As most successful businesses know, sales and marketing are irreplaceable parts of a company’s revenue generation. Advertising, image building, and customer outreach have been utilized to great effect in many marketing campaigns. However, while advertising is great for building brand awareness and creating positive sentiment about a brand, it doesn’t always guarantee action. Someone may like a brand, but it does not guarantee they will purchase that brand’s products.
In light of this, many companies have missed one of the most powerful revenue levers that they can utilize in their sales strategies. Sales incentive programs, or programs that reward desired customer behaviors with monetary and experience-based incentives, can be a more optimal way to drive revenue. Receiving points, rewards, or cash back for purchases creates a clear and positive cause-and-effect relationship between purchasing products and allowing customers to fulfill their needs. The Clearwater, Florida-based agency Level 6 is one company that has demonstrated the effectiveness of channel sales incentive programs since it made incentive marketing its sole focus in 2015.
Level 6 was founded by Ben Wieder as a full-service marketing agency in 2005. Initially, the company did a little bit of everything in the marketing space, from websites to brochures to corporate videos. After working in the marketing departments of Fortune 500 companies and seeing them agonize over the smallest fees, Wieder was inspired to found his own marketing agency that prioritized customer satisfaction over monetary particulars.
“Honestly, I never imagined Level 6 would grow into what it is today. My early goal was simply to build the kind of agency I would have wanted to hire as a client:responsive, transparent, and genuinely invested in outcomes,” Wieder commented. “Thanks to an exceptional team and a roster of loyal clients and vendors, we have built exactly that. The longevity of those relationships is the most meaningful measure of our success.”
Although Wieder’s initial goal was simply to run a more responsive and customer-centric marketing agency, the type of agency that he would want to hire as a client, he discovered the efficacy of incentive programs after a client asked Level 6 to develop a dealer incentive program during its first year. The company soon turned that initial discovery process into mastery, as incentive and consumer rebate programs became two of its strongest disciplines.
Today, Level 6’s sales incentive programs are built on its single-tenant software architecture, which provides each of the firm’s clients with its own unique codebase, database, and integrations. Instead of developing a generic one-size-fits-all SaaS program for clients, Level 6’s developers engineer features and capabilities tailored to clients’ specific sales strategies. Level 6’s customizable software for incentive programs fully integrates with each client’s ERP, CRM, payroll, and data infrastructure.
“The world has become commoditized. It started with the assembly line and has accelerated into an era of generic SaaS where every customer gets the same product regardless of their needs,” Ben Wieder said. “Enterprise clients deserve better than off-the-shelf, and Level 6 is leading the shift back to a more personalized, customer-centric way of doing business. That’s the legacy I want to leave behind.”
Examples of Level 6’s ability to innovate for the sake of its clients include one instance in which a healthcare rewards provider was looking for a way to create an incentive program that could accommodate clients who were required to use branded card carriers that displayed their unique company identity. Because of these requirements, the clients could not just use any white-label experience for its incentive program; it needed one with robust customization options that would help retain a company’s individuality. In response, Level 6 created a first-of-its-kind card carrier solution that enabled scalable, multi-client personalization from one platform. This healthcare rewards provider credits Level 6’s efforts with helping strengthen its relationships with its clients and setting a new industry standard for personalization.
To this date, Level 6 has generated over $6 billion in total client revenue and an estimated $1 billion in incremental revenue attributable directly to its incentive solutions. Taken together, these findings illustrate the emerging need for a new paradigm around how businesses grow in the modern world. While classical marketing remains critical in generating brand awareness and demand, it is the incentive structures that drive behavioral change and generate profit.
Through its innovative combination of bespoke technology and tailored incentive programs, Level 6 is setting itself up not as a typical agency or software supplier, but rather as a partner in performance-oriented growth. For any business seeking to advance beyond marginal growth and achieve sustainable revenue increases, the implications are clear: client-centered channel incentive programs are the future.
