A Global Technology Company

Situation
While the Client had been offering sales incentive programs to its value-added resellers (VARs) for a number of years, it was unable to quantify its return on investment. Promotions, often run in spurts, required frequent re-branding and had no consistent overall message to connect the resellers to the Client’s objectives. In addition, participants were frustrated by the administrative burden of the paper-fax based program and the Client call center had a hard time matching claims and awards through the required manual process.

The Client was looking for a better way to meet its key objectives of:

• building stronger relationships and recruiting more VARs
• increasing program participation rates
• strengthening business in broader geographies
• increasing SMB share while maintaining margins

Solution
Maritz Motivation, applied its experience in relationship marketing and rewards fulfillment to identify and address a number of issues.

A sophisticated web-based lifecycle marketing platform was designed to give participants an easy way to register for programs, track their progress, and automate their claims submission. Maritz recommended a points-based award system that would allow participants to redeem their claims at levels of their own choosing. While the company had traditionally provided cash awards, Maritz believed that giving participants a wider choice of rewards, including merchandise and travel, would broaden the appeal of the program and increase participation – with a tangential benefit being the ability to maximize their budget by converting cash rewards to non-cash rewards. The lifecycle marketing platform provided the ability to accumulate points from several programs into one account. The unified look and feel of the site helped to reinforce the brand image and key messages.

Another key to growing participation was providing incentives to both Account Managers (AMs) and Sales Engineers(SEs) combined with rewarding the VAR company itself. By splitting points earned (40% to AMs, 40% to SEs and 20% to the VAR company,) the program strategy was to build enthusiasm and motivate a broader base of participants.

Results

• VAR numbers grew from 400 to 5200
• Inactive VARs were identified and removed from the program
• POS data was matched against claims submitted by partners, reducing the processing time from 6-8 weeks to 8 days or less, thus reinforcing desired behavior in a timely manner
• Expanded reward choice proved a success – 50% chose non-cash rewards
• Non-cash points had a cost advantage over cash, thus helping meet margin objectives
• The coordinated market-centric approach reduced costs for product managers managing multiple programs
• The website’s flexible design allowed product managers to test and measure pilot programs and determine ROI
• Now there was a scalable foundation for expansion into other countries and other program types