Our Guide to Your Channel Incentive

Welcome to the comprehensive guide on channel incentive best practices. With over 20 years of experience in channel marketing, we know how to maximise the effectiveness of your channel incentives. This guide is designed to be your go-to resource for understanding and implementing effective channel incentive strategies.

Incorporating channel incentives into your channel strategy is crucial, as they can yield excellent returns on investment.

So, let’s begin with the basics…

What is a channel incentive?

Channel Incentives should form part of your channel marketing strategy.

Some might call them channel incentives, partner incentives, or channel sales incentives, but they all refer to the same concept.

They are motivational tools used to work with channel sales teams by incentivising or compensating them for driving deal registrations, accelerating sales, or increasing enablement to sell and train. These incentives reward participants in ways that benefit them and align with your business goals.

Channel incentive programmes can take various forms, including cash rewards, vouchers, gifts, or non-monetary rewards like travel opportunities. They aim to:

• Increase sales volume and promote specific products or services
• Encourage product bundling and cross-sales
• Improve market share/penetration and brand advocacy
• Enhance partner loyalty and partner retention
• Provide training and enablement to channel partners

By offering these incentives, companies can strengthen their relationships with channel partners, enhance channel engagement, motivate partners to sell products more effectively, and ultimately drive business growth.

For more information on Channel Incentives

We have some interesting content for you to look through.

• Using channel incentives to drive sales
• Benefits of running an incentive with Essential
• Incentive data: getting it right!
• 12 components that make a great incentive programme

Channel Incentive Best Practices

Channel incentive programmes are a proven way of boosting sales, growing pipeline, and up-skilling your channel partners. While there is no written rulebook on running your channel incentive programme, our experience running incentives for our clients has revealed several best practices you should consider when planning your next one.

Set clear goals

The first of our channel sales incentive best practices is setting clear goals. You are setting up a channel incentive for a reason, so it’s important to establish a clear purpose that aligns with your organisation’s goals.

Setting clear and measurable goals for your channel incentive will also help to:

• Secure the budget
• Onboard internal team members and stakeholders
• Articulate the purpose of the incentive to participants
• Keep focus during the incentive’s duration
• Know what you are measuring in terms of the success criteria

It’s not just about your own organisation’s objectives. Understanding the goals of your channel partners is key to building strong, profitable relationships. Incentives work best when partners feel they have a unique advantage. A well-designed incentive programme ensures that tasks align with their roles, making them feel ready and motivated to act.

Use pictures in the onboarding process

Often, you will need to ‘sell your idea’ internally before you can get your channel incentive programme off the ground. Explaining the channel incentive in pictures will help with this.

Instead of giving your stakeholders the old ‘death by PowerPoint’, with 20 or 30 slides, they must read off the screen, why not see if your incentive idea or plan can be articulated visually in a couple of diagrams?

We have found that creating a visual concept for an incentive along with a process diagram is the fastest and easiest way to onboard your team and stakeholders. And the pictures help make the incentive ‘sticky’, i.e., less easy to forget.

Check your data sources

Another of our channel incentive best practices is data. All incentives require data and often from multiple sources. Data is key at every step to measure progress and calculate success at the end. Whatever data you are using, check your data sources before you start. You will need to make sure you have all the relevant data fields, in the right format, and any filters have been set correctly. In addition, you will need to make sure the data is accessible at the times you need it, and that you can perform the necessary analytics to calculate the answers required.

Make sure the rules of the incentive are clear

Make it easy for your partners to understand how the incentive works, and what the rewards and the rewarding process is. This will mean that partners will take part in the incentive in the way you would expect and will minimise the queries you might receive from them. We strongly recommend you create a set of terms and conditions for your incentive to cover the rules of the programme in fine detail. This should include:

• What the incentive is
• What participants must do to be rewarded
• What the rewards are and how to achieve them
• Who is eligible to take part
• The incentive timescales
• How the prizes will be rewarded and when
• Who is responsible
• What the rights are of those taking part
• What information is collected and used

The Ts and Cs are legal documents, and we advise you to get your legal team to review them before you publish them.

A process for registration

By creating an incentive registration process you can capture the details of participants and ask them to accept the terms and conditions, as described above. It also acts as the first real indicator of engagement. If you receive only a few registrations, you’ll need to promote the incentive further to get the numbers up.

Registration will also help you forecast results and allow your participants to opt in to receive notifications from you about the incentive.

Don’t make it too easy!

