Expanding your business in the current dynamic market is a challenge every business wants to address. One ideal option that companies turn to is a channel partner or channel loyalty program.
Channel partners are typically organizations that help you promote, market, and sell your product or service. They invest their own marketing and sales resources, which helps accelerate your business growth and expand your brand reach to newer markets for almost no extra cost. Companies run channel loyalty programs to incentivize revenue-generating opportunities.
Interestingly, companies fall short of providing a good partner experience and gain better results despite the potential of the program. If your loyalty program is riddled with issues like complex claim processes, you will not be able to leverage it for business success. In this article, we will discuss the core tenets of designing an ideal channel loyalty program for your partners to maximize sales.
Partner-Centric Approach: Recognizing and Addressing Unique Partner Needs
Channel partner ecosystem can be instrumental in scaling the business for any company. However, it needs effective planning. Most companies already have a pre-defined channel loyalty program, and then try to fit partners into the program. Such an approach leads to friction. You can ensure the success of your program by understanding your partners.
Before you set expectations for your channel partners, you must clearly understand their motivations, resources, strengths, and weaknesses. Measuring everyone with the same yardstick is not a practical approach. This is because every partner will bring along its own specific needs, which you need to address proactively. It could include
- Extra training sessions on your products or services to gain expertise
- Aligning your company values with their processes
- Setting realistic targets or expectations
Seamless Experience: Simplifying Claims to Foster Stronger Partner Relations
When partners execute successful sales transactions, they reach out to the company claiming an incentive or payout. The seamless claims management process is critical to the success of your channel loyalty program. Clearing claims quickly motivate your partners to improve productivity and sales numbers. For companies, however, processing these claims becomes an operational challenge for finance teams due to the number of tasks involved – gathering reports, evaluating claims, and processing incentives. You can create a seamless partner experience by:
Setting calendar window for claims
Finance teams are usually neck-deep in payroll and other operations during month-end. Piling on the claims management during the same period will lead to errors. What you can do is set a calendar window for submitting claims. No matter when they close a deal, your partners can only submit the claims on specific dates in a month. Similarly, you can define the payout schedule as well.
Map complete claims workflow
Even before your channel partner submits a claim, they should know the journey their submission will make. You can map out each step of the channel loyalty program with an estimated turnaround time. This way, your partners will be aware of the due process, and not get anxious when they don’t receive incentives quickly.
Define fixed terms for claims
Have a well-defined set of rules for your channel loyalty program, and ensure that you communicate them to your partners. Also, avoid making frequent changes to the terms of the partner incentive scheme to keep confusion away.
Data-Driven Customization: Leveraging Insights for Personalized Rewards
Understand that every channel partner is built differently. It is important to consider this when planning an incentive program to ensure you offer maximum benefits. Instead of having a single incentive structure, you must plan a personalized reward system to properly acknowledge your partner’s efforts. Implementing customized incentive tactics will involve:
Tracking channel partner performance
Using a digital channel incentives platform like Zaggle Propel, you can generate on-demand reports to analyze the performance of each partner. Based on this data, you can fix multiple levels for incentivizing them.
Using a dashboard for efficiency
With access to an interactive dashboard, you can quickly generate progress reports of your channel partners, derive insights, and predict estimated sales and revenue numbers. It will help you in making data-driven decisions about personalizing rewards by mapping the right incentive to the right effort.
Simplify channel partner experience with tailored processes
Remember that your channel partners are working to promote and sell your product or services. So it is paramount for you to tailor every possible channel loyalty program to enhance their experience. But it is easier said than done. There is one solution that can make channel partner incentives simple- Zaggle Propel. It is an automated partner management platform that helps you engage your channel partners and build a community of loyal associates. Some of the key features are:
- Personalize incentive schemes for channel partners
- Automate claim submission and approval process
- Facilitate same-day approval through AI-based workflow
- Customise claim management forms for every partner
