Partner loyalty is a significant challenge for technology vendors. Your channel partners can easily switch to alternative products and suppliers, and simply having great solutions and technologies isn’t enough, especially if your partners aren’t consistently and effectively presenting them to their end user customers and prospects. You need to work harder than ever to retain and enthuse your channel partners.
Vendors that consistently provide their partners with resources to motivate staff, help with sales and marketing, and build skills, knowledge and understanding typically see stronger performance across several key metrics. According to research by the Aberdeen Group, effective enablement can cut channel sales cycle times by 28%, improve numbers of sales staff hitting their targets by 13% and lift lead conversion rates by 12%. The report also shows a 10% rise in team target achievement, and 8% growth in marketing lead acceptance.
Loyalty programmes
Incentive and training programmes are a great way to deliver relevant value to your channel partners, educating and exciting them about your products – to get them on board and keep them on board.
In fact, it’s arguable that, with channel partners typically under no obligation to sell your products in preference to other vendors’, a well designed B2B loyalty, rewards and incentives program is now critical to retaining your partners and building deeper business relationships with them, so that they consistently turn to your brands in preference to others. All businesses are run by people, and successful businesses are people-focused!
Creating your programme
Designing a B2B marketing incentive for a loyalty or win-back programme is a complex task. What do you offer as a reward? How do you package and promote it? Should you target your programme on a single partner, a specific set of partners, or all your partners?
There are various options to explore, which can be combined in diverse ways to create programmes addressing your specific needs and circumstances, and those of your partner or partners:
- Interactive portal: a hub for your incentive programme, this can be home to various assets relating to your products, and can provide entertaining activities to attract and engage your customers and prospects. Building in an incentive can multiply the benefits to your business.
- Training: offer webinars, quizzes, seminars and other assets to help your partners’ staff learn more about your products, improving their ability to sell and support them.
- SPIFF days: visit your partners, spend time with them and provide a fun and productive day to clearly demonstrate that you are invested in their success, and committed to supporting them in achieving their goals.
- Sponsorship: promote your company or product name in your partners’ offices, perhaps via a vending machine offering free snacks or by funding a team-building, social or other activity.
A real-world example
We recently built an incentive campaign for Trend Micro to build partner loyalty and sales, featuring an interactive portal, a campaign running over several months, and several SPIFF days. Take a look at the details to see how effective such a campaign can be.
Email us or give us a call on 0118 380 0333 for a chat about what we could achieve together.
