I recently attended Engagement Expo in Frisco, Texas. This B2B event organized by the Loyalty 360 organization attracted a couple hundred people looking to learn more about loyalty in the B2B space for the next 2012 sales cycle. There were many learnings about effective prospect engagement and acquisition, but two major themes emerged very clearly.
The first is new competition to traditional loyalty programs, along the lines of “group buying”, a formula popularized by Groupon, and Living Social which has also been cloned across every major American city. These programs promise a multitude of subscribers a deal per day, price-discounted from 50% to 80% off regular prices. In a national U.S. survey done by Research Now, 58% of adults said they were enrolled in one or more of these types of programs. There is a problem though: group buying as a customer acquisition strategy is weak when associated to lasting brand loyalty. This is supported by a Rice University study which reported that only ~20% of first-time Groupon customers returned to the businesses where they’d used a coupon.
The second is that a more effective approach to new prospect engagement and acquisition is a data- driven communication strategy across the prospect and customer lifecycle. This tactic ensures that your audience receives the right messages, at the right time, differentiating you from your competition.
To implement a data-driven strategy that targets both decision makers and influencers, you’ve got to start by analyzing your own data, then profile and examine your current customer base in order to identify like prospects. This is very important because by identifying prospects that resemble your current customers, you will substantially increase response rates and build prospect dialogue. Segmentation is the starting point to creating “relevant conversation” because it allows us to apply inferred knowledge in our messaging and enhances our chances “just to get in the game”, as generic messaging does not create dialogue opportunities.
Prospect cultivation strategies that create sales-ready leads, and significantly enhance sales conversion rates are also critical to the success of your efforts to maximizing customer lifetime value. Research has shown it takes 5+ touches just to begin making an impression in your targeted audience, hence less than 5% of all B2B leads generated are sales ready (were only touched once and sent to sales). Synergistic multi-touch cultivation efforts outperform single touch, so you’ve got to wrap a complete campaign around each communication, and please don’t sell, instead, offer. Offer information, motivation and consistent messaging. As you capture and track the dialogue that transpires with a prospect, you position yourself to engage in a personal and relevant conversation based on real information. This information helps you plan and manage through the sales cycle as well as identify up-sell/cross-sell opportunities through data intelligence.
Does this sound familiar? It sure did to me since this is an approach that we encourage our clients to pursue for the most effective engagement with their partners.
Thank you for attending (or not) our webinar on channel incentives for this new economy. During the webinar, we reviewed the effects of the Great Recession on the channel and how it has impacted IT & Telecom vendor’s incentive programs. We also listened to the “voice of the partner” to better understand their challenges participating in your program – followed by a target practice lesson aimed at balancing and delivering the right incentives to the right partners at the right time. It was a lot of content for 45 minutes and we stayed high level in order to please everyone in the audience.
If you felt we stated the obvious, you’ll be pleased to learn that as we go into 2012, we’ll dive into each segment in-depth, and analyze the facts behind the most successful incentive programs hawkeye has managed in the last 15 years. The objective of this analysis is to share key drivers for success in channel incentive programs, and provide you with a better perspective on our data-driven approach to incentives for the 2012 sales cycle.
Incentive programs are prone to generating considerable amounts of waste, as channel marketing teams allocate more and more dollars to their incentives programs without a clear understanding of what really makes them successful. Waste is especially evident on rebate programs that pay partners on volume, without consideration of partner engagement. Without a data-driven approach to recognizing the behavior of successful partners, incentive programs can only be judged by tactical measurements, instead of how well they support the real goal of increasing partner performance.
A data-driven approach to incentive plan design – identifies best practices that already exist within your channel ecosystem, and then places the right incentives to inspire those same behaviors across the targeted partner tier; raising the overall standard of performance, and creating positive changes that last.
We’ll continue to bring you more insights on measuring the true incremental impact of your channel programs in 2012. We know how vital it is to identify and prioritize partners with the greatest potential and align your resources so that you can invest in programs and partners that really make a difference.
The trees are changing color here in Seattle and that means….you thought I was going to say Fall is in the air right? Well, yes, but it also means that we are all thinking about 2012 and not just those Doomsday predictions. It’s time to plan budgets and strategies for the Channel.
We talk a lot about being data driven here at hawkeye and truly believe it needs to be a part of everything we do with our customers in the Channel. For companies seeking to maximize their large investment in incentives provided to partners, access to data and the ability to analyze that data is essential. For example, one of the things we suggest to our clients is that it is not enough to just track metrics with a rebate program – a best-in-class rebate platform should be able to provide modeling to determine your financial exposure.
Next week our Chief Channel Strategist Claudio Ayub will be presenting a webinar on Channel Incentive Programs for a Sluggish Economy. Incentive programs are always of huge interest to Partners but the challenge for Vendors is to maximize the investment: who do you incentivize? Which is better – company level incentives or team/individual incentives? Claudio will look at a variety of incentives programs with advice on how to target the appropriate program to the right partners.
We’re partnering with the Baptie Community for this webinar and look forward to a lively Q&A session after Claudio’s presentation – we hope you’ll join us. Click here to register.
Next week (July 27th) is the capstone broadcast for hawkeye’s webinar series on the Data-Driven Organization. As the organizer for our webinars, I thought it would be fun to try something new this time so we’re taking questions during registration and the entire webinar is being built around submitted questions and registrants’ areas of interest. The original plan was to have two experts available to field questions. I’ve been receiving so many interesting (and diverse!) queries this week that I’ve reached out to a couple other subject matter experts and now have a panel of four SMEs for the webinar.
If you have a question you need answered this is really a great chance to get four experts focused on your issue. The panelists are Greg Osenga, Dave Hafermann, Deb Broderson, and Vaughn Aust and collectively they have a wealth of experience in the channel including analytics, ROI, data integrity, CRM/PRM, MDF, and rewards/incentives.
And, yes, I know this sounds like a shameless plug for our webinar (big blog no-no), but really, I just want to be sure I have lots of questions to keep this panel really busy for an hour! If you have a question you want to get answered, just register here or if you’ve already registered and thought of something else, feel free to drop me an email at tdelphia@hawkeyeww.com.
Peter Ostrow, a Research Director at Aberdeen Group, is conducting a survey that will help companies with indirect selling partners assist them in hitting their quota more consistently. By participating in this brief survey, you will be able to see how your experiences in partner relationship management and channel enablement compare with those of your peers. This study offers a unique opportunity to benchmark your year-to-year accomplishments in terms of channel sales and marketing effectiveness. If your company is planning on implementing a channel or partner-based selling solution, or is simply evaluating the potential benefits, we would appreciate your feedback in this brief, 10-minute survey.
In appreciation for sharing your time and thoughts with us, Aberdeen will provide complimentary access for you to the full benchmark report (a $399 value). Individual responses will be kept strictly confidential, and data will only be used in aggregate. We look forward to hearing from you, and greatly appreciate your time and participation.
Thank you!
