Companies start looking for a loyalty provider for a few reasons. Some have a program that isn’t doing what they need anymore, and their current vendor can’t offer the strategic direction to fix it. Some have never run a program at all. Others need something short term, like a new product launch or an end-of-line spiff to drive focus among brand-agnostic channel partners.
Wherever they start, most buyers ask for a demo first. A shiny platform brings the idea to life and eases a lot of concerns. What gets overlooked is that the technology is a tool within the overall strategy. It doesn’t answer your business needs by itself.
So before you sign with any B2B loyalty provider, here are the seven questions I’d want answered.
Begin with your channel goals
1. How will this program help us drive the goals we’re trying to achieve in our channel?
It’s easy to get pulled toward the reward catalog. Variety has its place, but leading with it risks generalizing what every participant in every program wants, and the catalog ends up carrying more weight than it should. Start with your own goals and whether the provider can design around them. Ask, too, whether the business rules can change as the program evolves, because your goals this year may not be your goals further down the line.
Designing around those goals takes a provider who understands how your channel actually sells.
B2B expertise comes first
2. How well do you understand the B2B sales process?
B2B and B2C loyalty are fundamentally different approaches. Consumer programs are usually one-to-one: do this, get this. Larger B2B programs often need to change a number of behaviors across several stakeholders, each with a different role in the sales process, from deal registrations to turning up at an event. Expecting a B2C provider to deliver a B2B solution can be a little naive.
Sector experience gives a provider a head start on your industry’s acronyms and nuances. The end goal, though, is usually selling through trade channel partners, so understanding the B2B sales process is the more fundamental requirement. Once a provider knows which behaviors you need to change, the next test is whether they can show those behaviors changed.
Measurement that proves influence
3. How will you know whether the program is working?
Listen for how a provider maps behaviors to incentives and measures the uplift. Does completing an education module increase that participant’s sales volume? A/B testing different levels or segments within your channel shows what’s influencing behavior and what isn’t.
Probe on incrementality here too. Spiff-type programs usually produce a spike during the promotion, and the honest question is whether that business would have come in anyway a month later. Measuring people in the program against those who aren’t is how you see what an initiative really achieved. That kind of measurement depends on data flowing cleanly between systems.
Technology built around the participant
4. How easy will this be for our participants, and how will your platform connect with our systems?
The goal of any B2B program is driving behavioral change at the point of influence in the easiest way possible. Nobody wants another login or another password to remember. Even my Google password manager can’t keep up with mine. Participants want to see rewards at the point of sale and know that what they’ve done has added to their rewards balance.
Scale raises the stakes. Many larger businesses have ironed out the regional differences in their sales process, yet loyalty and incentive programs often still run separately. Ask whether the provider can integrate your CRM, finance process, and other core systems in a single, uniform way, so executives get a simple view of every region and each participant still gets a consistent, on-brand experience. A unified view of your data is valuable, though only if someone knows what to do with it.
Insight and support after launch
5. What’s the “so what” in your reporting?
Plenty of companies are sitting on lots of data and don’t know what to do with it. Every program should track program health: how many people join, how many engage, and how many do what the program was designed for. Far fewer answer the so what. Should we keep going, stop, or try something different? Basic reporting tells you what happened. Useful insight spots the partners who aren’t engaging as well as others and recommends a next best action, often using nudge theory to steer their next behavior.
6. Who will be driving the strategy once the program is live?
Technology is one part of a successful program. Understanding regional nuance takes people. A strategic account management team gets under the skin of your program, working with subject matter experts to understand existing behaviors in each region. That team also sets the rhythm of communications. Open rates in this industry tend to be higher because people want to see how well they’ve done, but if it’s only ever email, it becomes noise in the background. Different tactics, like a gamification tool or a notification center, keep participants coming back.
Every provider will tell you they can do all of this. The last question checks whether they actually have.
Evidence over promises
7. Can you show us the proof?
Ask for case studies, and not just one: what the issue was, how the provider solved it, and what the results were, repeated across different businesses and sectors. What others say about a company, including industry awards judged by peers, carries more weight than what it says about itself. If there’s no proof in the pudding, so to speak, treat that as a red flag. Off-the-shelf solutions can look shiny and very cost effective, and they can be misleading. So can price. The real question is whether it’s good value, and whether the provider can demonstrably change your business outcomes based on previous successes.
Here’s the kind of proof I mean. One client came to us wanting to improve the revenue coming in, rather than increase their volume of sales, by optimizing it and upselling wherever possible. They could already reward a behavior, but it was very flatline, with no levers to tweak. We designed a program that still rewarded everything, but participants got a significant improvement on their reward redemptions when they upsold, cross-sold, and drove business toward the areas our client needed. After one year, we saw a couple of percentage points increase in overall profitability. Volumes stayed the same, and revenue improved demonstrably.
That’s what a strong answer to all seven questions looks like: a clear goal, a program designed around the behaviors that move it, and results you can trace back to the program.
If you’re putting together a shortlist of B2B loyalty providers, talk to our team and we’ll show you how we’d answer each of these seven questions for your channel.
