For as long as we can remember, channel incentives have always been about building loyal successful partnerships.
Incentives have traditionally been skewed towards the partner executives; delighting and surprising them, then leaving them to do the job of passing on the rewards to their wider teams.
More recently, vendors have begun leveraging their digital smarts and discovered they’ve only just scratched the surface in terms of channel influencers. Vendors are getting ‘cosier’ with the right people within a partner. They’re getting more ‘personal’ to directly drive outcomes.
Businesses v Individual
There will always be a place for rewards aimed at the organisational level, especially because it’s driven by financial gain. Vendors will look to keep these partnerships on solid foundations by rewarding behaviours such as business planning, product bundling, achieving competencies and lead generation, just to name a few.
With that said, rapid digital adoption has seen vendors also lean towards creating relationships at a one-to-one level. In fact, individual based leaderboard reward programs are five times more likely to be engaged over business-led leaderboard rewards. Insights like this are key to the loyalty planning stage, helping vendors discover what makes individuals tick in order to create more meaningful connections in the future.
Teams v Individual
The increasing emphasis on teamwork in business has seen a growing body of research suggesting that in the case of small teams engaging in highly-interdependent work, team based rewards can be a winner, driving enhanced performance and outcomes.
However, the emphasis here is on the ‘small teams’ (generally regarded as 10 or fewer per team) in ‘highly-interdependent work’, where team members are heavily reliant on each other to complete their work and achieve goals – consider a basketball team (highly interdependent) versus a baseball team.
Our own research shows individual incentives work better in a channel landscape. That’s because channel businesses are more likely to fall into a loose or large team scenario.
It pays to be personal
While still keeping a close relationship with partner executives, start recruiting your dream team of individual sellers. Make sure they know your solutions like the back of their hand; having a knack for technology is always handy in the selling process.
It’s a ‘You get what you reward’ philosophy. The right incentives will help develop an individual’s appreciation for your brand regardless should they switch jobs. Since you’ve already created a solid bond, you can pick up where you left off and continue to see the same results from your individual sellers.
Take the lead. Influence the individual.
Don’t leave it to the business to decide who reaps the rewards. Reward individuals directly for what they do best - make it personal.
Here are a few individual incentives that can help drive the results you are looking for:
Registering deals – rewarding this will help better forecast sales.
Closing deals – sounds obvious, but loyalty is key!
Training – whether it's in-person or on-demand, training equals higher-quality deals.
Social – in the era of the multi-connected consumer, rewarding social selling on platforms is the perfect incentive.
Appointments – reward sellers for completing meetings, presentations and product demonstrations.
Technical sellers – POC’s should be a strong consideration for inclusion in any individual reward program.
Make it personal with Hachiko
Our clients are constantly looking for innovative solutions to help them to observe, analyse and efficiently reward individuals in their channel.
85% of our rewards programs are aimed at individuals not businesses, so we have the know-how when it comes to building meaningful and personal experiences that individuals will love.
Our bespoke engagement programs, innovative platforms and channel expertise can help you deliver individual rewards with a difference.
Chat to Hachiko today to build more personal experiences with individual rewards programs.