Skip to content

Our Mission!

To Rid the Tech Sector of Crap Channel Incentives!

Posted 31st October 2023

Share

We’re on a Mission to Rid the Tech Sector of Crap Channel Incentives!

Running Kick-Ass Incentives can be a really powerful way of encouraging your channel partners to generate more opportunities. And, sell more products.

If you’re behind target, your channel partner incentives are often the most effective tool available to help you drive sales, close the gap and secure your place at President’s Club. But only if they are run correctly.

As we head towards the end of the year it seems every vendor is launching an incentive trying to bring in or pull forward some much-needed revenue to hit their number.

But they are doing it BADLY! Merely launching an incentive does not guarantee success…

Here are some of the shockers I’ve seen recently:

Sharing confidential revenue numbers

An incentive that allows partners to track their progress on a public Google Sheet (yes really!). Not only is this completely unsecure, but it also makes it easy for the competition to see how much revenue the vendor is making across a variety of geographic regions!  

Offering beyond boring prizes

“Wow, I’m definitely going to push hard to sell more products so I can get more MDF.”

Said no salesperson, ever.

When is a reward, not a reward? When it is MDF dressed up as a prize. I spotted this recently for an incentive for a low-value software product. It was targeted at partner salespeople and offered the prize of additional MDF for closing more deals. Sorry folks, but your prize/reward needs to align with your target audience and salespeople don’t get excited about ‘winning’ MDF for their company to spend on marketing.

Poor promotion and short lead times

A big incentive launched six weeks after the sales window actually started. Giving partners just 2 weeks to sign up and then closing 4 weeks after that. It also launched during the school half-term holiday when lots of salespeople were away.

These are just a few examples of the awful incentives I’ve seen recently. I’m hedging my bets that the rise in these shocker incentives is due to a combination of vendor sales VPs being behind plan and channel marketing being told to ‘spin up an incentive’ with no prior experience. At least that’s what I’m hoping.

Introducing Kick-Ass Incentives!

At The Essential Agency, we’re on a mission to sort out a few things that we feel passionate about. And channel incentives are one of them.

If you’re behind plan OR you’ve been tasked with miraculously spinning up an incentive and you’ve never run one before we can help.

Our end-to-end Kick-Ass Incentives service is designed to help you create and execute a highly impactful incentive that will get the attention of the salespeople you are trying to influence. It’s backed by our powerful, brandable incentive platform that allows participants to track their progress and results and can be used to fuel healthy competition. We’ll even arrange the prizes for you, globally.

So, if you’re looking to run a sales incentive, a deal reg incentive, or something more targeted with a Rising Star partner, or even skilling up your pre-sales channel, get in touch.

We can help you create a Kick-Ass Incentive designed to smash your revenue targets and disrupt your competition!

Need to get something sorted like yesterday? Book a demo today

Back to top