Channel Management Software

Direct selling has become a thing of the past. Today’s eCommerce heavily relies on multi-channels, meaning your brand face is presented to customers through other parties than you. Although initially perceived as a concern for some, companies acknowledged the need and started using channel management software to handle this challenge.

Capterra’s definition of “channel management software” explains how it works in a nutshell: “Channel management software allows companies to streamline their distribution and sales efforts by organizing clients into specific segments and keeping track of marketing outreach and buying patterns”.

In the B2B context, companies use channel management software in order to monitor and manage anything about their channel. This includes tracking leads, real-time engagement with all members, direct sales, observing the pipeline, and many other functions.

With using channel management software, in other words, specific automation, companies became capable of handling complex B2B relationships. When automation was in, the storyline started from the customer, finding its way through the channel to the brand itself. This, obviously needed optimization in order to establish consistency. Consistency is an important keyword in the brand loyalty context, and we can achieve it through several means. We use loyalty strategies in order to achieve it, however, we need to understand the nature of a channel first.

Recognizing Your Channel

As much as the whole concept might imply a top-to-down mechanism, it is definitely larger than it seems. It is not only designed to provide the brand owner with ease to manage everyone, but also responding to your partners in a candid way.

Moreover, there is another challenge channel managers need to address here. Competition for acquiring customers aside, channel partnerships had their own share from the competitive climate as well. You constantly need to find ways to foster and empower your partners. They may want to choose other vendors if they believe you are not truly willing to listen.

Therefore, there is a need for providing incentives to maintain your existing channel as well as to recruit new partnerships. Incentives work for many cases including brand education and developing social awareness.

For reaching such a level, collecting data from across your channel is crucial. Data in this context refers to all sorts of involvement your partners’ exhibit. However, they are not always reflected on the software explicitly, meaning they need interpretation. At this point, loyalty additions serve as transcribers to address any interaction that would bring financial and emotional gain. Success lies in many realms, but B2B engagement is indeed a prominent one that is worth digging deeper.

Covering the Engagement Aspect 

Managing the emotional part, which is not a tangible matter like finances, might seem difficult. Yet, Apex Loyalty offers smart measures to decipher all sorts of data and transform them into engagement patterns.

We use B2B engagement metrics for understanding engagement levels and enhancing them. We utilize enrollment, redemption, active engagement, point accumulation and content consumption rates on the basis of our multiple measure approach in order to establish the most flexible mechanism possible.

Given the abundant nature of B2B channels, data is endless. You have to filter it in order to make sense to your partners, through reports, campaigns, visuals, content in short. With Apex Loyalty dynamic rules, you can build engagement offerings within a strategy, in a timely and scalable manner.

Adding a fun taste to it, we offer various engagement and gamification elements that you can integrate into these actions. Especially gamification features are noteworthy in terms of creating the community feel within the channel. It makes certain actions feel easy and fun, while rewarding your partners and even training them in a seamless way that does not feel tedious.

The projects we used these features in, in other words, our success stories, feature exceptional cases where companies achieved their objectives for better engagement within their channels.

Other Apex Loyalty Highlights

We defined Apex Loyalty’s core features as channel loyalty, customer and partner engagement and incentive automation. These components constitute a strong backbone that any company from any industry can utilize in a flexible way. It opens creative ways to increasing sales, educating and training your channel.

Another highlight is that Apex Loyalty offers all in a user-friendly manner. Our drag-and-drop design wizard is another loyalty element since members can design their own platform easily with it. With the user-friendly manager panels, they will be eager to interact on a daily basis, regardless of everyday hassles.

Rendering engagement easy and natural, Apex Loyalty provides a simple yet straight-forward and comprehensive addition to your channel management efforts.

You can read our previous post on https://www.apexloyalty.com/how-does-apex-loyalty-work-for-sales-team/