Sales, growth, profits, budgets, how do we make it all work?

How can we make sure our resources are used effectively?  Every business has sales and profit objectives. Objectives which are intended to fuel growth and sustainability.  Organizational budgets are established with these goals in minds.  It is imperative that all areas of your business are “in sync” in pursuit of the organizations goals, including your distribution network.  Effective utilization of your channel promotion budget is critical.  Used effectively, your channel partners provide additional “feet on the street” to carry your message.  Making sure they are motivated and pursuing the “right” business is crucial to your efforts.

How can we make this happen?  How can we “put our money where our market is”?  The key is to target your spending.  Motivate and reward your partner network (firm or rep) for driving the sales that are best for your business.  These sales incentives or SPIFFs can be targeted at new customer acquisition, strategic markets, new products, and/or profitable products. They can also be targeted at sales through strategic resellers and VARs.

Many manufacturers have “deal registration” programs.  These programs typically focus on larger deals and are price discounting programs or incentive payments for achieving a sales goal.  Incorporating a deal registration concept into your promotional spending strategy can also be effective in driving your partners to deliver the results you need.  Making opportunity registration part of the incentive qualification process can yield a multitude of benefits:

1)      Target your program – Create incentive programs for specific sales activity; vetting the deal will insure your partners are pursuing opportunities consistent with your business strategy

2)      Engage partners up front – Insure partners are aware of your program and are participating in the entire sales process – this mitigates “program mining” by partners looking for potential incentive earnings after the fact

3)      Minimize channel conflict – Vetting the deal will insure your partners and direct sales teams are pursuing unique sales opportunities

4)      Pay for performance – Channel partners will earn the incentive upon completion of the sale or reaching a target quota

5)      Communication – Create an additional communication vehicle between the channel and your sales team

6)      Establish a sales pipeline – Identify opportunities, focusing both the channel and your sales team on closing deals    (forecasting)

7)      Validate channel opportunity – Analytics (i.e. close rates) providing insight for forecasting and resource deployment

Targeting your spending combined with a “pay for performance” concept can be an integral and effective tool within your channel marketing strategy.

We have the solutions which make this concept easy to deploy.  We also have the back office support team available to handle all customer and sales validation requirements as well as reward payments.  Our team will handle the process, so you can focus on results.