How Do Incentive Programs Help You with Channel Sales Management?

Business who sell their services or products through a sales channel often greatly benefit from having sales partners in diverse regions as their product representatives. But when you have third-party sellers, it can be difficult to keep everyone on the same page. You have to ensure you’re properly guiding channel partners with informed, efficient channel sales management to maintain consistent on-brand messaging, correct product education, and recommended strategies for selling the right solutions to the right customers. Running a channel incentive program with segmenting capabilities can help you organize and manage your sales channel. Here’s how:

Segment sales promotions.

With segmented channel partner groups, you can use advanced performance tracking technology to run multiple, simultaneous sales promotions with different goals and focuses. You can divide up your sales channel by varying qualifiers. For example:

• By region: There are various reason you might want to segment channel salespeople by region. You may want to push different product lines in different areas—the southeast and the southwest U.S. have different demands for windshield wipers, for example.
• By performance: With a segmented incentive program structure, you can reward top-tier performers with high-value rewards, while still motivating the middle majority with lower-value rewards, and even moving low-performing partners closer to mid-level performance.
• By product type or range: If your channel partners carry different selections of your products, you can segment them according to these products and push specific sales promotions.
• By role: If your distribution channel includes dealers, distributors, and/or contractors, you’ll benefit from encouraging specific behaviors per role. You could reward dealers for sales, for example, while rewarding contractors for collecting end-user data.

By executing sales promotions with specific, targeted participating groups, you can maximize your incentive program investment and see greater results.

Improve back-end channel sales management.

With a segmented channel incentive program structure, you can create different access and permission sets for each segment. This gives each channel partner group a more relevant, streamlined experience with your program and minimizing user experience problems.

Along with varying permission sets, you can define different billing buckets and reward payout structures for different channel partner segments, while being able to access and export different report and analytics sets for each sales channel segment. This allows you to better track and report on incentive program spending.

Personalize incentive marketing campaigns.

Segmenting channel partner groups allow you to personalize your incentive program marketing. Using tokens in your incentive marketing creation, you can swap out select content in messages according to each individual program participant.

Personalized marketing is great for increasing channel partner participation and engagement in your program. As studies indicate,

67% of consumers think it’s important for brands to automatically adjust content based on current context.

Personalized incentive marketing is also an efficient form of incentive and channel sales management. McKinsey research indicates that personalization tactics can

drive 5-15% increases in revenue and 10-30% increases in marketing-spend efficiency.

Manufacturers who sell through a channel benefit from multiple sales partners who can act as extensions of their sales team. However, a fully effective channel requires alignment, organization, relationship-building, and channel sales management. A channel incentive program can help drive behaviors while executing organized sales and marketing efforts by facilitating segmented sales promotions, back-end permission management, and personalized incentive marketing.