Most dealer schemes move inventory from your warehouse to your dealer godown and call it growth. The design decisions that separate real demand from displaced demand are all made before launch.
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What behaviour are you buying. There are only a few honest answers: more end customer sales, wider distribution into new outlets, more display presence, faster payment, or a shift in mix towards particular products. Each implies a different scheme, and a scheme that has not named its objective will default to rewarding volume, which is the easiest thing to measure and the least likely to create demand.
| Scheme type | Buys you | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Volume slab on dispatches | Short term primary volume | Channel stuffing and a following month slump |
| Growth over own baseline | Incremental volume | Administrative complexity and baseline disputes |
| Secondary sales linked | Real end customer demand | Measurement difficulty and reporting burden |
| Display and visibility | Presence and share of shelf | Verification effort in the field |
| New outlet activation | Distribution width | Outlets opened for the scheme and then dormant |
| Early payment discount | Working capital | Margin given away to dealers who would have paid anyway |
| Mix or new product push | Adoption of specific lines | Cannibalising existing lines |
Slabs work by concentrating effort near a threshold, and that only helps when the threshold is genuinely within reach. A dealer who works out in week two that the next slab is unattainable stops trying, and a dealer who crosses it early has no reason to continue. Both problems are reduced by using several closely spaced slabs rather than one large jump, and by setting each dealer thresholds from their own history.
Objective, period, exactly what is measured, the slab table, the benefit, the claim process, the claim window, and one worked example using realistic numbers. Brief the field team before dealers hear anything, and test comprehension by asking a dealer to calculate their own benefit from the sheet. If they cannot, the scheme will not change behaviour regardless of how generous it is.
During the scheme, dealers should be able to see where they stand at any point, calculated from the same records you will use to settle. This does two things: it removes the end of period dispute entirely, and it maintains the motivational effect throughout the period rather than only at the start and the finish.
A short claim window and prompt settlement. Delay converts a goodwill exercise into a grievance, and channel relationships in most industries are long, remembered and discussed between dealers. The reputational cost of slow settlement is paid on every subsequent scheme.
Compare the scheme period together with the period after it against the same combined window in a comparable previous year. As an illustrative example, a scheme that appears to lift volume by a quarter during its own month, followed by a month down by a fifth, has bought a modest genuine lift at the cost of the full scheme budget, and reporting only the scheme month would have described it as a triumph.
Then compute cost per incremental unit and compare it with your margin. Some schemes fail this test badly and continue to run for years because nobody has done the arithmetic. Doing it once, on the last scheme, is usually enough to change how the next three are designed.
All of this depends on knowing what each dealer bought, when, at what price, and ideally what they sold. That record needs to live somewhere shared rather than in the field team memory or a set of spreadsheets, because scheme administration, claim settlement and next year baseline all draw on the same data. Where the record is fragmented, every scheme becomes a reconciliation project, and the reconciliation project is what makes manufacturers reluctant to design better schemes.
Related reading: industry pages, channel and lead management, reporting features, CRM for small business, use cases, and book a walkthrough.
Every team in this space loses revenue to the same recurring gaps. Here is what they cost you and how HelloGrowthCRM closes each one.
Sales spike in the last week of the scheme and collapse the following month.
Reward secondary sales or add a holding condition, and compare the scheme period plus the following period against the same window last year rather than the period alone.Measure across the reversal
Dealers argue about claim calculations for weeks after every scheme.
Publish a running scheme statement during the period, calculated from the same dispatch and sales records, so the final number is never a surprise.Running statements
Large dealers earn scheme benefits for volumes they would have bought anyway.
Base slabs on growth over each dealer own baseline rather than absolute volume, so the reward attaches to incremental business.Baseline-based slabs
The scheme was designed centrally and the field team cannot explain it.
Write it on one page with a worked example, brief the field team before dealers hear about it, and test comprehension by asking a dealer to compute their own benefit.One page and a worked example
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