Matt is an experienced B2B Loyalty & Incentive program designer with over 20 years working with Australian and New Zealand brands. Passionate about partnering with businesses to understand specific business and sales pain points, he takes a consultative approach to develop engaging solutions for customers that deliver measurable results.
We’ve all seen it happen. You head into the end of the financial year under pressure to hit a volume target. You pull the easiest lever available: slashing prices.
The strategy works in the short term. You secure the sales, hit your June numbers, and celebrate. But by July, the hangover sets in.
Your sales stall. When you reach out to your buyers, they refuse to buy at full price. By discounting, you’ve trained your customers to devalue your product, resetting their baseline price expectation to a new, lower floor.
When you discount, you aren’t building a partnership. You are turning your brand into a commodity and training your channel to become bargain hunters.
To protect your margins and grow your business in the new financial year, stop competing on price. It’s time to shift your B2B pricing strategy away from invisible price-cutting and toward visible value.
From a behavioural perspective, an invoice discount is an invisible currency.
When you chop 10% off an invoice, the savings are absorbed instantly into the buyer’s P&L statement. The procurement team might notice it on a spreadsheet, but the sales reps, business owners, and end users forget about it by tomorrow. It gives you absolutely zero lasting emotional loyalty.
Even worse, you’re giving away your hard-earned margin on transactions you likely would have secured anyway.
If you want to grow basket size and increase order frequency, you’ll need to change the currency. Instead, you can hold your price firm and utilise structured channel incentive programs to privately reward the exact buying behaviours you want without permanently breaking your market price.
Instead of dropping your price, here are some ways you can use targeted incentives to influence buyer behaviour.
If your channel partners only buy your legacy, high-volume items, pushing them for more volume of the same product is a fast track to discount demands. Instead, tie your rewards to product mix.
Offer high-value points or experiences only when a partner adds premium, higher-margin, or complementary items to their standard order. This will grow basket size strategically while protecting your core margin.
The biggest mistake in channel loyalty is paying for the sales you were already going to get. A flat rewards program that gives points for every dollar spent from day one is just an expensive discount in disguise.
Consider instead setting personalised targets based on each partner’s historical buying data. You can trigger high-value rewards when your customers exceed their organic baseline spend by a specific percentage. While you initially considered discounting, you’re now actually growing sales while keeping your initial margins intact.
Cash rebates behave just like discounts: transactional, easily forgotten, and quickly spent on invisible expenses like bills and lifestyle purchases. Tangible rewards, such as premium merchandise, business-building tools, or incentive travel, have a significantly higher perceived value than their actual cost to your business.
These specialised rewards create lasting emotional connections back to your brand, driving an irrational effort to buy more, while keeping cash margins intact.
You cannot build a sustainable, growing B2B business if you constantly give away your margin to close the next deal.
Price protection helps shift the commercial conversation from offering discounts to offering structured, visible rewards. This lets your brand change the age-old question from “how cheap can I get this?” to “what is the total value of partnering with you?”
Protect your price, change the behaviour of your channel, and build a self-funding growth engine.
