8 Ways a Channel Incentive Program Can Help You Maintain Critical Business During a Crisis

Hello everyone, thank you for joining us today for our live webinar, 8 Ways a Channel Incentive Program Can Help You Maintain Critical Business During a Crisis. If you have any questions during the webinar, please put them into the question box and we will try our best to get to them at the end. And with that, I'll go ahead and pass it over to Tim.

Thank you, Lauren. I'm Tim Harmon, uh, with Fielo, previously an industry analyst with Forrester Research for a decade. And normally I'm joined by my co-host Husseni Rasiwala-Yali, but Husseni is not able to join today. My wishes to Husseni go out to him, but also I want to extend my wishes to all of you and your family and friends that you remain safe. And healthy and vibrant as we, as we go through what we're going through. So with that, let me just prelude this too with saying that this is not a commercial, no way a commercial presentation, not really going to be talking about, you know, Fielo's product or solutions. These are tactics and ideas that we have gleaned from, uh, Velo customers, uh, as well as the, uh, the knowledge and experience that we've garnered over the course of our own, uh, experiences as well. So, uh, with one exception, I will talk about, you know, Velo and Salesforce, but for the most part, I'm going to keep it, uh, just in terms of tips and techniques that you can do to leverage your incentive program, you know, right now. So let's get started. You know, with the current coronavirus crisis, companies have to keep a close eye on developments and adapt accordingly, not only minimize impact on their business, but also, and perhaps most importantly, to ensure the health and safety of their partners and their customers. Now, if your company is currently running a challenge center program, it's clear that maintaining the status quo does not make sense. So here are a few tactics and ideas for how you can adapt your incentive program to take your partner relationships to a new level, both during the crisis and after it abates, by keeping levels of empathy, engagement, and innovation high. I'm going to talk about each one of those things: empathy, engagement, and innovation. So number 1, direct, direct partner and customer engagement to online. This may seem obvious, but you want to incentivize your channel partners to do online events. You know, as your partners and customers are in their homes for social distancing purposes, give your partners extra points for conducting virtual events. For example, you can incentivize this behavior by giving extra points for each engagement they have with the customer or for revenue resulting from online engagement, which by the way is an incentive technique known as attribution incentivization, right? So you're, you're incentivizing a behavior that leads to a downstream result, in this case a sale, and you're incentivizing the behavior that, that is attributable to what that result is. You know, incentivizing goes just beyond sales. Pre-sales and post-sales activities can and should be conducted through online channels as well, keeping your partners and customers safe while encouraging their participation. Number 2, spur the use of new engagement technologies, techniques, and learnings. For example, you might want to provide a super incentive for leveraging and sharing knowledge and templates for advanced presentation tools like Prezi, PowToon, and Haiku, uh, virtual whiteboard software, and even hologram and virtual reality technology, encouraging not only continued engagement but the adoption of new forward-thinking engagement models. So remember when I said about innovation, this is a time that can be leveraged well and powerfully for innovation, for new ways of engaging you know, with customers. And if you dial back the calendar a number of years to 2008, 2009, during the economic downturn, a number of companies actually doubled down in terms of innovation, in terms of business process innovation, technology innovation, things like that, and came out of that downturn with stronger partner loyalty, greater, greater channel share, and ultimately greater market share as well. So I think it's Jeff Bezos who was famous in the last crisis who said, we are doubling down on our, on our investments in order to take advantage. And you can see what Amazon has done in the of course, in the last, uh, 10 or 11 years. Number 3, want to create a new incentive that guides your channel partners to farm, right? Of the hunter and farmer sales models, the latter will be more effective during this time because your partners already know your existing customers well and are intimate with their goals and their needs and their architectures. They can communicate better with them at a distance than they can new prospects, right? In fact, there were, again, were examples of companies that doubled down in this area in, again, 2008, 2009, and wound up not only maintaining their business, but actually growing their business through an economic downturn. So while the majority of businesses were experiencing contraction, companies that invested in farming behaviors and incentivizing cultivating farming behaviors in their channels actually wound up continuing to grow. Number 4, open a direct line of communications between your partners and your business. Giving partners the opportunity to get in touch and provide feedback and/or make complaints. Make sure these channels are agile and well-staffed. That'll ensure that your company can quickly and efficiently respond to partners' concerns. Number 5, collaboration, right? We talk a lot about collaborative collaboration all the time. This is a particular time that you want to encourage collaborative thinking. All right, you want to award points to channel partners who share ideas and feedback on how your company can better contribute to crisis relief efforts and continue to make your partners' and customers' lives productive during this, you know, moment of crisis. Now, if you are a Salesforce CRM shop, you can use Fielo to leverage Salesforce's collaboration group chatter activity question and idea database objects to create incentives for multiple groups of partners based on their size, their geolocation, their product specializations, their vertical industry focus, etc., to share their questions and ideas about how to best deal with the current situation. You can allocate points, recognition, or other types of rewards to give to participants and to best idea contributors. And by the way, you may want to check out Byanders and Norstedt's book, which I refer to here in this slide, called Collaborative Crisis Management, in which experienced practitioners and scholars discuss how collaboration shapes societies and companies' capacity to plan for, respond to, and to recover from extreme and unanticipated events like this one, and how this panacea works out in the— on the ground, both on the ground and in the boardroom. Number 6, you want to postpone points and claims expiration dates with the understanding that in these times it may not be possible for partners to engage on all incentive program fronts to the same degree. Empathy for your partners should be paramount right now, should be your highest priority. And again, empathy for your partners and the situation, what they're going through, will come back to you, will come back around to you in just a few months in terms of, you know, greater partner loyalty and attribution. Number 7: Postpone tier downgrades. So similarly, there, similarly, there is no reason to penalize partners if they can't keep up their previous engagement levels during this moment of crisis. And make no mistake, partners will remember that you understood their situation during trying times. Number 8, last but not least, you want to open direct lines of communications between your partners and your business. And in particular, your company must issue an immediate announcement containing each measure it plans to take to keep partners safe and support your partners' business during the crisis. It's best that this announcement comes from a leading figure in your organization and that it is delivered across your most visible communications channels, ensuring that your partners receive the message and clearly understand your company's position in light of of the coronavirus crisis. So 8 ways to consider about how you might leverage your channel and program to really address the situation that your channel partners and your customers find themselves in today directly, right? Traditionally, or in normal times, you would use your incentive program to spur productivity. Here, I think you want to use it to spur, like I said, empathy, engagement, and innovation. And by doing that, that'll be an investment that will pay off in just a few short months' time. Now, the changes you choose to take up will, of course, depend on the needs of your business and those of your channel partners. While it may not be possible to implement all the changes mentioned above, implementing even a few will not only help you keep your partners and customers safe, it'll maintain critical business during this difficult time and foster the continued enhanced loyalty of your trusted partners over the long term. So hopefully that gave you some ideas. We're happy to, to discuss any one of those or more in, in greater detail with you. My email address is in the last slide. You can take note of it there if you want to contact me directly. The— we also want to point you to fielo.com where we recently posted under our research resources tab an article that that reflects a lot of what I've talked about today. And I would like to ask anybody that wants to add their own ideas of how to, you know, take advantage of their Channel Incentive Program to do the right things right now to comment on that blog post. And then we'll wind up taking all the comments and creating a more comprehensive document that we got— we'll get out to you later. So with that, Lauren, were there any questions that came in?

