Current sales and projections for the tire industry are optimistic, but the chance of a recession is looming in economic forecasts. This could lead to a future of consumers putting off routine maintenance and upgrades, as well as spending a lot less time on the road in general. What can tire brands and dealers do to prepare? In Tire Business magazine, Incentive Solutions’ Director of Global Accounts offers this advice:
Engage Tire Dealers with Rewards
To engage tire dealers and other channel partners means offering them a memorable and positive experiences with your brand—even better if your brand can provide personal value. One of the best ways to engage channel partners is with a rewards program. Even small rewards engage partners and can impact their habits. Whether you want to improve sales performance, encourage data submission or training, you can motivate any behavior with the right reward.
Provide Sales Resources
Set dealers and sales reps up for success with sales enablement tactics such as an e-commerce platform or a partner portal featuring product information, marketing assets, industry content, and training materials.
Offer Gamification
Examples of gamification include playing virtual games of chance to earn reward points, an sales leaderboard to spark friendly competition, contests, or daily trivia questions. Not only do games engage tire dealers, but gamified training helps improve the retention of knowledge, making training more effective.
Personalize Your Brand Experience
Consumers increasingly expect personalized, relevant experience with the brands they buy from. Business software such as customer relationship management (CRM) and channel marketing systems help you collect the data to deliver these personalized experiences. Channel software with data integration, automation, and segmentation features in particular help businesses create better experiences for channel partners and customers.
Maintain Price Integrity
Instead of increasing prices or turning to aggressive marketing, brands can develop better partner relationships to drive revenue organically and incrementally. Some things that help with this include:
- Encouraging more warranty registrations, which will help you fill in a lot of missing blanks in your customer data so you can improve sales and marketing strategies.
- Reward channel partners for submitting surveys and feedback, helping you understand your sales channel better.
- Motivate channel partners to increase product knowledge by offering them rewards for completing training courses or earning certificates, boosting their sales performance and confidence.
For more information and insights, read the full article in Tire Business magazine.