If you are paying to have your product or service placed and advertised in stores, restaurants or other distribution channels, it is critically important to ensure that you are receiving your money’s worth by having your brand, product, or service presented effectively to end customers.

At the same time, especially in today’s competitive environment, you need to show your channel partners how their association with your organization and products will empower their own brand and ensure profitability.

BestMark will help you achieve both of these goals. We can make sure your products or services are being promoted through suggestive selling and effective merchandising, and we can offer further value to your channel partners by providing critical information regarding how to improve key elements of their customers’ experiences and increase customer loyalty.

BestMark Understands the Importance of Channel Marketing and Frontline Selling

Successful suppliers know that their job doesn’t end once their product enters the distribution channel. A well-crafted and brilliant marketing strategy cannot succeed without the engagement of the individual distribution companies and their frontline employees. However, it is challenging enough to motivate direct employees to provide the necessary sales and service support; motivating the owners and employees of the independent organizations in a distribution chain requires even greater effort.

BestMark can help you overcome this challenge in several ways. First of all, we know that the following old adage is true: “It’s not what you expect, it’s what you inspect.” Measurements that encourage accountability make your job and the job of your channel partners easier. To this end, our services include:

• Checking whether sales associates or cashiers mention particular products or offers
• Observing which brand(s) an employee recommends in response to a specific scenario
• Evaluating if servers proactively suggest specific products, services, or additional items
• Inspecting signage for compliance
• Determining if products are correctly placed on the selling floor per planogram requirements
• And many, many more...

Catching Employees Doing Something Right

To further foster motivation for front-line employees to correctly promote your products and services, we can implement rewards into your mystery shopping/inspection program. A small gift card or other prize goes a long way toward reinforcing positive behaviors already occurring and also sets a great example for other employees. In addition, this helps keep your message top of mind. Everybody wins when we catch employees doing something right.

Training and Coaching Opportunities

If, on the other hand, our field agents discover that compliance is less than expected, our reports are a valuable tool to immediately determine where to focus training efforts and correct the problem.

A Value-Added Partnership

The mystery shops/inspections we conduct for you will evaluate and promote the marketing of your products and services, but they can also greatly benefit your channel distributors in many additional ways. Retailers, restaurants, and many other types of businesses regularly use mystery shops to measure their company’s proficiency at providing memorable customer experiences and to focus on consistently exhibiting key behaviors that result in customer delight, customer loyalty, and improved sales and profitability.

Since we will be visiting your channel distributors to measure the promotion of your products and services, we can add other measurements that will provide huge value to your channel partners at very little to no cost. Offering to fund invaluable data for your channel partners is a tremendous incentive for them to continue and promote their partnership with you.

Actionable Data and Results

BestMark’s reporting system allows for a wide variety of custom reports and client-defined metrics and is accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We also provide dynamic charting and graphing tools to create on-the-fly, ad hoc reports. These powerful, interactive web-based programs allow you to create, update, and track compliance at all levels within the supply chain as needed for performance feedback and coaching.

GuestLink™ Customer Experience Intelligence Features

• Interactive Dashboards
• Performance Scorecards
• Dynamic Query Drill-Down
• Individual Customer Experience Reports
• Strengths & Opportunities Reports
• Key Performance Indicator (KPIs) Tracking
• High-Impact Standard Reports

For more information about the advantages of a BestMark mystery shopping program, visit our Mystery Shopping Services page.