How to solve sales and business challenges using rewards and loyalty strategies.
Evolution, change, adapt – these should always be at the top of any annual business review, and in our world, the exact needs to be part of B2B Loyalty & Incentive program assessments.
Market trends, economic factors and competitors’ initiatives influence your business forecasts and success. Reviewing the issues that hurt your business last year is an excellent place to start.
Even with this information and so much change and uncertainty, it’s challenging to feel bold when considering new directions or plans for the coming financial or calendar year!
Yet it is here where the best business opportunities come from. Ideas to align customers and teams to address change, working towards fixing financial or growth goals and then setting budgets and ROI metrics for the forthcoming financial years.
Luckily, we work very closely with our clients and partners across various industries and have been reviewing their data, processes, and challenges to help them solve their business pain points.
This offers us a unique position to share critical insights into the common pain points B2B businesses have recently encountered, regardless of their industry. The foundation of an effective incentive program design is the ability to articulate how this impacts business and the value a company is prepared to invest in fixing the problem.
Doing a similar pain point analysis for your own business will help you highlight your operational, sales, acquisition, and growth weaknesses while pinpointing those bottlenecks and other pressures impacting your bottom line.
The list of 5 pain points has additional levels of strategic approach to include when targeting a change from customers. When executed well, they can give you financial success and begin to define the types of B2B loyalty you can gain from customers.
Share of wallet is a strategy that many businesses use to guide their B2B customer base on the best goods and services to buy while allowing them to choose when they buy, how much they spend, and who they buy from.
The question is, how much of the customer’s wallet are you currently receiving, and what are you doing to grow that share in the future? Suppose you need help to get a significant portion of the customer’s spending. An incentive program built around targets and growth will help you capture the loyalty of your customers and better understand their purchasing drivers while driving growth and positive ROI for your business in the market.
Price can be a significant pain point in a competitive market. The go-to strategy for most businesses when looking for new customers is the ever-popular promotional sales or discounts.
Unfortunately, reducing your gross profit to attract quick sales can be a dangerous and very costly exercise, especially if your competitors are all doing exactly the same thing, and you end up in a price war. Ultimately, promotions and discounted prices have caused many business plans to fail, because they lowered their margins too far, damaging their brand.
Instead, you should focus on maintaining your regular pricing while offering your customers more value than your competitors. Rewards and incentive programs add value to your brand, and our loyalty strategies have shown that rewards conquer discounts every time.
In fact, rewards completely remove many pain points associated with discounting and will give your business the price protection it deserves. Your loyal customers will appreciate more.
You can slice or dice sales any way you want, but for the best outcomes, you should always be looking for solid business growth, whether you calculate that in dollars, units, or any other measure.
For the last few years, many industries have felt the effect of lengthy supply chain delays, severely impacting recovery and sales growth as essential stock items were scarce or unavailable. Many companies needed help to maintain their expected growth because of the delays. So, it became necessary to focus more on the sales performance of new lines or take the opportunity to shift other associated product lines, available stock, or even premium stock rather than growth.
A cross-sell strategy will give you a much more robust cash flow, as well as increased growth in your market share. Plus, you will see an improvement in moving your slow-moving or dead stock, improving your bottom line. By rewarding your customers for purchasing end-of-line or premium stock, you will ensure the ongoing loyalty of your primary customer base while running your rewards program within the dictates of the current market uncertainty.
Commonly coined as customer loyalty, retention and engagement are paramount to your continued success, particularly in an uncertain market. Retaining customers who buy products and services is far more valuable to your business than acquiring new customers.
Customer churn is one of any business’s most visible and harmful pain points. Loyalty and retention activities, like rewards, status level, and elite benefits, will help you reduce customer churn by improving customer experience and ensuring their continued spending with your business long into the future.
Maintaining or growing the margin is critical to business success because it shows if your current pricing covers the cost of goods sold. Remember, more margin = more freedom. So, the larger your margin, the more flexible your pricing policies can be. In addition, having your sales teams focus on higher-margin products – and on the customers who buy them – will build a robust foundation sales database for the future, rather than the short-term approach of reducing margins to achieve high “volume now”.
Most business pain points come about through poor sales processes and positioning strategies. A B2B loyalty and rewards program will move your focus from tracking revenue to tracking customer behaviour and sales performance, reducing your pain points in no time.
Sales performance is a critical part of the universal language of business, and a loyalty and rewards program can easily relate back to a standard business metric like ROI to keep your finance department happy.
If, after reading this article, you can identify a business pain point you want to solve, our strategic design consultants can help develop new strategies and programs to reduce or solve your issues and change the behaviours of your customer base to build substantial growth in the coming year.
Many businesses currently avoid performing a Business Pain Point Analysis, preferring to wait for the market to settle down first. However, those businesses that take pleasure in addressing their pain points will now gain a competitive advantage over their peers because they will have the essential pillars and B2B loyalty, incentive, or rewards program to help them meet their business objectives regardless of uncertainty.
After 26 years, our pain point methodology has helped us to understand the issues that B2B sales and marketing leaders are facing now, and our specially designed rewards programs will quickly make your business pain points a thing of the past.
Contact our team and we’ll hold a workshop session to define how a B2B loyalty and incentive program can solve them and deliver positive outcomes.
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