Sales figures aren't the only thing you should be incentivising as part of your Channel Partner Incentive Program - there's a range of behaviours to reward.
Do you have a Channel Partner Incentive Program in place? If so, great! But you may need to rethink your program structure if all you're incentivising is sales. While it's easy to believe that sales is the be all and end all, there's a large number of other behaviours that are almost as important to reward. In this age of increasing competition (including from online vendors), you need to find a way to differentiate your program from competitors' - and just focusing on sales doesn't make the grade anymore.
So, what behaviours other than pure sales figures should you incentivise in your Channel Partner Incentive Program?
1) Customer loyalty
Generating true loyalty - whereby you have customers coming back to you time and time again even if they can get a cheaper deal elsewhere - is extremely difficult. Only your best channel partners will be able to do so, and this means you should be incentivising loyalty to show you appreciate that they are going the extra mile. Consider including a reward for a certain amount of repeat business as part of your Channel Partner Incentive Program structure.
A channel partner can only sell high volumes of your product if they really understand it.
2) Training
A channel partner can only sell high volumes of your product if they really understand the ins and outs of how it works and why it can benefit a customer. To do this, they need to undergo a significant amount of training on what you do and how best to sell your products. So, before you even get to incentivising sales figures, you should be rewarding channel partners that undergo a certain amount of training such as product demos.
3) Brand exposure
Another great thing to incentivise is how much brand exposure your channel partners can create for your product among their normal customer base. For example, are they engaged in email marketing campaigns that specifically mention your products? Or do they run regular events that prominently feature your brand? If so, this is exactly the sort of behaviour that can do wonders for your business, while not being directly linked to sales figures.
4) Gathering customer information
Data is king in the 21st century, and the more information you have about your customers, the better your product can meet their demands. However, if you're using a lot of channel partners it can sometimes be more difficult to gather this information. It's a good idea to incentivise the channel partners who collect this information and pass it on to you (checking of course that they have all the necessary legal permissions to do so). Again, though not necessarily linked to sales, the more data you have the better you can sell to customers next time - therefore this still impacts your company's bottom line.
A Channel Partner Incentive Program with Power2Motivate
At Power2Motivate, we've helped hundreds of businesses get the most from their channel partners through our Channel Partner Incentive Programs. Our easy-to-use cloud-based platform is easily customisable to your individual needs. Got partners located around the globe? The platform is available in 17 different languages, so no matter where they are in the world, they'll be able to reap the benefits of a Power2Motivate Channel Partner Incentive Program.
For more information, contact the team today or request a demo.