Maximize Channel Revenue and Gross Margin

Plug Revenue Leaks

Optimize Channel Inventory

Improve Sales Forecasting

Timely and Accurate Revenue Recognition Based on ASC 606 and IFRS 15

Understand True Performance of Channel Marketing Programs

Ensure Compliance and Avoid Overpayments

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Increase Sales, Minimize Leakage, and Maximize Profit

Incentive program management is a complex and time-consuming task, but it's a critical factor in improving your profit margins. At Incent4, we offer an incentive management solution that can help you streamline the process, increase sales, and maximize profits while minimizing leakage. Our platform simplifies the management, implementation, and compliance of various incentive programs. By automating the process and accurately tracking transaction-based financials, you can reduce price erosion and eliminate erroneous overpayments, resulting in improved gross margins and top-line revenue.

Incentive Management Solutions

B2B organizations distributing their products through partners rely on channel incentive programs to support and grow revenue. Managing, implementing and ensuring compliance for channel incentive programs is a complex and time-consuming task. It is virtually impossible to effectively promote, manage, and measure the success of incentive programs via manual processes and ad hoc systems. The lack of streamlined and automated processes can lead to incorrect overpayment of claims, potentially costing thousands or millions of dollars each year. Incorrect incentive management can also lead to incorrect revenue recognition and incentive payments.

Incent4 platform supports a wide variety of incentive programs, including the following.

Incentive Program Process

Incent4’s incentive management solution automates and streamlines the entire “request-approve-claim-validate-adjust-authorize-payment” cycle, making the process easier to manage and eliminating the risk of overpaying and double-dipping by channel partners. You can design and fine-tune strategies for future channel incentive programs by tracking utilization metrics and ROI of historical programs.

Incentive programs generally follow the same basic process:

Request

For incentive programs initiated by partners, a partner requests a program to improve sales. Examples are MDF programs for marketing activities and special pricing programs for selling a specific volume of certain product(s) at a reduced price. For programs initiated internally by the manufacturer (For example, rebates, price protection etc.), requests are created by authorized personnel of sales and marketing departments.

Approve

The request is either approved or declined by appropriate personnel in the supplier or manufacturer organization.

Validate

The supplier or manufacturer must confirm the claim is valid.

Authorize

Valid claims now need to be authorized for payment.

Claim

Partner submits a claim to the supplier or manufacturer to recoup the incentives based on sales and the program.

Review and Adjust

Once the automated validation is completed, program administrators can review and adjust claims. Manual adjustments are tracked with an automated audit trail.

Payment

Reimbursement/payment of the claim amount to the channel partner.

Revenue recognition

The Incent4 solution allows ASC 606 and IFRS 15 compliance with the ability to create estimates and actuals. Estimates can be accrued and reversed when actuals become available. All incentive activities seamlessly feed Incent4's Revenue Recognition module for creating journal entries. This ensures the correct G/L journal entries are booked for incentives that are expenses (e.g., MDFs) and those that are reductions in revenue (e.g., rebates and ship and debit programs)

Measuring incentive program effectiveness

The Incent4 platform not only enables accurate and timely incentive claims payments, but also allows incentive data and statistics to be used to objectively measure program and partner performance. You get a comprehensive view of all channel incentive programs and their performance, including ROI and usage metrics, program accruals, and exposure. These metrics can also be integrated into the dashboards and analytics.

The Incent4 customer success team is always available to help OEMs manage incentive programs, establish “best practices”, and aid in completing the cycle of validation and payment.

Incentive Management Benefits

Sales

  • Know exactly which channel incentives are working by product, family, geography, and individual partners.
  • Improve and streamline your channel relationships.
  • Provide channel partners with accurate and timely incentive payments with full audit capability.

Finance

  • Be confident all transactions are accurate, valued appropriately, and accounted for based on industry compliance mandates.
  • Reconciled inventory enables better sales forecasting, reduced stock-outs, and reduced channel inventory.
  • Recognize revenue based on ASC 606 and IFRS 15 standards.

Marketing

  • Understand the true performance of channel marketing programs.
  • Create, manage, and improve promotions and marketing initiatives.