turning them into loyal partners for your sales efforts. If it doesn’t, at least you’ll know what area you should strengthen to offer a greater value proposition. There are certain partner incentive programs (like those from power2motivate.co.uk)that can help you achieve your end goal.
Here are some of the partner incentives and how they can benefit you, your business as well as the reseller.
Partner Incentives
Registering a Deal
This incentive gives you the ability to carry out a behavioural analysis of your current sales cycle and identify how you can make it better. This is left for days when your sales haven’t been picking up. In this case, your partner identifies potential leads for your products and gets paid when the leads actually buy your products and are converted to customers.
The partners get a percentage of every deal that they are able to close. This type of incentive can help you (the company) manage your indirect and direct pipelines and makes the resellers more accountable as they have a stake in the sales now.
Offering Rebates
These incentives are possibly the most offered ones in sales. They are provided by many companies that target certain products (such as crisps) at defining moments (e.g. just before Easter). The way they work is that the partners get a cut of the sales and that motivates them to sell more of your products.
Activity-Based and Fee-Based Incentives
Activity incentives are the types of incentives responsible for rewarding partners for participation in activities that you (the company) can’t or won’t do. An example of this would be paying a department store to manage your contracts for all other stores and grocers in the vicinity that stock your products.
This may save you the time and effort that goes into managing these stores and allow you to focus on other pressing tasks.
