When it comes to growing your brand, bringing new customers into the fold, and retaining current clients, you can utilize several different marketing techniques and sales tactics. One option to consider is a sales incentive plan. Incentivizing the continued purchase of products and services from your company may help improve customer retention while attracting new buyers to your business. Of course, while all of this sounds good on paper, executing and maintaining an incentive program can prove a bit more challenging, especially if you are limited on manpower or have never handled such a program in the past. Incentive programs require real-time monitoring, and the more customers you bring into the fold, the more difficult it becomes to stay on top of everything. Understanding submission processing, how it impacts any kind of incentive program, and its impact on your business productivity is important. With this information, you can better decide how to execute an incentive program and how best to utilize your own time, money, and energy.
Staffing and Manpower
For starters, you will eventually need to dedicate employees specifically to monitoring your incentive program or spiff program. If you start out small, it won’t prove all that difficult, but as more customers sign up for your incentive offers, the more robust your services become and the more dedicated manpower you’ll need specifically for your program. You might find you’re processing submissions daily. Even if you have specific applications to notify you when a customer reaches certain incentive thresholds, you will still need dedicated manpower to administer the rewards and process the new account creation. This becomes a variable expense because the more your incentive program grows, the more time and energy you’ll need to put towards it. The entire point of launching such an incentive program is to both grow your business and make money, but if you’re taking all that revenue and pumping it into hiring additional employees, it really doesn’t do you much good.
Costs
You will need to invest in specific monitoring applications for your incentive program. You can’t just type everything into an Excel spreadsheet and hope to stay on top of the purchases made by customers. A spreadsheet might work when you only have a handful of customers participating during the offer period, but as that handful turns into dozens, then hundreds, and even thousands, there’s no way you can stay on top of it with such a program. This means you’ll need to pay more money for an application, as well as money for dedicated employees and possibly even a new localized server, to stay on top of the information and to back up customer data because the last thing you want is to lose your customer purchase info. Forcing customers to start their incentive profile all over again is a quick way to lose customers.
Programming and Infrastructure Costs
As mentioned above, your growing sales incentive program will force you to invest in new applications and infrastructure services. Even if you don’t go with a physical data center on-site, you’ll need to pay more for cloud storage, which again will increase the cost of running the incentive offer to your customers.
Don’t forget about the added budget bloat that comes from supporting new software and the maintenance of that software. On average, the annual software maintenance fee is 25% of your license cost. This adds up quickly and can hurt your bottom line. By outsourcing your submission processing to Incentive Insights, you don’t have to worry about these fees!
Seasonal Increase
Throughout the year, you will have a steady flow of customers making purchases that count toward their incentive rewards. There will be some minor peaks and valleys, but generally, the year will remain consistent. That is, until your holiday or peak seasons hits! More purchases will be made during the holidays, which increases your reliance on your established programming and infrastructure. If you’ve never been through a holiday season with the storage service or the given applications, you will have no idea whether the hardware and software can keep up with demand. Software crashes and slow performance issues are not an option.
How Incentive Insights Solutions Can Help
Accepting, processing, and monitoring submissions into your incentive-based service can quickly anchor down employees and your budget. Thankfully, you don’t have to do this on your own. At Incentive Insights, you can partner with a professional service that focuses on enhancing your incentive solutions while saving you money, time, and headaches. There is a lot of trial and error when selecting applications and cloud-based services that will work with your incentive programs. The problem here is you don’t have time to continually learn new applications, nor should you hope the cloud service can keep up with your holiday rush. With Incentive Insights, you’ll avoid all these problems and have all the solutions you need right at your fingertips.
The staff at Incentive Insights can receive the physical documents, images, and any other information (however you obtain your customer info) and then implement it into the network workflow. Our staff will digitize the information and put it in an easily reusable format for your CRM, marketing or sales databases, etc. With all of the submissions and processing handled, the staff at Incentive Insights will then take the info and monitor any purchases made by the customers, add the purchase info to the client file, and stay on top of any reward notifications you need. This eliminates the need to hire new employees or experiment with various applications. Plus, you will have peace of mind knowing the seasonal rush won’t bog down your server or cause problems with an untested application. You will receive all of this, plus Incentive Insights uses a proprietary system that offers double-blind data verification for the highest degree of accuracy.
Discover the Incentive Insights Difference
Whether you have questions you want to be answered or are ready to take your incentive programs to the next level, the staff at Incentive Insights is here to help. All you need to get things started is to give the customer service staff a call or fill out a request form right on the website.
Nathaniel Smathers, a contributor to the Incentive Insights blog, brings a fresh perspective on business strategies and market trends. With a background in marketing and a passion for data-driven insights, Nathaniel offers a unique blend of expertise and creativity. His approach to dissecting complex market dynamics and transforming them into actionable strategies makes him an invaluable asset to our team.
