Gaining traction from your contractor incentives can be hard work but it is imperative in building long-term loyalty and repeat engagement with your brand. There exists a myriad of distractions out there– competitor programs, consumer rebates and promotions, personal endeavors like births, deaths- all competing for limited individual mindshare.
If your contractor incentives program isn’t working, there could be several reasons behind it. A trusted channel incentives solution provider like Dash Solutions can offer the expertise and tools necessary to create traction, focus, and drive success through your indirect partner channels.
After decades in the industry, here are four common issues that could be hindering your success and suggestions on how to tackle those challenges:
Incentives Don’t Align with Program Objectives
Simply launching promotions, SPIFFs and contests without an overarching strategy is a formula for misuse of budget, misaligned incentives, and disengaged contractors. After formulating your overall program objectives, a good channel solution provider can help tailor incentives to help reach intended partners and drive KPIs in the context of program objectives.
Objectives may include greater market penetration within a specific product line, more volume for a specific SKU, training, and many other leading sales indicators. For example, volume-based incentives reward when partners sell more, while training incentives will reward upon completion of a specific course or module to increase product knowledge.
Promotions Aren’t Appealing
If your promotions and incentives aren’t attractive to your dealers or contractors, you can bet on this being a losing strategy. Incentives must be tailored to appeal to specific audiences, so a fundamental understanding of your contractor ecosystem is necessary. Know your loyalists, detractors, and those in between to help ensure your promotions resonate with the audience’s needs or interests, lest they recall a competitor at point of sale. Additionally, goals and incentives that are impossible to achieve may wane interest, so be sure to balance earning difficulty with attainable goals.
Program has Unclear or Complicated Rules
Channel incentives management programs help you centralize your SPIFFs, promotions, and contests in a singular environment to help you communicate them and define their rules clearly. If the structure of the program is confusing or not clearly communicated, contractors may get frustrated, not understand how to participate, or may even accidentally disqualify themselves for noncompliance with terms and conditions.
Moreover, sales submissions rules should be a seamless and secure process, allowing for fast and efficient payouts to keep your partners earning. If your submission or redemption process is too convoluted, participants may get discouraged or confused and take their business elsewhere.
Not Aligning with Your Content or Brand
Brand recall and loyalty in a contractor’s day to day requires training and positive reinforcement. Again, with 100s of different brands competing for partner mindshare, or a field job that frequently keeps them out of the office, creating a positive perception, affinity, and brand recall requires a program where your incentives are in line with your content and brand identity.
Your incentives might be just one of many similar offers. Using a channel incentives solution that facilitates branded promotions that are personalized and targeted to specific audiences, in a branded homepage, gives them a unique experience that helps resonate for repeat activity and engagement.
Conclusion
Running a successful contractor incentives program is a powerful way to boost engagement, reward loyal partners, and strengthen your partnerships. However, it’s not always as simple as launching a reward program and hoping for the best. If the program isn’t yielding expected results, it’s important to consider underlying factors, such as the ones described above.
In a nutshell, the key to success is creating incentives that resonate and can reach your specific contractors, keeping the process simple and compliant, and maintaining consistent line-of-sight into the program’s health. Identifying and addressing the distractions and obstacles in your current approach, you can unlock a program that truly resonates and drives additional revenue.
