In today’s competitive landscape, business relationships have evolved beyond simple transactions. Building lasting business associations require trust and loyalty. With companies generating significant revenue share through channel partners, effective engagement with them is essential. Luckily there is no better time than Diwali to enhance your channel partner experience through a festive incentive program. Since the festival season is the peak sales period, the role of your sales partners increases exponentially. Additionally, festive incentives will play a major factor in motivating your partners to boost their performance. It underlines your gratitude towards your channel partner network for their contribution and helps in building long-term loyalty with them.
However, to streamline the implementation of a festive incentive program you will need a modern solution, like Zaggle Propel. It not only automates your channel partner incentive program, but also gives you access to a wide range of Diwali gifting options. It enhances the experience of your channel partners, while making the program a hassle-free sales improvement strategy.
If you’re wondering where to start with your Diwali festival incentive program, we will walk you through the entire process. In this blog, we will help you learn how to make your partners feel special with a carefully custom-designed Diwali gift or incentive.
Festive Incentive Program for Channel Partners
Incorporating an Incentive program can boost your channel partner performance significantly. However, it is easier said than done. According to Forrester, a whopping 58% of channel incentive programs fail. However, it is important to note that incentive programs fail to yield a result when they follow a template. Incentive programs are designed to make your partners feel valued, and for that you must personalize your program.
Diwali gives you an ideal opportunity to tailor your incentive program for better results. But it is important to follow a strategy for better engagement and channel partner performance with Diwali gifts.
In a nutshell, a festive incentive channel program is a targeted and seasonal incentive program to motivate your channel partners during the holiday or festive season. It helps you leverage the festive mood in the market to boost your sales through increased visibility and wider reach.
Some of the benefits of a festive incentive program for channel partners include:
- Increase in channel partner sales during Diwali gift shopping season
- Making work rewarding via Diwali gifts by encouraging prioritization of your product
- Expanding market visibility and geographic reach of your brand
- Chance to increase upselling or cross-selling opportunities
Best Practices to Maximize a Festive Incentive Program
Be Ready for Seasonal Sales Peak
Diwali gifting is a cherished tradition, making it the perfect opportunity to not only boost your sales but also infuse the festive spirit into your channel partner incentive programs. But for the seamless implementation of your program, you must time its launch at just the right time. For Diwali this year, you must ideally announce incentives around the third or fourth week of September. But incentives will have no point without milestones, and to have realistic targets, your team must understand needs, mood and spending patterns during the season. Therefore, prepare your sales projections, and then align them with exclusive or tiered Diwali gifts.
Design Flexible Channel Partner Incentives
One size doesn’t fit all – is the fundamental philosophy of channel partner incentive programs. To ensure your program is well received and adopted, get a good lay of your channel partners. Categorize your partners based on their market reach, geography, sales volume and revenue contribution. This categorization must be your guidelines to design a flexible incentive program. Most companies build a tiered incentive strategy involving Diwali gifts to motivate partners based on their motivations.
Personalize Your Diwali Gifts
Personalization is a crucial element of a successful channel partner incentive program. For that, you must be aware of your partners’ motivations, likes, dislikes and requirements. These data points will help you create personalized diwali gifts for your channel partners. With this, you show that you value your partners enough to learn their preferences and customize incentives to suit the same.
Ensure Clear Communication about Incentives
Once you design your incentive program, its execution depends heavily on how well your channel partners understand it. Here the onus of ensuring clear communication lies with you. For this, you can do multiple things starting with using a robust communication platform. Remember to include all the necessary terms of the program, eligibility criteria for each tier, incentive claim process and so on. Eliminating any scope for confusion or miscommunication must be your priority.
Implement Channel Partner Feedback
Although the Diwali incentive program may not go on for a long period of time, you must seek feedback from your partners and update the program accordingly. Since the success of your program – which guarantees better sales – depends on your partners, they must accept the program. Even after you roll out the program, allow suggestions from the partners and make provisions to implement the ones that can enhance the incentive strategy.
Most Companies Fall Short Here
Even after you design a solid Diwali channel partner incentive plan, and have timed it perfectly for the seasonal peak, things might go wrong at multiple levels. It happens due to broken communication, unequal implementation, and lack of tracking system. To avoid these challenges, you must use an innovative solution like Zaggle Propel. It is a channel partner incentive platform that comes with in-built AI capabilities to automate a number of tasks. Zaggle Propel is an automated solution that you can use to build and implement a variety of partner loyalty programs.
With Zaggle Propel, you can fastrack your Diwali incentive program and launch it in a jiffy. Let’s see how.
- Frictionless Onboarding Experience: It allows you to create customized registration forms that suit your partner ecosystem and make it personalized.
- Configurable Schemes Management: Configure your schemes and make all the details of the incentive program easily available to your partners.
- Automated Claims Process: Your partners won’t have to go through a long waiting period to claim their Diwali gifts. You can simplify this step by automating verification and approval.
- Multiple Gifting Options: Make your incentive program fun by giving unique and creative Diwali gifts from our wide gift merchandise options that you can personalize.
- Track Channel Partner Performance: Use Zaggle’s AI-powered dashboard to get all the metrics to monitor your partner performance and estimate sales numbers.
