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We hear from Traci Maynard,
Microsoft Executive at Axiz, who
tells us how the automation of
incentives streamlines the lead to
revenue processes.
DRIVING INCREASED
REVENUE
FOR YOUR BRAND, YOUR
VENDOR AND YOUR BUSINESS
O
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ne of the most tried and tested
methods for driving a more
positive sales outcome from an
organisation is to offer some
form of incentive to people to take the
‘action’ the company requires. In the channel,
this has become one way to differentiate
oneself from the competition, since offering
something in return for the sale puts your
business in a better position than the
company that does not.
Traci Maynard, Microsoft Executive at
Axiz, says that research firm Forrester
has demonstrated that the automation of
incentives helps to remove the ‘friction’ in
the partner’s sales process and to streamline
the lead to revenue processes.
“If one looks at the 2017 study from
the Incentive Federation, which measured
the expenditure of US businesses using
non-cash rewards for employees, customers
and partners, overall incidences of channel
reward programmes increased by some 57%
in just three years,” she said.
“With figures like this, it makes me
curious as to exactly what a version of this
ar
d,
Mi
cro
sof
t E
xecut
ive
at Axiz
study would look like for the South
African channel.
“The study summarised that ‘award
points, gifts cards, incentive travel and
merchandise’ are the most commonly used
tools for firms seeking to provide reward
and recognition to employees, sales teams,
channel partners and customers.”
Maynard points out, however, that
Digital Transformation is changing vendors’
approaches to such inducements. She
explains that they all inevitably want to see
a return on their investment in terms of a
particular incentive – for example, a certain
amount of sales were made prior to the
incentive, while following it, sales doubled or
tripled. The difficulty is that while this is easy
in a physical world with physical goods, how
are such incentive schemes measured in the
world of the cloud?
“Understanding that the world itself is
different, the incentives from Microsoft for
its cloud offerings, via programmes such
as Cloud Solution Provider (CSP), are also
designed to drive a very different behaviour,”
said Maynard.
“What the vendor does is it encourages
sales behaviour by incentivising partners for
new customers added – in other words, end-
customers – and Microsoft then sets a range
of qualifying seats, such as 25 to 99, 100 to
299, and 300 plus seats.
“Essentially, the incentives programme
encourages partners to develop new ways
of marketing their Microsoft offerings, such
as through conference attendance, training
programmes and new package offers. The