What is mercenary loyalty?
When you think about techniques used in channel programs to incentivize and motivate partners, Mercenary Loyalty is probably the most likely strategy that comes to mind. Other loyalty objectives may seek to prioritize interactions, establish a sense of community, or optimize barriers to exit the partnership, but Mercenary loyalty has a different aim.
The ultimate goal of Mercenary Loyalty is to inspire transactional behaviors from your channel partners. These methods are often short-term and intended to prompt immediate action related to measurable and quantifiable objectives, such as meeting quotas, sales totals, or other performance-based transactions.
How can i get the best results from mercenary loyalty tactics?
Motivating and incentivizing your program’s participants is an evergreen priority, but just as important as launching a multi-dimensional loyalty strategy that nurtures a variety of partner needs is using the right incentives and rewards to reinforce business-building behaviors – and we can help.
Our channel programs are designed to support your launch of every loyalty initiative, and to drive prompt action from your partners that help you reach your goals, we ensure your program’s base rule structures align with your program’s Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs.
With these in alignment, you also have complete control to customize your objectives, sales targets, or criteria for partners to receive incentives. Plus, our system makes it easy to keep your partners engaged and on pace toward certain milestones through visual progress trackers displaying their transactions and sales information, including SKU and dates of sales. But that’s not all.
Let’s dive into other ways Maritz can help support your program’s Mercenary Loyalty strategy with a range of must-have resources and features.
Points Programs
Your program’s use of a points system to reward partners for positive transactional behaviors, like making a sale or reaching a pre-set quota, can be hugely beneficial for encouraging their continued commitment to your program – and its most pressing objectives.
When our points programs go to work in your channel strategy, you gain optimized tools for organizing and tracking your partners’ individual and collective efforts, all while boosting their anticipation of opportunities to earn and redeem exciting rewards from our robust marketplace.
Additionally, our points programs deliver options for you to:
- Customize goal-centric rule structures and criteria for earning and redeeming points.
- Offer partners flexible options to redeem points immediately or bank and accumulate points over time.
- Present a vast assortment of rewards that can be redeemed in our extensive online rewards store.
Cash incentives
Motivating channel partners through financial-based incentives can be hugely effective for not only driving action but also for driving loyalty. That’s why our cash incentives are designed to give you – and your partners – options that most effectively prompt behavior.
We offer various forms of cash and cash payouts, including:
- Pre-Paid Cards – Use “single load” cards of appropriate denominations ($50, $100, $500, etc.) to be delivered based on goal achievement.
- Reloadable Cash Cards – Issue a program-branded card and regularly load funds onto the card with each transaction or goal achieved.
- Virtual Payments – Send direct, digital payments through PayPal or Venmo in lieu of physical cash cards.
- Cash Check or Direct Deposit – Send cash in the form of a mailed check, direct deposit, or ACH funds transfer.
Tiered programs
The use of Tiered Programs is another Mercenary Loyalty strategy that works by drawing on an ongoing goal for partners: Advancing their status.
Our platform makes the implementation of tiered programs easy by creating rules to calculate payouts when certain milestones are reached. When your partners progress through tiers, they can unlock more lucrative earnings, incentives, or benefits.
Additionally, our platform’s tiered programs:
- Calculate and configure appropriate partner levels, or tiers, based on your set sales thresholds.
- Support re-naming and branding your tiers by categories, such as bronze, silver, gold, platinum, etc.
- Provide partners with a display of their current tier, along with curated content or learning modules relevant to their present status.
Our services in Decision Sciences also include Tier Analysis to help you more effectively drive desired behaviors. Using predictive models and performance data, your program can draw from insightful metrics to strategize, create, and adjust tier levels – both in number and threshold. Plus, benefits for each tier will be explored to maximize the factors that motivate tier progression in your program.
Promotions
SPIFs, or Sales Performance Incentive Funds, are another type of short-term incentive used to motivate specific behaviors, goals, or sales activities within a designated time frame, such as selling a specific product, closing a certain number of deals, entering a new market, promoting a new product launch, or achieving stretch sales quotas.
We offer extremely flexible promotion capabilities so that you can prompt the partner initiatives you need to reach your target.
Additionally, our platform’s promotional capabilities enable you to:
- Utilize configured promotion start and end dates, customer targeting, promotion content, and incentive payout rules.
- Adapt promotions for all partners or a segmented audience.
- Provide promotional highlights on the partner portal homepage with a feature module and detailed landing page.
- Send emailed communications at regular intervals to announce the promotion and maintain engagement.
Minding the gaps of mercenary loyalty
When it comes to spurring your partners’ excitement to sell your products and motivating them to perform at their best, Mercenary Loyalty has a big part to play. And we can help you strengthen it.
Our approach to Mercenary Loyalty in channel programs is built on our foundation of behavioral science, and our programs are engineered to support your ability to identify and leverage your partners’ unique motivators. With powerful tools and program elements in effect, you can line your partners’ paths with compelling incentives and rewards that reinforce unified strides and propel your business forward.
Read about the other dimensions of Channel Loyalty:
Curious to learn more about strengthening Mercenary Loyalty in your channel strategy? Contact us to learn more about how our solutions can help you reinforce partner behaviors that drive powerful results for your business.