Understand the channel partner journey and better align your incentives to your partners
Everything’s changing! Today’s world of channel incentive and rewards management looks very different from just a decade or so ago. Millennials have replaced Generation X as the largest generation in the workforce. And they are filling key customer-facing roles in record numbers. In our frenetic, 24/7/365 digital and social world, the classic sales funnel has become a complex, circuitous journey. That’s why it’s a great time to stop and rethink the way your incentive plans are designed and implemented.The Partner Journey
You know your channel programs need to evolve. To develop a truly integrated strategy, you must look at how incentives align to the partner journey—and to your partner personas during every step of that journey. Vendors need to be able to ensure proper attribution and measure influence around the end buyer at each stage. 
Partner Profiling
Which channel incentives are the most effective? How do I know which promotions to launch at each particular stage in the partner journey?
These are common questions that vendors ask themselves. To answer these questions, you need to identify your overarching corporate goals. What are you trying to achieve? What type of growth do you want? Next, you need to profile your partners. While developing your ideal partner profile, be sure to engage partners in the profiling exercise. Now you’ve identified which partners you want to engage, and which partners are really going to contribute to your growth goals. Partner profiling will help you identify and flag those partners. Next, you, the vendor, need to identify partner-level personas and understand which partner personas are going to engage with each one of your channel programs and incentives. It’s complicated, and the old, offline ways of working just won’t cut it. High tech companies supported by software that can capably manage the full lifecycle of their incentive programs have a strategic advantage in the marketplace. The ideal incentive management solution enables the vendor to analyze, track, report and respond nimbly to a wide variety of partner/buyer behaviors and market factors. Vistex provides leading-edge software and solutions to turbocharge your incentives management system. To learn more about the channel partner journey and how to better align your incentives to your partners, download the eBook, Aligning Channel Incentives to Partner Personas and Journeys.