Reinventing Distributor Engagement Strategies Through Business Infra Based Rewards

Challenge

A leading global industrial bearings manufacturer was running a traditional incentive scheme for its network of 100 distributors (who further dealt with 5000 retailers) and was keen to reinvent this scheme so as to substantially boost engagement and loyalty levels. These distributors, who were high net-worth business owners, typically relied on existing business and were not channelizing their resources towards marketing the brand and penetrating the brand further. The brand was in need of a unique, strategic loyalty program that would motivate their distributors to allocate resources towards activities like marketing, customer engagement, and brand awareness.

Solution

BI WORLDWIDE India offered a set of innovative solutions to address the brand’s challenges with its existing incentive scheme. The first step was to introduce a point-based loyalty program where distributors would earn loyalty points on a quarterly basis, in addition to the benefits they would receive under sales incentive schemes that were already in place for meeting business targets. These points could then be redeemed for 2 categories of business infrastructure related rewards – market development activities such as customer meet-ups, exhibitions, website development, marketing campaigns and communications; and organization development activities such as training, workshops, showroom fabrication, and infrastructure support. Distributors could choose from over 75 reward options in these 2 broad categories, and these could be further customized for distributors to better meet their unique business needs. These rewards enabled distributors to improve their prospects and processes at demand generation, building brand awareness and visibility, and customer engagement, which could eventually lead to a higher volume of sales for the brand.

BI WORLDWIDE India also leveraged its proprietary Channel Smart technology to create an efficient end-to-end channel management process, by consolidating all incentives, reward points and travel benefits into a single technology platform. This platform was easy to navigate and also made insightful data accessible to distributors, such as weekly sales data, sales targets, current achievements and quarterly and annual shortfall.