CX Strategy

Five steps to build a successful B2B customer incentive program

By
Alex Atkins
November 17, 2022
5 min read

Few things are more critical to the success of a business than developing customer advocates. Every brand wants to make its customers happy. In SaaS, even minor improvements in customer experience lead to more significant gains in customer retention. Considerable increases in customer engagement significantly boost retention revenue. According to Guy Nirpaz at Totango, “70–95% of SaaS revenue comes from retention and expansion of existing customers.” You heard that right — yes, this surpasses net new revenue figures. The initial sale generates as little as 5% of SaaS revenue. As the SaaS economy has matured, we have finally realized that replacing churn with new acquisitions becomes increasingly tricky, especially at scale. It suffices to say that in the world of SaaS, keeping your customers has become the top priority. 


What are customer incentives? 


According to our friends at Paddle, “Customer incentives are rewards granted to customers for engaging in behavior that helps build the brand.” Think of customer incentives as bonuses or rewards given to customers for promoting the brands. For example, customers may receive additional credits if they promote your brand on social media. Or, maybe you’ll give them access to more advanced features. They can be revenue related, such as making a repeat purchase or upgrading an existing plan. They can also be action-oriented, like writing a testimonial, referring another customer, or participating in a webinar or a panel. 


B2B rewards and incentives are diverse, including product discounts, rebates, discounted or free products, features, early access to new functionality, charitable donations, and more. Compared to their B2C counterparts, B2B businesses tend to develop more personalized, long-term customer relationships. Therefore, it’s common for a B2B incentive program to be more personalized and designed explicitly for specific customer segments and cohorts. For example, a discount incentive can be offered to a company that allows the vendor to use its logo for marketing rights. Or, the vendor can provide early access to a new SKU for free or at a discounted price. 


B2B incentive programs are generally less transactional than B2C programs. Instead, B2B programs are focused on deepening existing relationships. Customers must view the program as somewhat personalized, and it needs to offer a clear benefit. 


Finally, one of the best incentives for engaged customers is simply communication. As with any relationship, communication is critical. Companies that regularly communicate with their customers show that they care about them and want to keep them up-to-date on the latest news and developments. This communication can take many forms, such as emails, newsletters, social media posts, or even phone calls. By staying in touch with their customers, companies can build strong relationships that will last for years. 


Now that you have a good pulse on brand-building B2B behaviors and how to incentive those behaviors, here are five steps you can take to build a successful customer incentive program, grow customer loyalty, and improve customer retention. 


5 Steps to build a successful program:


There is no shortage of ways to incentivize customers to build your brand and business. Be creative. The sky’s the limit as far as creativity is concerned. However, not all SaaS companies are alike; thus, creating a custom incentive program is essential for success. It’s not like the worst that can happen is you don’t have any takers. A poor incentive program can lead to far worse outcomes — even compliance and legal challenges if you aren’t careful. Follow the steps below to ensure your program hits all the right notes.


1. Listen to your customers


Understanding your customers and ideal customer profiles (ICPs) is the first step to creating a successful incentive program. To better understand your ICPs, you must listen deeply to what your customers say. The key here is to go beyond traditional tactics like NPS and CSAT surveys like NPS and CSAT. Nothing speaks louder than the unabridged, unbiased, unsolicited voice of your customer. The most competitive businesses analyze everyday customer conversations to distill thousands of data points a month and capture customer sentiment at scale. Taking that step can only be accomplished through a customer intelligence platform (CIP). 


2. Choose your goals


As we mentioned above, there is no shortage of brand-building behaviors. Is your program focused on generating more customer testimonials and case studies? Do you need more customer references? Or is the primary goal to increase expansion revenue? Different goals mean different programs. They also represent different audiences. You’re not going to ask a struggling customer who’s still onboarding to write a case study. Similarly, you’re not going to incentivize a customer who’s already planning on expanding their seat count to upgrade. 


3. Choose a test group


Testing your program on a smaller group minimizes risk. There are a couple of ways to choose your test group. Let’s say your program aims to generate 10 case studies for a new website landing page. Traditionally this has been a pretty manual task. First, you reach out to your customer success and account managers to ask which customers are “happy” or “most likely to write a testimonial?” Once you’ve chatted with a few colleagues, you can pull together your group. Alternatively, you can aggregate customers exuding positive sentiment in seconds with modern technology like a CIP. You will save yourself hours of work and have the underpinnings of a repeatable process and, ultimately, a healthier incentive program.

But what if your goal is to incentivize customers to upgrade? How do you know which customers are already planning on expanding their account versus those who are just ‘happy’? Positive sentiment doesn’t always infer expansion opportunity. Don’t spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars building a program to encourage those customers who are already about to expand. Spend that bandwidth and budget on happy customers who need an extra nudge. The issue for most is that they cannot tell the difference. Without a CIP, it’s nearly impossible to differentiate between those two test groups. With a CIP, however, you can define and segment those customers who are ‘happy’ from those that are ready for ‘expansion.’ 


