In business, we know that changing prospect and customer behavior is vital to marketing and sales teams. They seek to understand the current customer needs and behaviors to gain concrete insight into the customer environment. They then seek to innovate and differentiate to make life easier, better, and faster in some fashion to improve their customer’s business.
However, customers are busier than ever, and their proclivity to have face-to-face interactions is significantly reduced, thanks to the substantive digital transformation all successful businesses are going through. So, how can we inspire, manage, and cultivate an engaging, bi-directional digital exchange or “digital dialogue”?
What Are Sales Incentive Programs?
Sales Incentive Programs reward a sales or marketing team for meeting and exceeding their sales goals. This type of program motivates users with incentives outside of traditional sales commissions.
Why are Sales Incentive Programs Effective?
Changing customer behavior is a science, and sales incentive program best practices reflect that. As with most shifts, customer behavior necessitates goal setting to gain commitment for reasons unique to each customer, like a dream reward. We must then measure each customer’s progress towards their self-selected goal, preferably with something easy to understand, like an achievement gauge. Then, once I’ve set a visible goal for myself and likely told my significant other and friends, I’m committed.
As the customer is focused on the goal, along comes an email with a bonus offer to get the customer there sooner by selling the newly announced product or a myriad of other marketing objectives, e.g., attending a webinar, clearing old inventory, taking a quiz or a survey. Suddenly, the customer looks for those program-branded emails and opens them right away so they can take full advantage of these limited-time opportunities. This is fundamental to creating sales incentive programs that work.
Your sales incentive program is a dynamic steering mechanism that must constantly be used to accelerate the achievement of dynamic marketing objectives. With these shifts in customer behavior happening in a matter of hours, the bonus offer email campaign is launched on an agile basis.
Creating a Sales Incentive Program with an Outside Partner
When I was on your side of the desk, as CMO of a $200M computer distribution company that we grew to $1 billion, I often used successful sales incentive programs for our extensive B2B customer base and 500-person sales force.
I began by thinking we could do this in-house by purchasing some rewards, tracking the customer’s earnings in a database, and sending out some communications. Wrong!
Creating sales incentive programs that work is a formidable initiative that has to be the focus of an outside agency partner to succeed and achieve the incremental growth objectives effectively.
Most importantly, successful sales incentive programs follow the Pay-for-Performance model, where reward payouts are incurred only if and after desired sales results occur. Our business case model will show this along with your winning ROI!
Types of Sales Incentive Programs
Five types of sales incentive programs can boost growth within your organization. They are:
- Channel Sales Incentive Programs
- Distributor Sales Incentive Programs
- Contractor Loyalty Programs
- Dealer Loyalty Programs
- SPIFF Sales Incentive Programs
How Does The Incentive Group Create Successful Sales Incentive Programs?
When you partner with The Incentive Group, we begin with a discovery meeting to dive deep into your business goals. You’ll provide insight relative to these 12 customer challenges and objectives:
- Measuring and growing account share
- Shifting buying behaviors (e.g., accelerating e-commerce)
- Cross sell and upsell of products
- Attracting new customer through differentiation
- Gaining referrals from existing customers
- Activating previously dormant customers
- Increasing customer retention, mitigating churn
- Educating your channels and customers
- Capturing customer insights
- Communicating regularly and effectively with customers
- Measuring customer behavior and results
- Reporting and analytics through inGauge
From there, a program plan is formulated that uses sales incentive program best practices to outline how the desired gains in each of the areas above can be achieved.
Over the last 30+ years, The Incentive Group has launched hundreds of successful sales incentive programs, and success leaves clues that turn into a repository of proven best practices. These are the keys to taking your program from a burden on the bottom line to a game-changing initiative pointed to by leadership as a key growth driver and valued internal steering mechanism. Our successful sales incentive programs also include a state-of-the-art loyalty platform (inGauge), which is white-labeled to ensure your loyalty program completely aligns with the look and feel of your brand.
A custom-curated collection of rewards is brought forward from exciting merchandise, travel, gift cards, and reloadable debit card options. A/B control group case studies are provided to help you understand which reward collection will best motivate your customers effectively. Customers are segmented into relevant tiers to uniquely speak and market to each participant group, whether by volume, class of trade, job title, geography, or persona. Add the all-important communication plan with ongoing bonus offers, quiz and survey options, and you’re ready to roll! From there, launching your sales incentive program only takes 4-6 weeks.
Let The Incentive Group help you create a successful sales incentive program that works! Contact us today to request a demo of our best-in-class loyalty platform.
