The uncomfortable truth is that most channel incentives reward revenue partners would have delivered anyway. Volume rebates scale with sales, so they pay loyalty and size, not the behaviour you’re trying to shift. You end up paying a discount on gravity.
the leading indicator
Reward the action, not the outcome
Revenue is a lagging indicator. By the time it lands and you pay against it, the behaviour that caused it is months old and impossible to attribute. So reward the leading actions instead: the first 100 demos on a new SKU, deal reg for new logo accounts, new product enablement completed within a month of launch, deals created and registered for a new product in the first quarter after enablement. You get the idea. Those are the moves that predict revenue, and the moves a reward can really influence.
the motivation gap
Pay the human, not the P&L
The person deciding where to spend selling time is the rep, the BDM, the pre-sales engineer. A rebate that lands in the partner company’s account next quarter never reaches them. If you want to change what someone does, the reward has to reach that person, mean something to them, and needs to arrive fast. Actions that result in delayed rewards get forgotten. Actions that result in rapid rewards get repeated.
the framework
What good looks like
Map the three or four behaviours you genuinely need this year. Attach a small, fast, individual reward to each, paid to the person who did it within days. Measure the action rate, not just the revenue that follows. Measure the incremental impact of this. Over time you might start thinking about reducing the company level rebate and increasing incentives for the people driving the results. Rewarding the right behaviour in real time, to the right individual, is exactly what Incentivizer was built to do, with multi-currency eGift fulfilment so the reward lands while the action is still fresh.
your next move
Run the test this week
Before your next planning cycle, run one question down every line of incentive spend: what behaviour did this change? If the honest answer is “nothing, they’d have done it anyway”, you’ve found the budget for the things that would. If you want to see what behaviour-led, real-time incentives look like in practice, book a quick demo of Incentivizer. You don’t need a bigger budget. You need to stop paying for the behaviour you were always going to get.
By Sam Rudland, founder of Incentivizer and The Essential Agency.
Ready to see what Incentivizer® can do for your channel? Start your free trial or book a demo and we’ll walk you through it.