Supporting the Sales Team with Employee Purchase Programs

Challenge

Targus has a long history of selling laptop bags and computer accessories primarily to other businesses, facilitated by an internal sales team. Once we built momentum with an ecommerce ecommerce engine aimed at serving smaller businesses and consumers, bigger customers also started to purchase directly through our website, because it was quicker and easier than dealing with a sales rep.

Naturally, this created strife internally, and I found myself regularly dealing with emails and phone calls from frustrated salespeople, and stuck in several, sometimes contentious meetings on the topic. We weren’t going to stop selling our products online of course, so I wanted to find a way to help the sales team feel more excited and optimistic about our continuing push into ecommerce.

Solution

I proposed an idea to launch an Employee Purchase Program (EPP) that my team would build and support, and the sales team could offer as a value add to their customers. These programs could be extended to customers at the discretion of the sales team, and allow the employees of those customers to purchase products on Targus.com at an exclusive and significant discount.

Here’s how it all worked:

• Once a customer was approved for the program, they would provide their employees through emails and other communications, with a link to their personalized landing page

• We built the personalized landing pages using a template, so that all we had to was change the company name and logo to launch one

• When an employee clicked “Get Discount”, they would provide their company email address to which we’d send a unique, one-time use promo code

• The employee could redeem the promo code on purchases made through Targus.com

Results

Although I can’t share specific program results, the number of orders generated through these EPP discounts was relatively small. However, the program was exceptionally well received by the sales team and gave them additional firepower for securing new accounts or re-engaging existing ones. Furthermore, the third-party vendor we secured to validate employee status for these EPP programs, enabled us to launch other membership discount programs that were significantly more fruitful with a nominal increase in cost.

Takeaways

• The success of an ecommerce program can’t always be measured in pure ROI terms

• If a program can enable sales teams to more efficiently close deals, and helps teams internally to work through conflicting incentives, supporting that may be a cost worth bearing