So, you’ve been hearing about your competitors’ channel partner incentive programs and are trying to decide whether to start up one of your own. Or maybe you already have some experience with them but are trying to figure out new ways to increase your partner engagement.
Wherever you are in your journey, there are a few key traits of good channel partner incentive programs. Here, we’ll discuss how to make yours as effective as possible.
Channel Partner Program KPIs
Often times, the goals of channel partner programs will be ambitious, yet simple.
“I want to grow incremental sales of x product 15% year over year.” Great goal. But you’ll also need to make sure you’re on track to hit that goal. That’s why we suggest focusing on the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to help track the health of your program. Here are a few common ones:
- Enrollment rate—the number of enrolled participants vs. those that could be enrolled in the program.
- Participation rate/Engagement rate—how often people visit the channel rewards site, or click on your promotional emails.
- Percentage of participants earning points—this will give you an idea of how many people are engaging actively with the program.
- Revenue from program participants vs. revenue from non-program participants—this side-by-side comparison is a basic measure for understanding hard and soft ROI.
Channel Partner Programs Should Be Simple
The last thing you want is a frustrated channel partner. If your program’s rules for earning are too convoluted, your partners won’t earn. If your enrollment process asks them a million questions, they won’t enroll.
A good saying to keep in mind when setting this up is, “Aspirational and Attainable.” By making your program as easy to understand as possible, you make success more attainable. But you can also do this while making sure it’s exciting enough to make participants want to aspire to achieve that success.
If you’re setting up personalized goals for your channel partners to reach, use simple metrics. Increase your sales in the first year by 1%-3%. Earn 2x points for selling X product. Earn bonus points for submitting pictures of your partners’ stock counters.
These are all great examples of simple earning structures that should get your channel partner incentive program off the ground in no time.
Engage Your Channel Partners Regularly
Whether it’s through targeted marketing messages, updates to program rule structure, or even special promotions tagged on to your program, you want to make sure you’re at the forefront of your partners’ minds.
People will lose interest in your program. That’s a sad fact. But these same people will stay around or even come back if you make your channel rewards program fun and engaging. That’s a happy fact.
Gamification is a great way to keep people interested in the more mundane tasks that are a necessary part of a channel partner program. For instance, filling out demographic information. Boring, right?
But what if you could host a fantasy football league for all your partners? And what if that league helped you ask questions that gave you valuable data on the partners in the league? All while watching your indirect sales reps smack talk each other.
Not so boring now, wouldn’t you say?
Conclusion
While keeping people inspired and having fun isn’t the direct business result that gets you to “15% incremental growth year over year”, it is what keeps those partners coming back to you. It’s what keeps your products top of mind while they’re selling to their customers.
Want more information about channel partner incentive programs? Get The Definitive Guide for an Effective Channel Incentive Program. now and become the channel expert you want to be!
