Which channel partner incentives are generally the most effective?
Okay, let me qualify this a little bit, right? There are two types of incentives. There is actually the incentive program, and then the specific incentive that an individual is going to receive in recognition of his behavior, his activity, or transaction (as it used to be many, many years ago). What we find is that choice is really the best incentive. What I mean by that is that you need to be able to provide choice to the different audiences that you're going to try to engage. For example, a business owner, a partner owner is going to have different desires, different motivation than a sales rep, a sales manager, and/or a marketing associate, right?
You need to have choice. Obviously, the business owner is going to be looking after the bottom line, and he's going to be more interested in cash rebates, for example. That may or may not be necessarily good for the supplier, right? Yeah, it will definitely help the company's bottom line, the partner's bottom line, and that's something that all suppliers are interested in doing, but those funds may be spent on competing products, or a number of other things that you really don't have control of. Now, when it comes to your sales managers and your sales reps, an assortment of lifestyle options is the way to go.
I’m talking about very high-end products like GoPros, I'm talking about a number of items that are really attractive to this audience, as well as gift cards and prepaid cards. You've got to provide choice for these individuals, okay? Choice is really the answer to that question of what incentive works best.
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