This FMCG Brand Cut Trade Incentives and Partner Loyalty Went Up
Channel partners were being paid to stay. Measuring what they actually valued lifted partner NPS by 16 points while cutting incentive spending 8%.
At a glance
- Channel partner relationships were being held together with trade incentives rather than with anything the partners actually valued.
- Partner NPS was 23 points, low for a business whose entire route to market runs through those partners.
- Listening to partners properly lifted partner NPS to 39 points, a 16 point gain.
- Incentive spending fell 8 percent over the same period, with stocking levels held.
The situation
The company sells through wholesalers, distributors and retailers. They are not customers in the conventional sense, but the entire route to market depends on them, and shelf presence is decided by whether they choose to stock and push the product.
Partner relationships were managed largely through trade incentives. When engagement softened, the reliable lever was to spend more. It worked, in the narrow sense that stocking levels held, and it was expensive in a way that never appeared as a customer experience problem because nobody was measuring partner experience.
Partner NPS, when it was finally measured, came back at 23 points.
Partner NPS of 23, held in place by incentive spending. That is not loyalty. That is rent, and the price goes up every year.
What the measurement found
Two things the incentive programme had been masking.
High-volume partners were among the least satisfied. The partners moving the most product, and therefore carrying the most revenue risk, were disproportionately represented at the bottom of the score. Incentives had kept them stocking while their actual experience deteriorated, which is precisely the situation that looks stable until it is not.
The drivers of dissatisfaction were operational, not commercial. Distribution reliability, communication about supply, and how much effort it took to resolve a problem. Not margin. The company had been paying to compensate for friction it could have removed.
This is the pattern that makes incentive-led partner management so durable and so expensive. Money is a fast, legible lever. Fixing distribution communication is slow and belongs to another function. So the money keeps going out.
What we changed
Partner feedback moved to a structured programme covering the partner tiers that carried the most volume, with driver analysis run against the scores to identify which operational factors were moving them rather than guessing. The programme covered 300 partners, with four to five respondents at each, giving roughly 1,200 to 1,500 responses in all.
The findings were routed to the functions that owned them, supply chain and distribution rather than trade marketing, and tracked as an outer loop: recurring themes fixed systemically rather than handled partner by partner.
The result
Partner NPS rose from 23 points to 39 points, a 16 point gain.
Incentive spending fell 8 percent over the same period, and stocking levels held.
The relationship between those two numbers is the finding. Incentives were partly substituting for operational quality. Improving the operational experience reduced how much substitution was needed, so the same commercial outcome cost less to produce.
Amitayu Basu, CEO and Co-founder, NumrThey were paying partners to tolerate friction. Remove the friction and you stop paying the toleration fee. The 8 percent is what that fee was costing them.
Note on what is and is not claimed
The 8 percent reduction in incentive spending is measured. It has not been converted into a return on investment figure here, because doing so credibly would require the absolute spend base and an attribution model, and neither is being published.
An 8 percent reduction on a national FMCG trade incentive budget is a substantial number in its own right. It does not need inflating into a ratio to be worth reading.
What transfers
Measure the partners, not just the end customer. Businesses that sell through channels routinely run sophisticated consumer CX programmes and nothing at all for the intermediaries who decide whether the product reaches a shelf.
Check whether your best partners are your happiest ones. If the highest-volume relationships are also the least satisfied, incentives are holding something together that is not otherwise holding.
Separate commercial levers from operational ones. If dissatisfaction is driven by distribution and communication, margin will not fix it. It will only rent a delay.
