The way B2B companies approach sales has evolved dramatically in recent years. Sales teams are under growing pressure to do more with less—less time, fewer people, and tighter budgets. Fortunately, a custom B2B reward program can automate key aspects of the sales process, driving greater market share, boosting sales, and better bottom-line profits for your sales plan.
It’s a common challenge in B2B sales: the top 20% of customers receive most of the attention, while the remaining 80%—often the greatest source of untapped potential—are underserved due to limited resources.
If only you could better service them all...
This is where a B2B reward program delivers high impact. It enables you to engage with your existing customers more frequently with personalized incentives that drive additional purchasing—without requiring additional outreach from your sales team.
Prospecting is essential to offset churn, but most teams are stretched to the limit maintaining their existing accounts. As a sales leader, you’d like to realize those sales and profit growth opportunities without increasing your headcount or sales budget.
Automating part of your outreach strategy through a well-structured B2B reward program allows you to scale without increasing sales overhead. It acts as a proactive sales assistant—supporting customer acquisition by delivering timely, relevant incentives to prospective buyers.
You have active, demanding, dormant, and lapsed customers, plus a pipeline full of prospects and a wealth of sales data. But if you lack the resources to act on this data, you’re leaving money on the table.
A data-driven B2B loyalty and reward program is a powerful sales tool that automates outreach to all customer types and helps identify gaps and growth opportunities across your entire base—especially the 80% that your sales team can’t call upon regularly. While many people consider reward programs to be a retention tool for building loyalty with existing accounts, a well-structured B2B reward program can help drive new customer acquisition and sales as well.
Most companies have rich sales data but no clear strategy to use it to drive incremental sales. Sometimes they lack the internal analytical tools and resources to sift through the data to identify insights, trends, gaps and opportunities. That’s where Lift & Shift’s data and analytics services come in.
Review your data to identify actionable sales gaps and opportunities that align with your company’s sales goals. Lift & Shift can help you:
Score and segment your customers
Using customer scoring, we grade performance against sales norms, identifying high-potential segments. Each segment is then assigned targeted offers aligned to their behavior and opportunity level.
With automation, the scores can be arranged into segments of similar customers, with each segment targeted for relevant sales messages and interactions. Your sales team can now prioritize who should be contacted, when, and about which products or services.
With the right insights from your sales data, you can create dozens—or even thousands—of customer segments, each with distinct behaviors, purchase patterns, and growth potential. A well-structured B2B reward program lets you target each segment with personalized offers designed to drive incremental purchases and boost lifetime value.
This is where automation becomes essential. A modern reward platform uses a rules-based engine to dynamically assign offers based on your defined sales goals for each segment. Whether you’re targeting lapsed customers, cross-sell opportunities, or high-growth accounts, the system does the heavy lifting—tracking goals, assigning rewards, and delivering tailored communications at scale.
Be sure to avoid one-size-fits-all offers. Customized rewards aligned to specific customer behaviors deliver significantly higher engagement and conversion rates. Investing in this level of targeting ensures that your program delivers measurable outcomes and has a lasting impact on sales.
At Lift & Shift, we work with you to develop a tailored offer matrix that aligns reward values with specific purchase opportunities—by customer, by segment, and by sales objective.
One good rule of thumb: the greater the value of the purchase outcome, the greater the value of the reward you should use to incentivize the customer to make it. This ensures your incentives are meaningful enough to drive action, ensuring you get the outcome you need—at a return you can measure.
Most B2B reward programs will employ a base program offer worth between 0.5% and 1% of the purchase price. From there, limited-time variable bonus offers can be used to create urgency and influence behavior around specific products, SKUs, or timelines.
All offers are 100% performance-based. No purchase? No reward cost. That means you’re free to test, adjust, and optimize your offer values based on actual results, ensuring ROI is always in your control. Because they are offered for a limited time, you can always tweak them up or down depending on how things go.
Today’s B2B reward platforms include powerful automated communication modules. Lift & Shift’s platform delivers personalized, segment-specific messages to participants, including:
The platform will assign your approved reward values to each purchase opportunity and automatically deliver motivating reward messaging to each customer, helping your sales team maintain engagement across your entire customer base. This incentivizes ALL your customers to make purchases from you, rather than your competitors.
All the insights, relevant offers and messaging should be instantly and easily accessible to your sales team. Your reward portal serves as a dynamic sales enablement tool, giving your team access to the latest customer insights, reward opportunities, and messaging strategies—before every call or meeting.
This ensures your team is always equipped to sell smarter and faster, without increasing sales costs and overhead.
Best of all, automated reward programs are completely performance-driven: no purchases, no costs. You control the economics of every offer; rewards are only earned by customers when they make the purchases you want them to, and you set the reward values to reflect your margins and sales opportunity values. Program performance is tracked and reported automatically—by month, quarter, campaign, or customer segment—providing full visibility into ROI and areas for optimization. The incremental sales and gross profit delivered by your program will pay for all program-related costs many times over, assuring excellent ROI on every dollar invested.
Very easily. All reward costs are performance-based—directly tied to actual purchases. No purchases? Then, no reward costs. You define reward values that reflect your margin potential and customers. The result? Fully accountable, performance-based marketing spend. The associated increase in sales and profit margins ensures great ROI every time.
Any. The sales data is the key. Sales targets and margins vary. Your program should reflect these nuances and be tailored to each opportunity. One size does not fit all, and your program should be structured this way. Whether you’re targeting distributors, resellers, contractors, or service providers, your program can be fully customized to reflect your unique sales objectives and margin profiles.
Highly. Reward offers and communications can be personalized at the customer, product, segment, or behavior level—based on any variable in your sales data. The opportunities are almost limitless. This will heighten engagement, boost retention, and drive incremental sales and profit.
The more customers you have, the greater the opportunity to benefit from an automated sales reward program. If you have more than a few hundred B2B customers, a reward-based sales automation program can help you drive efficiency, scale outreach, and grow revenue—without increasing staff. Let your data do the work.
Virtually none. Working with a full-service program administrator like Lift & Shift, your involvement can be limited to less than an hour or two a month. As a fully managed solution provider, we work with you before launch to establish the customer segment goals and reward values, and then we take it from there. Our professional team handles program design, data management, reward fulfillment, and reporting. You’ll meet monthly to review progress and make strategic decisions—while we handle the execution. We do all the heavy lifting while you focus on your business priorities.
Lift & Shift’s analytics team can track virtually any sales metric you can imagine. We’ll use this intelligence to inform campaign design and drive higher-value purchases across all segments based on their shared behavior. Common analyses include category/product/brand/SKU purchasing gaps, product purchase bundles or associative purchasing, purchasing volume drop-off, customer purchase scoring, and purchase growth vs. previous periods.
A modern B2B reward program is more than just a loyalty tool—it’s a smart, scalable way to automate sales, increase customer engagement, and deliver measurable revenue growth.
Let your data do the work. We’ll help you turn it into results.
(NOTE: This article has been updated from a post originally published April 28, 2021)
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: "How to Create a Wildly Successful Loyalty Program for Your B2B Business".
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!
