Channel partner loyalty programs are a cost-effective strategy to boost your sales number and improve your brand’s reach, but it does come at a cost. To ensure that your investment is being utilized to its fullest potential, you must measure how your funds are distributed between channel partners and who is filing for rewards.
Below are some of the reasons why you must measure the effectiveness of your channel partner loyalty program.
- Assessing if goals are achieved
Monitor and track the progress of your partner loyalty program to see how close you are to achieving your goals.
- Identifying areas of improvement
Identify and remove any roadblocks channel partners may face.
- Understanding channel partners
Customize your programs to suit your channel partner motivations and preferences
- Evaluating effectiveness of rewards
Evaluate if your rewards are motivating partners in participating & improving their performance.}
Defining Channel Partner Performance
Channel partners work differently and bring in value in their own unique way. In effect, you can categorize the value that your channel partner loyalty programs produce into four buckets – revenue boost, strategic advantage, operational excellence, and relationship health.
Revenue boost
Measure the increase in revenue or sales numbers that can be attributed to your loyalty program and channel partner. You can assess if the amount you are spending in training, onboarding, and facilitating is generating the desired ROI. You can also calculate the financial viability of a partner by considering the direct sales and pipeline value.
Strategic advantage
Instead of being an extended sales team, your channel partners must expand reach into newer markets and bring new additional opportunities. Further, your channel partners must offer seamless and personalized customer experience, which you measure with metrics such as customer attrition rate.
Operational excellence
Your channel partners must have a team of professionals who are trained and certified on your product or service implementation, in addition to being an ideal sales expert. You can measure this by establishing a learning journey with operational milestones.
Relationship health
Better your relationship with your channel partner, the better their performance. Although it may be challenging to quantify the loyalty or relationship with your channel partner, it is necessary to measure it. You can do this by evaluating their engagement with training materials, efficiency of communication and participation in channel partner loyalty programs.
Metrics to capture effectiveness of channel partner loyalty program
As an organization, the metrics you choose to understand how well your channel partner loyalty program works depends on your unique business objectives. However, we have listed 5 key metrics that will give you a broad idea of your partner’s performance. You can add or delete metrics as per your process.
Redemption Rate
This metric shows if your channel partners are redeeming your rewards and by what percentage. It is a direct indication on whether your rewards are valuable and motivating.
Partner Lifetime Value
As the name suggests, this metric will give you the lifetime value a partner has produced for you. It tells you which partners can be retained through attractive channel partner loyalty programs.
Engagement Rate
This metric signifies how effectively your channel partner is engaging or communicating with you. A high engagement rate indicates that your partner is fully committed to increasing your sales and revenue, and will also respond positively to your channel partner loyalty programs.
Churn Rate
Churn rate indicates the number of customers that your channel partners are losing over a period of time. It can give you insights into the customer experience that your partner is offering. You can decide on training the concerned associates or motivating them with better channel partner loyalty programs.
Cross-Selling or Upselling Rate
If your channel partner is bringing in additional revenue by either cross-selling or upselling within your portfolio, it is a great marker that your partner is aligned with customer needs.
Besides these, you can also measure metrics like order value, leads volume and profitability per loyalty program.
Ace Up Your Loyalty Program with Zaggle Propel
Channel partner loyalty programs are essential for businesses to maximize the performance of their partners and sales associates. However, it must be managed meticulously to ensure that it doesn’t become a financial leakage. While you can plan and decide the metrics to monitor to understand the effectiveness of channel partner rewards programs, it will need a robust channel partner incentive platform like Zaggle Propel.
One of the major features of Propel, which is making it a top choice of enterprises, is metric-based configurator to calculate incentive. With this, companies can determine KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for channel partners to assess their performance. Additionally, you can configure multiple conditions and have tailored scoring criteria based on geography, qualification criteria, and so on.
Learn more about Zaggle Propel here.
