Expecting sales growth year over year can be a simple conclusion. Businesses build targets around it as a measure of success, meaning that it forms a large portion of the expectations and outcomes of the year.
However, the last few years have demonstrated that we are only sometimes in a climate where growth can occur due to external market forces, supply availability, and stock issues or when inflated prices have become the norm. As much as we recommend the virtues of a growth incentive program, it simply can’t occur in inhospitable markets.
This doesn’t mean you must bunker down and weather the storm. Other sales incentive options are available to achieve great results and secure your market share.
Want to see what a sales incentive program can achieve in your industry?
Selecting a Business Objective Beyond Growth
There are many sales incentive programs available to your business, but selecting one requires your brand to answer a simple question.
“What business pain point are you trying to solve?”
You need to determine your focus and objectives in these difficult markets rather than focusing on the return on investment (ROI).
Here are some questions to help you narrow down what you should be building your solutions around:
- Are your customers disengaged?
- Do you need to re-establish, strengthen or maintain your customer relationship?
- Is product knowledge at an all-time low?
- If you have stock and supply issues, is it across all products, or could you focus on products that you have in stock?
- Are there cross-selling opportunities across brands, ranges or even business divisions?
- Is your main objective to maintain current growth rather than achieve year-on-year growth?
From here, you’ll have the foundation for your program design and understand your goal. Your sales incentive program should be flexible and able to adapt to your shifting business needs.
Including elements aligned with your business’s changing focus allows you to change the program’s focus, working as a dynamic tool to support these changes.
Creating Value and Finding Retention in Difficult Markets
A great example is food service distributors within the COVID-19 lockdowns and the impact on hospitality and the food service industry.
A client’s program with growth target-based offers was flailing after an 85% decline, and the program needed to be fit for the current market. This change required our help to pivot the focus of the program to fit more current objectives:
- to be the supplier of choice
- to re-establish core product-ranging post-COVID
- to reward distributors for this.
These new objectives gave the client a superior foothold in their relationship with their clients, with the distributors acknowledging that the supplier fully understood their current climate. The understanding resulted in reciprocated goodwill, and 64% of the program participants could meet their updated monthly purchase targets.
This pivot sent a message to their customers that they understood how they were hurting. They adopted a strategy of providing customers with value and supported the emotional connection that sales incentive programs foster.
Bundles, Add-ons and Upsells
While growth may seem impossible in specific markets, an alternate solution is rewarding customers for bundled purchases. Tweaking “buy X, get Y” to “buy A+B to receive C” can work effectively as a cross-selling opportunity, especially when the bundles make logical sense to channel partners.
For example, in the automotive industry, pushing a bundle in limited stock supported by aftermarket sales products such as upgrades, tints, or services can be a creative solution to keep your customers incentivised to keep buying from you. Again, this comes back to the heart of an incentive program – by providing additional sources of value within the transaction, fostering an emotional connection between brand and customer can lead to increased revenue in any market condition.
Driving Competitive Natures Through Status Tiers
An additional way to create positive behavioural change in your customer groups can be to use a psychological principle: rewarding through creating a sense of status.
Your sales incentive program can create status tiers, allowing participants to earn points and achieve status levels once they meet the target. This pivot has quickly been adopted within the computer and tech industry and is an absolute success.
This type of program uses leaderboards to drive a sense of competition within your participants, which most readers will know is a keen motivator for most sales teams. Once the participant has achieved a specific tier, they will likely change behaviour to retain it.
This sense of competition can allow your program’s focus to pivot from growth to reinforcing specific targeted behaviours through connecting the program’s status points to examples such as:
- attending a networking event to maintain strong relationships with your customers
- completing a learning or training module to enhance product knowledge
- providing feedback by completing a survey.
These all strengthen the bond with your customers by finding an alternative to growth your brand would like to support – your brand needs to find what it’s looking for.
Reviewing and Adjusting Rewards
Similarly, your program can adjust the rewards to meet the objective changes – something any program should review regularly. When pivoting your objective within the program, it is critical to ensure that participants can now achieve rewards that could have previously seemed out of reach. Otherwise, they’ll disengage with the program.
While growth often demands more revenue, matching rewards with the desired outcome can still lead to success. This can be achieved by finding less cost-prohibitive rewards, such as moving from incentive travel to merchandise bundles. You’ll reduce reward costs while still finding ways to incentivise behavioural change.
One example of such an approach is to shift rewards from travel to merchandise. This simple change can reduce reward costs but still provide benefits; for example, achieving a lower sales target could still result in a desirable reward.
Flexible and creative with your rewards can help ensure your program delivers the desired outcomes.
In closing, value the relationship with your customers above all else. Maintaining spending and retaining customers through trying markets can be as good as growth, allowing your brand to maintain a larger share of the wallet.