Can’t get your partner’s account managers (AMs) to play ball? Those AMs have all the juiciest info about your target accounts, so, whatever you do, don’t give up on fostering the co-selling relationship between your sales reps and your partner’s AMs.
We spoke with Josh Carter, Partner Manager at Hatch, to hear how his team tested an incentive program with one partner to get the partner’s AMs referring leads and helping to move opportunities to closed-won. Now, Hatch’s sales reps are closing deals at a 70% close rate (compared to 46% with quick form-fill digital referrals).
“They have 15 account managers that are all on the ‘Hatch train,’ they know everything about Hatch, they know how to leverage our shared customer case studies, it’s incredible,” says Carter. “We’re making their customers more successful, and now the account managers are also getting paid for it.”
The easy-to-roll-out incentive program
Carter and his team announced to their partner’s AMs that they’d get $50 if one of their clients takes a demo with Hatch. They’ll get another $250 if the deal closes.
“The reason why the spread is so intense there is so that people don’t send us leads that are a bad fit. They have skin in the game to get that full $300,” says Carter.
And it worked. Carter says that additional $250 influences the AMs to provide every piece of context they have so the deal actually closes. They’re also more likely to send leads with a higher likelihood of closing.
Getting buy-in to launch your own incentive program
To get buy-in to test the incentive program with a single partner, Carter suggested offering a sales program incentive fund (SPIF) reflective of the average annual contract value (ACV) the partner typically sources for Hatch. For this particular partner, Hatch offered a SPIF of 2.5% of the ACV.
Additionally, Carter tested the program with a couple of AMs to start. The close rate improvement for deals sourced by the AMs was so high that there was no question about continuing the program and offering the SPIFs to additional AMs.
“It has paid for itself multiple times over,” says Carter.
As Hatch rolls this incentive program out to more partners, they’ll continue structuring the incentive as a percentage of the average contract value associated with deals sourced or influenced by each partner.
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