Top Three Components of a Successful Channel Sales Incentive Program

Digital Channel Sales

Enticing and engaging your partner sales down-line about your products and services is a crucial aspect of generating sales, customers, and new leads! Motivating the sales team to do what they do best (sell sell sell!) through digital channel sales incentive initiatives boosts profitability, and is an easy and cost-effective opportunity that every company should explore.

Listed below are three important components to include in a great channel sales incentive program strategy.  These key considerations were used by a leader in the Automotive Industry and a client of All Digital Rewards.  They wanted to encourage its dealers to sell genuine accessory over that of third party parts to their customers. The promotion included multiple departments at each dealership.  And the engagement delivered had to meet the needs of the dealer, the respective departments, and the consumer.  The program had been running for several years was declining and needed a boost, and they reached out to All Digital Rewards to re-launch the program. So we just started with the basics:

First, create a digital channel sales strategy.  In order to create a successful channel sales incentive program, you need to examine and identify the target. What is the goal? Is there a current program offered, Last year’s sales? Desired growth? These are all great basic questions to find the answers to help you determine what your objectives are. With this particular client, they had already had a program in place, but it was not performing well. ADR needed to reevaluate the program and carefully make changes applying advanced technology to automate the program without confusing the participants and offering what they wanted most – rewards.

Next, do your research.  If the program is existing, identify the challenge the stakeholder’s experiences, so as not to repeat them and if new conduct research within the industry and the participant demographic to see what will work. In this case, the issue at hand was the current program began to decline, the staff was not participating in the promotion, and the ones that were did not have the basic knowledge to sell the genuine accessories. After many interviews and meetings with automotive dealers, researchers, and manufacturers ADR designed a perfect program that found a balance between motivating sales initiatives and rewarding the staff responsible, which in turn created more excitement and participation within the sales team, service, and marketing department to push more products.

Finally, deliver what you promise.  You can have all the best intentions with a good strategy, know what you need to do but if you execute the incentive program incorrectly, it’s a bust.  For this client, after creating the strategy, designing the program, the execution was administered through cloud-based sales claim site designed to easily implement at the dealer level. All Digital Rewards additionally was able to integrate into the manufacturer’s dealer system.  Participants access the program website via Single Sign On (SSO) thus eliminating the need to have Dealership employees have multiple logins for each promotion. Rewards were issued based on the stakeholder’s criteria.

The promotion had awesome results with an increase in sales of 800%

It is important to note to have continued success program managers will need to keep up with evolving technology and industry reward trends to keep participants engaged and motivation high.

All Digital Rewards is a leading loyalty engagement specialist that works directly with companies, partner networks, and end-users to design and support employee, consumer loyalty programs, and incentives. To learn more about digital channel sales programs, click here to read the full Enhancing Automotive Sales Training with Digital Rewards: Case Study and call 866-415-7703 or click the “Schedule a Demo” button at the bottom of the page and let our team of experts here at ADR help you succeed in your next sales incentive program.