Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, today’s highly competitive digital landscape has transformed how B2B buyers purchase products. A significant share of B2B revenue comes from channel partners. However, by the time channel partners begin their work, the buyer has already done comprehensive research on the product and the brand and may require additional persuasion. Therefore, channel chiefs must find ways to motivate their channel partners and ensure their product’s success in the market.
A significant challenge for channel chiefs is to craft relevant, transparent, and highly-lucrative incentive packages. However, many high-tech and B2B companies lag on investment to manage their channel revenue and associated processes.
Recent research by Forrester says, “More than half of companies (56%) rely on homegrown technology solutions to partly manage their channel revenue processes, and many of these in-house solutions suffer from overlapping functionality, resulting in disconnected silos of data that are prone to duplication, errors, and inefficiency.”
So, let’s delve deeper into the challenges of channel incentives in the new normal and ways to overcome them.
Companies rely on in-house spreadsheets and other ad-hoc databases to store channel partner performance results and calculate incentives. When such data comes from multiple places and formulas are manually created, errors crop up, which hamper partner relationships.
Hence, organizations must leverage automated incentive management solutions to organize all data and calculate incentives more accurately.
It is crucial for organizations to train their channel partners regarding the products and services; it is equally essential to provide commensurate incentives as partners develop advanced skills and sell the products more efficiently.
Therefore, an incrementally rewarding incentive program is imperative to lure channel partners.
It is critical for vendors to not only offer sales-based incentives. Instead, rewarding pre-sales behavior that leads to ultimate sales is also essential.
Therefore, organizations must provide incentives to their channel partners for non-transaction activities undertaken at different stages of the buyer’s journey, including lead reporting and registration and bottom-of-the-funnel activities like upgrades, renewals, upselling, business won in new buying centers, etc.
Many companies design one-size-fits-all incentive programs, which wouldn’t work for all channel partners as partner types change and grow. Common incentives that brands provide their channel partners include new customer bonuses, volume rebates, and market development funds. Additionally, some enterprises also dabble in non-monetary incentives like micropayments and gamification.
Channel chiefs must adopt the right mix of incentives that reward current performance and also changes in the partner’s behavior. Moreover, partner demographics (Millennials will comprise 75% of the channel by 2024) and the emergence of a mix of transacting and non-transacting partners should be considered while designing incentive programs.
Channel partners have associations with several brands and appreciate clear and easy-to-comprehend incentive programs.
Moreover, organizations that leverage real-time channel data not only reduce their time-to-market but also get greater visibility into channel ROI and partner performance, which reduces payment errors. Greater visibility into incentive programs also drives channel partner satisfaction and retention.
Zaggle Propel, our automated rewards, incentives, and engagement solution for your channel partners, includes a customized incentive platform to address your complex KPI-driven partner incentive needs.
Our solution comprises a metric based configurator that boasts advanced capabilities, including -
Other features include -
To know more about Zaggle Propel , please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.
Expert contributor and editor at the Zaggle Knowledge Hub, specializing in corporate spend management, expense compliance, and B2B fintech solutions.
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