The Distributors All Stars
An engaging, fun rewards program designed to maximise sales growth and loyalty across the entire national sales force within a wholesale business.
The Challenge
The Distributors are Australia’s leading national independent wholesale distributors to petrol and convenience, corner stores, pharmacy, newsagents, schools and the route market, and specialise in beverages, confectionary, snack, grocery and customer service.
The Distributors are a long-time client, with Gratifii (formerly Hachiko) successfully running their retail loyalty program. Now The Distributors were keen to replicate that success with their own sales force. They were looking to offer an incentive to increase product knowledge, growing the depth and breadth of product reach, and accelerate new product uptake and sales growth within their fast-paced, competitive market.
Our Solution
Gratifii designed a rewards program that guaranteed engagement of the branches by rewarding members for connecting with supplier brands through the completion of product training, enablement activities and achieving sales growth. The incentive stretched across all sales influencers including branch owners, sales managers and sales reps.
Reps were kept motivated to continually sell products into outlets throughout the year with bonus points for new product distribution. The points-based program saw a broad number of reps rewarded by exchanging their points for bids in prize-filled online auctions. Additionally, competition between national branches and reps were fostered with the lure of generous leaderboard prizes.
Pivotal to the success of the program was providing all stakeholders (client, branches and sponsors) with transparency via performance dashboards which provided timely, granular detail of reps’ engagement scores and completed activities.
For sponsoring suppliers, the program enables them to encourage focus on specific product sales and drive greater interactions with stores to create more selling opportunities, turning their reps into brand ambassadors. The ability to offer monthly training and resources including videos and Blads, further drives engagement and awareness – more than 12,000 training sessions were completed between the July launch and February 2023, with more than 16,000 resources accessed during the same period.
Campaign design
All Stars’ regular, engaging comms keep the program front of mind and called out the new campaigns providing freshness and new challenges for All Stars members. Timely comms, customised to each segment, focused on creating excitement and fun, driving urgency and a sense of friendly competition.
Early comms, both email and telemarketing, drove eligible members to activate their accounts, followed by regular short CTA emails to encourage members to be fully engaged with the program.
That fun, engaging nature, impactful creative and custom narrative worked, with an average open rate and click to open rates of more than three times higher than the industry average.
The use of direct communications, website dashboards and online auction rewards has helped The Distributors create an engaging, personalised relationship with reps.
The results
Within six months of hitting the market, The Distributors All Stars program was delivering significant returns.