Your incentive needs to sit somewhere between ‘not too easy’ and ‘not too hard’. The rewards must be achievable and encourage your participants to do more than they would ordinarily be doing. If the goal seems unattainable it might put participants off from taking part.

Our experience has shown that if there is a way to cheat the system, your participants will find it. This is why you need comprehensive terms and conditions to clarify the rules with those cheeky rule-breakers!

Reward the right habits

Channel incentives should reward positive behaviour changes and the right actions. Design your incentives to encourage and recognise incremental performance improvements.

Make sure your rewards are something your participants want. Tailoring rewards to their preferences increases motivation and engagement. This approach ensures that your incentives are effective but also ensures they are valued by your partners, driving sustained performance improvements.

Allow participants to track their progress

During your channel sales incentive programme, you will collect data on participants’ activity to report to the wider team the progress of the incentive versus the goals set. Granting participants access to their progress information takes things to the next level and encourages them to maximise their efforts to gain further rewards.

Incentive portals or leader boards are one way of providing this information, plus it has been proven to reduce the number of queries you receive on progress as partners can self-serve.

Timely communications

Communication is critical for every incentive, and the approach needs to be similar to most projects in that there are ‘before’, ‘during’, and ‘after’ stages of communication.

Before

Awareness and promotion: your goal is to make partners aware of the incentive and entice them to register to participate. You need to communicate this via several different channels to maximise the reach of the message. These could include:

• Via email – a promotional email to your partner audience
• Via your partner website – a dedicated incentive page with downloadable content and visibility of the Ts and Cs
• Via webinar – if you run regular update webinars for your partners, include a section to highlight up-and-coming incentives
• Via account managers – equip your account managers with the necessary content to promote and discuss the incentive when they meet with partners

During

Progress and encouragement updates: your goal is to update participants with progress information to spur them to do more, and earn more rewards. These updates should include:

• Status notifications – with the partner’s score, reward status or position on the leaderboard
• Help and support – encouraging partners to reach out for advice or support if needed
• Reminders – on the rewards available, the process and the deadline

After

Incentive summary and claim information: partners will be keen to learn how they did, what rewards they achieved and the process of obtaining those rewards. It is important to thank them for taking part and provide them with a summary of the impact the incentive had.

Get feedback

Post-incentive feedback is important and will help inform future incentives. Measuring how well you did is not just about the sales numbers or the engagement you achieved from partners. What did the participants think of it?

Raising brand awareness and loyalty from your partner base is one of the most common goals we see companies set. If you run effective and rewarding incentives for them, they are more likely to take part in future incentives. The only way you can truly gauge participants’ buy-in is by collecting their views and opinions on the incentives you run.

A post-incentive survey will help of course, but we also encourage reaching out to partners and talking directly with them. Add this information to the feedback survey along with any you received during the incentive and then leverage it when you come to planning the next one.

Types of channel incentives

Channel incentives come in various forms, each designed to achieve specific objectives. For a comprehensive overview, check out our blog post, “Which Channel Incentive Should I Opt For?”.

Here’s a brief look at some key incentive types we recommend:

1. Sales Accelerator

Boost Your Sales Velocity! Energize your channel sales teams, speed up the sales of targeted products, and achieve your quarterly revenue goals.

2. Deal Registrations

Build a Robust Pipeline! Encourage your partners to register their deals, increasing the number of opportunities in your sales pipeline. Focus on new logos, renewals, new products, or expanding existing customer accounts.

Read our blog: What does a good deal registration channel incentive look like?

3. Enablement

Empower Your Teams! Motivate pre-sales, technical, and sales teams to enhance their knowledge of your products and services, achieving necessary certifications. The better they understand your offerings, the more effectively they can sell.

What incentive works best?

In our experience, it really does depend on what you hope to achieve. Are you looking to push sales performance? Are you looking to enable your participants with the knowledge they need?

With our channel incentive campaigns, we typically observe the following outcomes:

• Sales Accelerator Campaigns: Typically see a 35% uplift in sales revenue.
• Deal Registration Campaigns: Generally result in a 36% increase in deal registrations.
• Enablement Programs: Equip teams with the skills and knowledge to sell more effectively. We see a 44 % rise in enablement and a 58% increase in certifications.

Your channel incentive next steps

As you run more channel incentives you will no doubt create your own best practices formed through your own experience. These will help make the running of future incentives as seamless as possible.

However, if you don’t have the bandwidth to take on the task of running an end-to-end incentive, get in touch with us. The Essential Agency has been running incentives of all shapes and sizes for many years and we would be more than happy to lend a hand.