7 Questions You Should Be Asking Sales Incentive/Loyalty A Compelling Case For Optimizing Your Solution Now
A Compelling Case For Optimizing Your Solution Now Your current sales incentive and loyalty program fit your needs very well when you first implemented it. But with changes in market dynamics, competitive pressures and tight business margins; your sales and channel distribution strategies have likely evolved substantially. Is your current sales incentive program (including your software platform and management services), meeting your needs and enabling your go-to-market strategy? Here are seven questions you should ask to determine if it s time to look at some new alternatives. Have your expectations for revenue coming from channel partners changed? Are you expecting a greater proportion of your revenue to come through sales channels? Are you recruiting additional partners and growing your overall partner organization? Have you shifted focus from SMB to enterprise or vice versa? Strategies change. Channel organizations need to be in sync with the strategy. To optimize partner engagement and drive the kind of loyalty and revenue that results in partners consistently choosing to lead with your products; your partners must be inspired, educated, enabled, recognized and rewarded. And it does not stop with launching a program by communicating it to the owner/manager of a sales partner. Can you reach out to the sales reps directly, the ones on the street, and motivate them? Do your sales incentive and loyalty program, platform and services truly support your needs?
Does your sales incentive program drive measureable improvements in engagement, loyalty and revenue at the reseller and reseller rep level? Quite simply, are you getting the results you want? Or does your program feel somewhat broken, in need of a tune up, or perhaps a major overhaul? Perhaps the market has changed, competitors have changed the rules, and sales are slowing or share is at risk. Are your incentives compelling? Do reseller reps feel educated, confident and effectively rewarded to sell your products to their customers, when they have a choice? If your sales incentives are not driving the results you need, you can t afford to make small adjustments and have great expectations. Does your platform deliver professional insights and actionable analytics? Can your sales incentive platform easily report on the many thousands of sales transactions occurring every month, right down to the reseller, rep, product and customer level. Are you effectively harnessing the power of the data and arming sales leadership, marketing leadership, and channel sales team to make better decisions and win? Is the data from your sales incentive and loyalty program being used by your Channel Sales Team (Partner Account Managers, Partner Business Managers, etc.) to enable them to exceed their quotas? Do you have performance data on each rep and each reseller partner, or is your data only at the distributor level? Your channel sales team can improve their effectiveness managing partners and driving revenue with a deeper understanding of the strength and focus of the reps in the field working for their resellers. Where is coverage weak? Which end user customers have been buying your products? Where are the opportunities? Where are the gaps? Does your rewards program enable you to influence the behavior of the reseller reps so that they will sell more of the products you want them to sell? Are cross-sell, upsell and attach rates improving? Are the reps well trained to sell the products you want them to sell? Are the reps effective at selling broadly across the entire product line? Do you know which reps are effective and which are not? Resellers tell us that when vendor incentive programs change from month to month and quarter to quarter and seem entirely disconnected, that the reps just don t get onboard. They won t make the long term commitment you need when they only see a short term focus from their vendor.
Can you measure the effectiveness of your product/value proposition training programs in terms of revenue impact? Sales reps that believe in your vision and truly understand the value of your products and services will confidently represent you. Recognize and reward their commitment to investing their time to learn your products. Your sales incentive platform should help you understand the relationship between well trained sales organizations and the sales they deliver for you. Is your investment in training driving the returns you expect and need? Is your program easy to administer and cost effective? Breakage: Some loyalty companies charge the program sponsor, immediately for all reward dollars or points earned. Unredeemed points that become the profit of the loyalty company is the breakage. With ChannelAssist, there is no breakage. Zero! Timely, error-free processing of claims against sales incentives and reward fulfillment is absolutely critical. Fall short and you lose credibility, and your resellers shift their focus, potentially to a competitor that can deliver on the commitment of their reward program. Whether you have thousands of claims for sales incentives or hundreds of thousands, you need to deliver on the commitment. Sales reps can t afford to spend their time chasing claims for sales incentives and their sales managers, will not tolerate it! And internally, you re faced with compliance issues, operations processes, international funds transfer, bank card processing. What is your estimate of the error rate associated with your incentive payments? What is your SLA for validating sales claims and fulfilling rewards, and do you consistently meet it? Does your current rewards provider charge you for breakage? Does your sales incentive & loyalty platform facilitate one-to-one communication with the reps in your sales channels? You have developed clear messaging supporting your go-to-market strategies and channel strategies and the all-important what s in it for me message for your distribution partners and their reps in the field. You need to deliver and reinforce that messaging without it getting filtered. Plus you are competing for mindshare and time with everyone else that want to deliver messaging to the very same partners and reps. Does your platform enable communication to the reps that you need on your side? Can you continue to build the relationships you need. And perhaps the ultimate question
Could You Be Making More Money? Is it time to evaluate other options? ChannelAssist s software and services enables companies like yours to drive sales channel engagement and revenue, and build loyalty from the partner sales rep level up. Every month, ChannelAssist s platform and services powers sales incentive and channel partner programs that deliver thousands of education modules, process hundreds of thousands of sales incentive claims and support thousands of sales reps working for channel sales partners including distributors, resellers, and agents across North America. Take the next step and call to discuss your channel goals and how we might help you optimize your programs and accelerate results. Call us at 1.888.780.9696 (ext.8987) or email us at sales@channelassist.com With over a decade of experience, ChannelAssist has helped companies grow their revenues through solid business strategies and solutions. We work with companies of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500 that require leading-edge, result driven solutions to maximize their revenues and channel relationships. 2012 ChannelAssist Inc. All rights reserved.