If you’re a manufacturer who’s developed an effective distribution channel through which to sell your products, your channel partners are no doubt excellent. They likely come from different backgrounds, with a variety of knowledge and skills. While that diversity is a strength in collaborating on sales and marketing strategies, it can also be a challenge. A growing distribution channel sometimes results in disjointed sales promotions, marketing campaigns, or incentive programs. Here are four ways incentive technology can help you manage channel partners and build a more aligned channel ecosystem.
Segment channel partners.
Segmenting partners helps you manage different goals and initiatives.
With channel incentive technology like Incentive Solutions, you can segment your channel partners into groups based on region, performance, channel partner type, or any other qualifier you want. This gives you the following capabilities:
- Create varying incentive program permission sets and access rules so that each of your channel partner groups. Channel partners should have incentive program experiences customized, relevant, and useful to them.
- Run multiple, simultaneous sales promotions with different participation rules, product focuses, and goals. Your top-tier channel partners can compete for a luxurious incentive trip, for instance, while your middle majority performers earn lower-value merchandise rewards.
- When using a reward points program, assign different reward point values to different actions or product sales. This places greater importance on those that are most important to your sales and marketing goals.
- Define different payout rules and billing buckets for your channel partner segments. This gives you greater control and more granular focus in your incentive program investment.
Offer an open-enrollment incentive program form.
Capture the data you need to fill in knowledge gaps about channel partners.
With an open enrollment incentive program, you can provide a publicly-available registration form for potential incentive program participants to use. No invitation is needed. That means you can capture much-needed contact info and data about vendors or end-users you previously knew little to nothing about.
Having more data about the people and businesses through your channel means you can fill in a more complete image of your distribution channel. This allows you to create more informed sales and marketing strategies, which not only helps you, but allows you to be a better resource and partner to your channel partners who share in your success.
Gather more customer and sales data.
A document upload and verification tool makes it easy for partners to submit data.
You run sales promotions backed by incentive rewards in order to boost revenue. You can also use them to gather data and improve the sales reward experience, both of which help you manage channel partners.
With sales claim upload and verification technology, your channel partners can upload warranty registrations, receipts, invoices, and other claims documentation directly to your incentive program to go through your determined verification rules. The incentive program then rewards them instantly with funds or reward points.
With an easy and instant reward-earning experience and greater access to sales and customer data for you, sales claim upload and verification technology paves the way for you to have better insights and channel partner relationships.
Reward channel partners for submitting feedback.
Surveys and feedback help you create better channel strategies.
You can use your incentive program to deliver custom surveys and feedback forms designed to collect customer data, referrals, user experience input, and any other information that sheds light on your distribution channel.
Immediate rewards provide a greater incentive for your channel members to provide information they might not otherwise be inclined to submit. Collecting this data helps you understand the demands and needs of your channel partners, identify sales trends and opportunities, and better manage channel partners with more informed sales and marketing strategies.
You don’t have to sacrifice organization and agility to have a large, diverse sales channel. Channel incentive technology allows you to segment channel partners for more granular, target sales and marketing strategies. You can tap into sales and customer data while better engaging and collaborating with channel partners. When you’re enabled to manage channel partners through incentive technology, you establish a competitive advantage and drive revenue growth.