What is cult loyalty?
From prioritizing interactions over transactions, optimizing the barrier to exit the partnership, and utilizing rewards to motivate partners, there are a handful of tactics to engage, motivate, and build loyalty among channel partners.
However, when we look at channel loyalty through the perspective of the Multi-Dimensional Loyalty Model, Cult Loyalty focuses on optimizing a community of nurtured partners aligned with their program’s values and goals.
How do you put Cult Loyalty Tactics to work?
As experts in behavioral science, we understand what promotes, prompts, and reinforces group mentalities and partner behaviors. As channel program design experts, we use this understanding to tailor and launch channel programs that help partners emerge as some of your brand’s most powerful and committed advocates.
So how can Maritz help you foster Cult Loyalty within your channel program?
Communities & Forums
When you invite your partners to access the support and insights of a resource-rich community, they gain a reinforced sense of belonging, and greater motivation to invest in and promote your products. That’s why we make it simple to launch secure and easy-to-navigate forums that promote a collaborative ecosystem for your channel partners to network and gain support.
Our secure online communities and forums give you tools to:
- Deploy an inclusive peer network for partners to easily post, search, or explore relevant topics.
- Foster the exchange of best practices, success stories, supportive resources, and more.
- Maintain administrative capabilities to monitor functionality and interactions.
Learning & enablement (upskilling & business-building)
Going beyond product and service training to support your partners’ development of soft skills, personal growth, and individual learning is a hugely beneficial offering within your program – and one we can help implement.
Our intuitive platform streamlines the creation and management of your program’s training objectives through customizable and flexible learning modules. With options to customize your selection of courses based on unique business objectives, you can even segment or target certain courses for specified partner groups.
We support a range of upskilling and business-building training, including:
- Professional Development Training like leadership and management skills, time management and productivity, communication and negotiation, presentation best practices, emotional intelligence, and interpersonal objectives.
- Soft Skills and Personal Growth Training like stress management and resilience, diversity and inclusion training, goal setting, mindfulness, self-motivation, and creativity and innovation.
- Entrepreneurship and Business Development Training like business planning and strategy, market research and competitive analysis, funding and finance for startups, scaling a business, and franchise management.
Referral programs
Partners who feel appreciated and acknowledged for supporting your business will be more motivated to continue their efforts, making referral programs essential for any successful channel strategy. That’s why we provide dynamic tools and a user-friendly platform that streamlines essential steps – from lead registration to progress tracking to commission management.
Additionally, our platform’s referral programs equip your partners with:
- Quick and convenient lead registration directly through their partner portal.
- Referral tracking to manage the status of Active, Won, and Lost leads.
- Organized details related to payouts and commissions for closed leads.
- Email updates related to important steps to the sale – from lead submission to commission.
Swag & wearables
Introducing Maritz-designed corporate swag, wearable items, or logo gear to your channel partners can be a cost-effective and impactful way to support a sense of community among partners and nurture their relational ties to your brand.
Take advantage of our unique opportunities to support branding efforts among your partners:
- PRODUCT SOURCING & DESIGN Our program experts curate a selection of products that appeal most to your channel partners and apply branding via digitized logos, embroidery, and other methods on apparel, bags, promotional products, technology, office products, and more.
- FULFILLMENT OF SWAGWhether bulk, individual orders, or a redemption option in your reward catalog, we support warehouse and shipping of client-branded merchandise and can even send orders to a third-party fulfillment house based on your preferences.
Group incentives trips & events
To help your program facilitate rich and motivating group experiences on the emotional end of the reward spectrum, we can help “Wow” your program participants with world-class experiences.
This includes our specializations in event and experience development, and deliverables to support high-quality partner encounters:
- Maritz Specializations include incentive travel, product launches, annual conferences, trade shows, sales meetings, board meetings, dealer meetings, and more.
- Maritz Deliverables include site and venue sourcing, on-site tradeshow or exhibition management, Travel Director support or assistance, event technology, air ticketing, signage, event communications, and more.
Making cult loyalty initiatives count
A multi-dimensional loyalty strategy that applies a range of Cult Loyalty tactics doesn’t just advance your channel program; it advances the formation of your channel community. However, taking advantage of these benefits means taking limitations off your platforms to best engage the breadth of partner personalities within your diverse channel ecosystem.
Through Maritz Solutions, you can experience the freedom to customize and deploy a channel program centered around opportunistic loyalty experiences and value alignment for your most essential partnerships.
With a deeper toolbox and team of experts at your side to help you elevate and enhance your program interface, you can evolve dutiful program participants into loyal promoters who fuel rigorous growth for your business.
Read about the other dimensions of Channel Loyalty:
Want to know more? Contact us to get more information about how Maritz can help you evolve your partnerships into a powerful community of brand advocates.