Make the money follow you

People who truly love their jobs might say they “don’t do it for the money,” but they can’t really say money is irrelevant — it’s a job, after all — at the very least they need money for living expenses.

And they’re not likely to turn down an opportunity for some extra cash when it exists.

To be successful, your GTM strategy needs to account for this simple fact when structuring revenue team incentives. But it doesn’t always work that way — sometimes strategies evolve but the compensation structure stays the same.

This happens when leaders mistakenly believe that employees will change their priorities to follow the business’s goals. But in the vast majority of cases, people will ultimately follow their own wallet.

When implementing a new strategy like Ecosystem-Led Growth, you won’t get results just by telling the sales team to embrace it. GTM team members who earn commission will likely only take a new approach seriously when they’re incentivized to use the tactics and outcomes the strategy is meant to enable.

This applies to your partner programs as much as your own team.

TACTICS

How to boost close rate by incentivizing your partner's account managers

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.

Pavilion Director of Demand Generation Josh Carter is a former Partner Manager at Hatch. His team at Hatch tested an incentive program with one partner to get the partner’s AMs referring leads and helping to move opportunities to closed-won. The result was that Hatch’s sales reps started closing deals at a rate of 70% (compared to 46% with quick form-fill digital referrals).

“They had 15 account managers that were all on the ‘Hatch train,’ they knew everything about Hatch, they knew how to leverage our shared customer case studies, it was incredible,” says Josh. “We were making their customers more successful, and now the account managers were also getting paid for it.”

Making incentives simple and attainable

Carter and his team announced to their partner’s AMs that they’d get $50 if one of their clients took a demo with Hatch. They’d get another $250 if the deal closed.

“The reason why the spread was so intense there is so that people didn’t send us leads that were a bad fit. They had skin in the game to get that full $300,” says Carter.

And it worked. Carter says that additional $250 influenced the AMs to provide every piece of context they had so the deal actually closed. They were 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 paid for itself multiple times over,” says Carter.

Read more about getting buy-in for ELG.

MEME OF THE DAY

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UPCOMING EVENT

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August 20th — Exploring the Power of the Benefits Broker Channel: Leveraging HR’s Most Trusted Consultants: Ryan Taguding (Founder and Principal at Temio Consulting) will share where to begin, how to identify your ICP and distinguish sales blockers from champions. Register here.