Add Bench Strength to Your Sales Team with a B2B Reward Program

B2B Companies have so many accounts, but so few hours in the day. You’re a big manufacturer or wholesale distributor with hundreds or even thousands of accounts. Your business model is based on customer acquisition and customer retention.

Your sales team compensation is largely or entirely commission-based. In the course of an average day, who do they tend to call on? The biggest, most important 20-30% of your business customer accounts of course, as there simply isn’t enough time to connect with everyone, so they look after your bread and butter accounts.

But consider a few realities…

High Volume, Low Margins  

Those top customers are also high on your competitor’s prospect lists and as a result, those accounts tend to be over-serviced and afford little room for sales growth. Further, because they’re so sought after, they can negotiate more aggressively, playing you and your competition against one another, resulting in some of your lowest margin business.

Small-Medium Accounts – Big Opportunity  

What about all the smaller accounts your team doesn’t have time to pursue? In total, they actually represent an incredible opportunity for sales growth and higher margins – if only you could get in there and call on them all and capture more of their spending for your products and services.

Reward your customers for their loyalty

B2B Reward programs are actually automated performance-based selling engines. Loyalty rewards increase your visibility with accounts, ensuring you are more top-of-mind when it comes time to place orders in your category. You can easily use your program to target specific sales gaps or opportunities with strategic bonus offers and reward points designed to change customer behavior.

Consider the results  

We studied over 10,000 transactions for a wholesale distributor in the automotive category who launched a B2B reward program targeting tire shop owners, comparing 8 months of pre- and post-program data. Customer data shows:

• Participating dealers increased purchase frequency by 45% versus only 2% increase by non-reward users
• Reward-earning dealers made more than 3X the number of purchases than non-participants
• Reward-earners spent 27% more per transaction than non-reward dealers
• Reward earners increased total spending by 53% and outspent non-reward dealers by almost 300%

When structured and operated properly, results like these are common. The reason more and more companies choose to employ reward programs is because they improve customer experience and deliver terrific ROI. 

Key Program Traits for Maximum ROI Impact:

1. Sound Offer Structure – Plan your offer structure so it makes sense for your economics. The more valuable the sales outcome for you, the richer you make the associated reward value for your customer. Use reward tiers graduated to reward your best customers at a higher rate than customers of lesser value.
2. Program Awareness – Tell people. Get as many customers to sign up as possible. A program can’t influence behavior if they don’t participate.
3. Ease of Use – Make it easy for your customers and prospects to join the program. Offer a welcome bonus to encourage them to sign up.
4. Sales Team Involvement – Introduce a companion reward structure for your sales team, designed to ensure they encourage as many customers and prospects as possible to sign up for the program.
5. Ongoing Engagement – Don’t use short duration programs; they are hugely inefficient. Plan an ongoing program that encompasses both short and long term sales objectives and create limited time and/or ongoing reward offers tied to these objectives. Your customers will be able to accumulate more rewards and be increasingly influenced by the program.
6. Program Visibility – Keep your customers in the loop about their reward status by sending out a monthly reward email that includes their reward balance. Be sure to communicate new bonus offers tied to specific sales in these emails as well.

A good B2B loyalty program is a valuable sales tool, providing added account coverage for smaller accounts and more leverage for your sales team when they call on bigger accounts. But they require care and attention to succeed. Let Lift & Shift bring some bench strength to your sales team with a custom B2B customer loyalty program.