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 large manufacturer or wholesale distributor with hundreds—or even thousands—of accounts. Your business model is built on customer acquisition and customer retention.
Your sales team is compensated largely, or entirely, through commissions. So, in the course of an average day, who do they tend to call on? Naturally, the biggest and most important 20–30% of your customer accounts. There simply isn’t enough time to connect with everyone, so they focus on your bread-and-butter customers.
But consider a few key realities…
High volume, low margins
Those top accounts are also high on your competitors’ target lists. As a result, they tend to be over-serviced and offer little room for sales growth. Additionally, because these customers are so sought after, they can negotiate more aggressively—playing you and your competitors against each other—often resulting in your lowest-margin business.
Small-medium accounts = Big opportunity
What about all the smaller accounts your team doesn’t have time to pursue? Collectively, they represent an incredible opportunity for sales growth and higher margins—if only you could reach them and capture a greater share of their spending for your products and services.
Reward your customers for their loyalty
B2B reward programs function as automated, performance-based sales engines. Loyalty rewards increase your visibility with accounts, ensuring you stay top of mind when it’s 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 influence customer behavior.
Consider the results
We analyzed over 10,000 transactions for a wholesale distributor in the automotive sector that launched a B2B reward program targeting tire shop owners. Comparing eight months of pre- and post-program data, customer insights revealed:
- Participating dealers increased purchase frequency by 45%, versus only a 2% increase among non-participants
- Reward-earning dealers made more than 3X the number of purchases compared to non-participants
- Reward earners spent 27% more per transaction than non-reward dealers
- Overall, reward earners increased total spend by 53% and outspent non-reward dealers by almost 300%
When structured and operated effectively, results like these are common. More and more companies are adopting B2B reward programs because they improve the customer experience and deliver terrific ROI.
Key Program Traits for Maximum ROI Impact:
- Sound Offer Structure—Design your offer structure to align with your business economics. The more valuable the sales outcome, the richer the reward value should be. Use reward tiers graduated to reward your best customers at a higher rate than customers of lesser value.
- Program Awareness—Promote the program. Get as many customers to enroll as possible. A loyalty program can’t influence behavior if customers don’t participate.
- Ease of Use—Make it simple for customers and prospects to join. Offer a welcome bonus to encourage sign-ups.
- Sales Team Involvement—Introduce a companion incentive structure for your sales team, designed to ensure they actively promote the program and enroll customers.
- Ongoing Engagement—Avoid short-term programs—they’re inefficient. Develop a long-term program that addresses both short- and long-term sales objectives. Use limited-time and ongoing offers to keep customers engaged and accumulating rewards over time. Your customers will be able to accumulate more rewards and be increasingly influenced by the program.
- Program Visibility—Maintain regular communication. Send monthly statements via email with their current rewards balance and promote new bonus offers tied to specific sales goals.
A well-designed B2B loyalty program is a powerful sales tool. It extends account coverage to smaller customers and gives your sales team greater leverage when they call on larger accounts. But like any sales tool, it requires ongoing care and attention to perform at its best. Let Lift & Shift bring some bench strength to your sales team with a custom B2B customer loyalty program.
The Ultimate Guide to B2B Loyalty Programs
This article is part of a series covering how growth-based loyalty programs can elevate sales and company profits by incentivizing current customers to spend more, attracting new customers with appealing rewards, and motivating your sales team.
If you'd like to learn more about B2B Loyalty Programs, then please read the next article in the series: "Competing Against E-commerce Giants: The Power of B2B Loyalty Programs".
For an overview of all articles in the series, please visit our resource page "The Ultimate Guide to B2B Loyalty Programs".
Lift & Shift™ offers a powerful B2B reward platform that can help your company leverage its sales data to drive incremental purchases with customers and channel partners or motivate sales staff. We work with manufacturers, distributors and service providers to analyze sales data, identifying purchasing gaps and other valuable targeting opportunities.
We create and deliver highly relevant offers to customers, in-house sales staff or sales associates, motivating your target audience to respond, using a wide array of appealing reward options as influencers. Our performance-based reward structures deliver an unparalleled return on investment, with absolutely no wasted budget.
Our customizable reward platform enables clients to easily benefit from a robust loyalty reward program. It's affordable and includes Lift & Shift’s turnkey professional program administration. We take care of everything so you can focus on your key initiatives.
Looking to create or
improve your program?
We can help!
Blog page form
Your Automated Sales Partner: How a B2B Loyalty Program Unlocks Revenue from Under-Serviced Accounts