Let me see. Yep. Okay, this one is from Leah. Can you give an idea of how virtual reality could be applied to presentations and meetings?

Yeah, I can. Actually, I thought someone might ask that. You might remember that I talked about advanced presentation technologies, virtual whiteboarding software, which I think is a potentially great investment to make right now. And then I talked about holographic and virtual reality technologies as well. I anticipated that virtual reality and actually holograms might come up as a question. And so I put some slides in the appendix though. I'll just share with you some examples. The holographic and advanced presentation technologies are used sometimes in TED Talks, TED presentations as well. So this is— if anybody saw The Kingsman, you saw how they used holographic technology in terms of conducting virtual meetings. But here's some VR examples, some virtual reality examples. Of how virtual reality is being used to conduct meetings, you know, at a distance. These are real-world examples of VR being used for meetings. I think there are two others that are— two other examples I can talk about that— that are two or three other examples that I can talk about to kind of bring the VR applicability home. One is that, and obviously this is if you, you know, make hardware or some sort of manufactured good, you can use, you know, virtual reality to actually explain, you know, that product or good, right? Here's an example of a VR augmented reality application that does exactly that. Here's another example of using virtual reality to, uh, to walk, uh, you know, customers or prospects through a product and how a product is actually used. I also want to bring up the example of if you are an application, for example, an application software company that, you know, supports business applications, or a consulting company that is, is in business process management. That you can actually walk your customers and prospects through a journey, so to speak, using virtual reality. So think about, for example, if you were an ERP, enterprise resource planning, software company, you may want to walk your, your virtual reality audience through an office campus or a or a manufacturing plant operations to show how things progress from a business process aspect from one part of the office campus to another. And that, by the way, includes your suppliers and customers or through the plant. And last, here was an example I was thinking out too. So anytime you— there are choices, lots of choices that you want your customers to understand, to learn about, and I used cyberattacks here. Virtual reality is a great forum for that. They can kind of choose through virtual reality the path they want to go down to learn and experience more of that particular thing. So if you have multiple products, or in this case, that's not multiple products, it's obviously multiple types of ways that your company can be affected or impacted, then virtual reality is a good example of that. So with that, let me turn it back to Lauren.

Alrighty, thank you, Tim. Well, unfortunately, we are out of time for today's webinar, but thank you for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed it. And if we did not get a chance to answer your question, we'll do so through email after the webinar. And, you know, as Tim mentioned earlier, If you'd like to learn more about Fielo, please visit us at fielo.com and, and go check out our Resources Center for more best practices, ebooks, info sheets, but there's lots of great material on there. All right, thank you everyone.