Growing emerging market sales for global technology company via an innovative channel incentives program
CHALLENGE & OPPORTUNITY
A global technology company continually faced low software sales in the breadth channel segment of emerging markets. In response, a senior leader at the company wanted to tackle this issue head-on and increase revenue for the company.
Initial strategy work identified the retail salesperson in emerging markets as a critical influencer in consumer purchasing decisions, but the company wasn’t adequately supporting or incentivizing this role. Although the client had robust global channel incentive programs upstream at the manufacturer and distributor level, it lacked a scalable, proven “last mile” program at point of sale in these markets where the consumer exercised choice.
SOLUTION
Supporting the senior leader, we defined a program to drive favorable behavior at point of sale, built the business case, and helped sell the idea to the divisional VP, securing the funding necessary to execute.
Working across policy, finance, operations, field organizations and retail partners, we planned and executed a pilot program for five representative emerging markets. As part of the pilot program, we onboarded field marketing organizations and retail partners, delivered a web portal and SMS platform to onboard retail sales people and manage their participation, and established a robust business intelligence (BI) platform to track sales and minimize fraud.
The pilot program enabled field marketing teams to build campaigns for recruiting, training and awarding retail sales persons for having the right conversations with customers to generate sales.
IMPACT
- Retail sales people who participated in the pilot program were more likely to recommend the company’s product, were significantly better at communicating the company’s value proposition, and drove more sales at a higher average sales price.
- The program was scaled to 21 emerging markets, championed by field marketing organizations, with some even reallocating discretionary funds from other marketing investments to support this effective program.