FAQs

With the click of a mouse, your customers have easier access to more competitive vendors than ever before. It’s imperative that you do as much as possible to avoid customer attrition. B2B loyalty programs use your customer sales data to stay relevant and top-of-mind with customers, with reward offers tied to past purchasing behavior. They have been proven to generate incremental sales for businesses. Companies use B2B reward programs to add new business customers, keep them longer, and improve each customer's lifetime value. 

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Yes. B2B loyalty programs are successful across multiple B2B sectors (many of which are reviewed on this website). Unlike other sales and marketing tactics and programs, loyalty programs are highly measurable. The best B2B reward programs reflect the business's sales objectives and employ a reward structure tied to these objectives. Good programs constantly evolve to reflect recent learnings and the changing nature of both the business and its B2B customers. 

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Businesses want to make sure that their B2B customers purchase their products from them and not the competition. Rewards programs provide an added incentive for B2B customers to purchase from your business. Rewarding customers becomes an immediate sales growth and profit center, with highly measurable results and incremental profit. Having a B2B loyalty program encourages customers to buy from your business time and time again, keeping customers engaged and building relationships.

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Companies often attempt to build and manage a loyalty program internally, with little experience or understanding of what it takes to design and run a best-in-class program. Additionally, B2B reward programs make use of mountains of sales data – so automated data analytics and processing are required – something many companies simply don’t have.  At Lift & Shift, we have years of experience in the B2B loyalty space. We develop and operate your program using our proprietary loyalty software tools and years of accumulated best practices running successful programs across multiple industries. 

To ensure your program’s success, we:

• design the program to align with your company's sales goals and profit margins
• train your sales team about the program and how to promote it
• offer an incentive to your customers to join
• send consistent, informative, personalized communication about the program
• make participation easy
• have a broad array of desired, exciting rewards from which to choose

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From years of experience working with B2B loyalty clients, we can honestly say it all depends on one big decision. Whether you build/run your rewards program internally or leverage the expertise of B2B loyalty experts like Lift & Shift. Do you have the internal resources, experience, and time to commit to designing, implementing, and administering a B2B loyalty program? Whether it be creating a customer-facing reward website with account history, importing and analyzing customer sales data, developing personalized account-based reward offers, deploying monthly member statements, handling inbound program inquiries, or measuring program impact and ROI, there’s A LOT to do. On the other hand, Lift & Shift is a full-service loyalty program. A dedicated account manager works with you to get your program up and running smoothly, then manages its efficient operation 24/7. Working with us, our clients spend less than an hour of their time each month with loyalty program administration. 

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Lift & Shift is a full-service loyalty program provider. A dedicated account manager works with you to get your program up and running smoothly and then manages its efficient operation 24/7 with our multi-disciplined team of B2B reward program experts. Working with us, our clients spend less than an hour of their time each month with loyalty program administration. Our B2B loyalty team are experts at program design, website creation, data importation and processing, ongoing member communications, reward fulfillment, customer care, etc. We know all the ins and outs.

The Lift & Shift team will work with you to understand what you need your program to do. We’ll develop a proposed program structure and budget and then draft copy for your custom reward program website and member communications. Once you sign off on the copy, it takes about eight to ten weeks to reach the launch stage. During those eight weeks, while our developers are building your reward website, we work with you to finalize things like sales data format and workflows and create initial reward offers. Importantly, this time also includes training your sales team (inside and field sales) on the program and its use. 

Program costs vary depending on type, size, and scope. A well-designed program should effectively pay for itself many times over using the incremental gross profit from the sales growth it delivers. The most cost-effective program structure is performance-based, where reward program costs are tied largely to the points issued as customer members spend more of their category volume with you; typical customer growth for a well-structured B2B reward program is 25% or more.

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Unlike many other sales and marketing tools, reward programs are highly measurable. Program ROI is calculated using the incremental gross profit of the reward customers and the reward program costs tied to the same customers. 

Program impact is easily tracked by comparing members’ purchase behavior to that of non-members, both before and after the program launch and/or offer event(s). Reward programs can see an ROI as high as 700% when reward offers are properly structured to reflect sales objectives and profit margins.

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Easily. All reward offer costs are performance-based and tied to actual purchases. If there are no purchases, then there aren’t any reward point costs. A tip: simply be sure to properly align reward offer values to the associated profit margins of the products/services in question; the richer the available margin, the more robust the offer can be. You’ll have a great ROI every time.

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Customer data analytics is the practice of analyzing your customers’ past purchasing behavior to predict their future purchase behavior. The foundation of analytics is historical sales data. Data plus analytical expertise results in customer insight. This insight allows companies to understand and motivate customers (through reward offers) to achieve specific behavioral goals. The desired goals may be to continue their already exemplary behavior or to modify their behavior in some way – try a new product, increase their transaction size, purchase more frequently, etc. Analytic tools may be as simple as spreadsheets but are more likely to employ mathematic algorithms and models that search through data to identify customer trends and habits. Lift & Shift has a team of data experts and a suite of proprietary analytical tools available to help you through this exploration and discovery. 

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Sales data is key to your B2B reward program’s success. Your data is securely used to administer your program and can be as simple as a monthly file that includes a unique customer number, purchase date, product info (e.g., SKU number), purchase quantity, and price. 

