How to reward partner sellers with incentive award cards
In 2008 I was running a European-wide partner program at a cloud email security company.
We had over 1000 partners in the referral program.
These were typically small IT Service Providers who ‘owned’ the relationship with their customers - SMBs that we couldn’t sell our cloud offering to any other way.
We paid our referral partners 15% of the first year’s revenue, but we wanted to do something that really stood out and kept our company and brand in front of the partners even when they weren’t thinking about email security!
We launched an incentive card program that rewarded individuals at the partner whenever one of their referred customers signed up to the platform.
The quick facts:
We issued a branded card to qualifying sellers at our partners
It is a prepaid debit card, meaning it is not a bank account
The cardholder can only spend what is on the card and no more
It can be used anywhere MasterCard is accepted
Exemptions are fuel, utilities, cash, subscriptions and gambling
It can be added to a mobile wallet (ApplePay etc)
Can be used as contactless
Here’s how you can launch your own branded card program
Find a provider
Firstly you need to find a provider to manage your program. We used Edenred. They’ll issue cards in the US, UK and potentially other regions where you have partners.
Other companies do provide card issuing products, but these tend to be aimed at your own employees as a way of handling expenses. When looking at providers be sure that they can support this use case.
Create your branding
You have two options:
Logo only - you’ll use stock cards in a choice of colours and add your logo (similar to my mock up above).
Custom design - you’ll be able to provide the full artwork for the card to fully represent your brand
I’ll cover fees a little later on, but for logo only design there is no minimum commitment.
For custom design there is a minimum initial order of 1000 cards. You don’t need to issue them all, but you will need the stock cards printed up.
Complete KYC onboarding checks
As you will be distributing funds you will need to go through a "Know Your Customer” KYC process to prevent money laundering.
Once complete you’ll sign your service agreement and be ready to start issuing and loading cards.
Define your criteria
Now you can start to think about three elements to your program:
Who gets a card
What triggers a payment
How much is that payment
Who gets a card
In the program I ran we called the incentive award card “Club MessageLabs” - it was an elite group that sellers wanted to get into.
To qualify you had to have referred in a certain amount of business - either deal volume or bookings amount.
Take a look across your partners and consider what entry criteria would allow 15-25% of your potential sellers into the program. It needs to be achievable and a stretch at the same time.
What triggers a payment
We used closed bookings as the trigger. Each month we’d look at deals with a referral partner attached and trigger a payment for the partner seller.
This aligns their incentives which the expected behaviour.
Paying for referrals themselves generates lists of ‘potential’ customers that still requires a lot of qualification and heavy lifting to get a deal done.
We paid our incentives monthly to keep the momentum high, but you can load cards on any schedule you choose.
How much to pay
This is an important question for a number of reasons.
Anti-bribery and corruption. Your company, and your partner’s company will likely have rules around what is considered a gift (sending a thank-you branded water bottle) and what is considered a bribe (sending $1000 in used bank notes).
Your program should be in the former category - thank-yous. So think about the value of the deals you are rewarding and a thank-you of $50 or $100 would not be unreasonable.
If your rewards are reaching multiple $100s then you are influencing behaviour beyond the sellers core job and you might find you are not allowed to run your program in certain partners.
This is for the individual not the company. The issued cards have an individual’s name on them. So whilst you might issue it to the Sales VP or the MD of a smaller company - it is a personal card for that individual.
That person may choose to use the rewards for the benefit of the whole team (a card behind the bar at the end of the month) or they could buy themselves some concert tickets.
Do not confuse this incentive with the main referral fees or margin that you pay the partner at a corporate level.
What does it cost?
A quick note on fees.
The main cost to this will be the amount you are loading onto the cards - so you’ll want to model that out by the number of expected participants and the expected monthly reward as the program grows.
Then you’ll pay a few additional fees:
£10 (or dollar equivalent) for each card that is issued, including the postage of the card and activation letters (and remember the 1000 card minimum for a custom design)
5% issue fee on card loads - i.e. load £1000 onto cards and pay £50
Cards have a two year expiry, and once they expire you’ll issue a replacement card which is charged at the same fees as a new card.
Promote your program
Now you have the core elements of your program ready to go, it is time to launch it out to your partners.
We launched it just like any other product launch - flyers, emails, calls, updates to the partner site.
It was important to get the partners executives onboard - as they could easily reject the idea of us rewarding their employees if they felt it was introducing the wrong behaviours.
With the leaders on board, you can then promote into the sellers themselves, and the quickest way of doing that is to go back through the sellers that have closed the most recent set of deals.
If you aren’t capturing this information in CRM then you will want to add this into your referral process.
We called our program Club MessageLabs, and we wanted recipients to feel like they were “in the club” and disregard corporate boundaries.
So without sharing confidential information, we had regular communications out to club members with leaderboards and stories of success that helped motivate members in other companies.
Share the stories
We had so many inbound comments of how a member had used their Club MessageLabs card to take their partner out for a meal, or had used it to buy a holiday they had been saving up for.
For me this was the best part of the program. You can send branded swag out all day long - but do people really need another notebook or coffee cup?
Members of the program were able to buy things that were important to them, and with our branded card that made a direct link between our brand and their personal lives.
I am surprised that I see so few of these programs out in the wild.
But that gives you an opportunity to launch yours and really differentiate against your competitors as you compete for your partner seller’s attention.
Get started
Whenever you are ready, there are two ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue growth.
Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your RevOps strategy.
RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more.