The amount of sales data available to each company varies depending on their go-to-market strategy. For example, manufacturers that sell through distribution often have limited detailed sales data for downstream customers, so they must rely on the distributors to share some of their sales data – or must require the customer to supply this data by submitting a reward claim. Manufacturers who sell directly or through distributors have more robust transactional customer data, which affords them virtually unlimited opportunities to motivate specific purchase behavior (re-purchase, add a category, up-sell, cross-sell, etc.) by their customers. 

We understand the concerns you may have about sharing this data to facilitate a reward program and take this responsibility very seriously. Lift & Shift has best-in-class security systems and data management protocols in place, including encryption technologies, firewalls, and antivirus software. Your data is your data; we use it only to power your reward program, and we are a trusted vendor to many clients who provide us with access to their sales data to drive incremental sales on their behalf every day.

Concerns about data privacy are real and valid. Excessive use of personal data by social media companies has resulted in enormous backlash, harming customers’ trust in companies and brands. B2B reward programs are quite different: most B2B reward programs do not collect very much personal data; they use account-based sales data to identify customer purchasing trends. With this insight, the company can identify B2B customers with opportunities for increased sales and then make reward-based offers to motivate their behavior. Done correctly, the B2B customer purchases from the company versus its competition while getting closer to attaining their chosen reward. 

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B2B companies with more than a couple hundred customers benefit the most from sales automation, including an automated sales reward program. A B2B reward program is a highly useful and cost-effective tool that sales teams can use to power account-based sales and marketing programs and boost productivity and results.

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Any sales channel with a significant number of targets (customers and/or sales reps) will benefit from automation. A B2B automated loyalty program can be customized for any sales channel and/or target audience. The sales data and analysis are the keys. Sales targets and margins vary by account or sales rep. Your B2B reward program should reflect your business and its opportunities. It can use automation to identify and capitalize on unique account-based reward offers tied to purchasing gaps and opportunities identified through automated data analysis.

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It can be completely personalized. An automated sales reward program is easily customizable to specific criteria or customer segments. Any detail included in sales data can be used to automatically personalize your customer’s experience and create highly relevant purchase offers that will heighten engagement, boost retention, and drive incremental sales and profit. 

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Lift & Shift’s Data and Analytics department provides analysis and reporting on virtually any sales metric imaginable. Using a suite of nine proprietary algorithms, we can generate customer segments based on shared purchase behavior or customer profiles. Common analyses include category/product/brand/SKU purchasing gaps, product purchase bundles or associative purchasing, purchasing volume drop-off, customer purchase scoring, and purchase growth vs. previous periods. Many other reports can be generated – it all depends on the breadth and depth of available sales data.

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Lift & Shift is a full-service loyalty program provider. A dedicated account manager works with you to get your program up and running quickly and smoothly and then manages its efficient operation 24/7. Working with us, the average client spends less than an hour of their time each month with loyalty program administration. Our B2B loyalty team is made up of experts at program design, website creation, data importation, analytics and processing, program impact and ROI reporting, ongoing member communications, reward fulfillment, customer care, etc. We know all the ins and outs of automated sales reward programs.

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Programs that include multiple businesses under one loyalty brand are called coalition loyalty programs. In coalition programs, your company is challenged to stand out from all the other participating companies, and you have little or no control over or access to all the program data – a huge shortcoming. It’s virtually impossible to shape the reward program to suit your business’ sales and marketing objectives. Your company and its brands/products deserve a customized program that is designed and administered in a way that maximizes your ROI. A Lift & Shift loyalty program is customized to your company and your goals.

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The Lift & Shift contractor rewards program addresses the realities of the construction industry and makes it easy for downstream trade contractors, general contractors, remodelers, and builders to participate in a manufacturer’s reward program. Our proprietary Distributor Data Direct platform enables your key distributors to participate in the program by supplying some of their sales data, so you can reward your enrolled contractors without them ever needing to submit claims. This helps drive contractor participation, boosting your sales and profits – as well as your distributors’.

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Customer engagement is the connection your customers have with your company/brand. Highly engaged customers tend to buy more from a company

• they’re open to new purchase suggestions (new products, more categories, cross-ell, up-sell, etc.)
• they talk up your company
• they tend to be more loyal – and less likely to buy from your competitors. 

Improving your customer engagement helps bolster customer retention and their lifetime value to your company.

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Many customer relationships have become increasingly impersonal thanks to the internet and market disruptions like COVID-19. It’s much easier for customers to solicit multiple quotes or prices than ever before, and this is a key cause of attrition. It’s more effective and economical for businesses to focus on retaining an existing customer than continually seeking (and investing in) new customers. Customer engagement is important because when a customer is engaged, they are more likely to stay a customer, purchasing more from your company for longer periods of time. They have stronger ‘customer lifetime value’ than less engaged customers and are less likely to defect to the competition. 

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Creating ongoing relationships between companies and their customers is key to any B2B loyalty program and its customer engagement strategy. A customer who opts into a B2B loyalty program is signaling that they are interested in rewards, and their purchasing could be influenced as they seek to accumulate rewards. The most effective rewards programs have a wide array of reward options (merchandise, gift cards, experiences, etc.), so there’s something motivating for everyone. The company then uses each customer’s unique purchase history to develop personalized, targeted offers to motivate that customer to behave in specific ways (buy more of what they have been buying, try new things customers like them are buying, etc.). These reward offers are a win-win. They incent customers to behave in ways consistent with the company’s business objectives (win!), and they accelerate the customer’s attainment of their chosen reward (win!).

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