4. Build a budget


Regardless of your program goal, it’s essential to map out a budget. This process can be relatively straightforward if your incentive and desired customer behavior are tied directly to revenue. For example, if I’m offering $10,000 of free products to generate $15,000 of repeat purchases, that’s $5,000 of net profit. Budgeting gets more complicated as the incentives and behaviors move away from simple transactions. Let’s say your incentive to generate 10 case studies is to provide early access to a new product offering. Determining the monetary value of a case study is difficult. Understanding what you want to charge for a new product offering is difficult without going through the proper motions. Still, getting everything down on paper and setting up a rough projection is critical. Ultimately, your budget should be a tool that determines whether or not what you’re giving away is less than what you’re getting in return. 


5. Analyze and iterate


Rarely does a customer incentive program knock it out of the park on the first go. There are often many moving parts, and it can be tricky to nail the incentives down on the first attempt. Depending on what brand behavior you’re seeking, these programs can take weeks, if not months, to conclude. Requesting 10 case studies is not going to be a quick turnaround. That said, it’s essential to track your program’s progress effectively. There is no shortage of project management tools to choose from these days. A CIP lets you quickly track leading indicators based on sentiment and insights. Regardless of how you’re monitoring success, keep an eye out for improvement opportunities.


Conclusion


Engaged customers are essential to the success of any B2B SaaS business. To properly engage with your customers, you must listen to your customers at scale. Only then can you offer them the right incentives at the right time to boost brand-building behaviors. Pair that with excellent customer service and regular communication, and you can build strong relationships that will last for years.  

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Joel Passen
April 1, 2025
5 min read

Sturdy's Customer Intelligence Platform performs real-time revenue threat root cause analysis, and delivers cross-functional insights to the teams and systems to mitigate churn.

Portland, OR — April 1, 2025 — Sturdy.ai, a pioneer in AI-powered customer intelligence, today announced it has raised $6M in Series Seed funding. Voyager Capital led this round, with participation from Fortson VC as well as existing investor, Grotech Ventures. The funds will be used to deepen Sturdy’s AI capabilities, expand integrations with customer data silos, and grow its go-to-market and engineering teams.

Modern Teams Need Actionable Intelligence to Protect and Grow Revenue

With customer expectations higher than ever and retention under pressure, the need for proactive, AI-driven revenue insights has never been more urgent. According to industry data, reducing churn by just 5% can increase profits by up to 95%. Enterprises have spent millions on building silos of applications to get closer to their customers and create active communication channels in the hope of mitigating churn risk early. Yet, this has failed to provide the proactive warning signals required. Sturdy closes the gap by seeing across these silos for a unified view of customer communication.

“We’re creating an AI-first intelligent interface for all things customer. This allows Sturdy to provide an almost magical understanding of every customer interaction across every data silo,” said Steve Hazelton, CEO and co-founder of Sturdy.ai. “This funding enables us to move faster to empower teams to stay ahead of risk and unlock new revenue opportunities.”

Investors Bet Big on AI-Powered Revenue Threat Detection

The funding round attracted a strong syndicate of investors aligned on Sturdy’s vision for a more innovative, AI-native approach to revenue intelligence. Voyager Capital, known for backing category-defining SaaS platforms, led the round, with General Partner Diane Fraiman joining Sturdy's board.

“Sturdy is tackling one of the most urgent and overlooked problems in enterprise software—how to extract proactive insights from the flood of daily customer interactions,” said Diane Fraiman, Managing Director of Voyager Capital. “Retention has become a critical topic in boardrooms. We believe that every business will have a system of intelligence in the next 3 years. Sturdy’s platform is positioned to become essential infrastructure for any company serious about protecting and growing revenues while truly putting their customers first.”

“Sturdy is one of the most powerful and immediate applications of AI and natural language processing we’ve seen,” said Thomas O’Keefe, CEO of Solo LLC. “At both Solo and previously at Syntrio, it has delivered instant value—surfacing proactive, actionable customer insights and driving measurable improvements in retention.”

About Voyager

Voyager Capital is a leading West Coast early-stage venture firm, providing entrepreneurs with the resources, experience, and connections to build successful companies for today’s modern economy. Voyager invests primarily in B2B technology companies, including AI-driven business solutions, software-driven hardware, sustainable agriculture, and supply chain. The firm's domain expertise, go-to-market, and team-building resources are proven to help build market leaders. Voyager Capital has over $550 million under management with offices and resources in Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, and Calgary. 

About Fortson VC

Fortson VC is a seed-stage venture firm based in the Pacific Northwest, built for exceptionally rare founders who are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.  Led by Cole Younger, Fortson brings over two decades of early-stage investing experience and a disciplined approach grounded in authenticity, grit, and courage.  While driven by curiosity, our primary focus is B2B software and the technological frontier around it—the infrastructure, intelligence, and automation shaping the future of how businesses create value.

About Grotech Ventures

Founded in 1984, Grotech Ventures is a leading early investor in high-potential technology companies. Grotech seeks innovative, early-stage investments across the technology landscape and continues to invest and add value throughout the life cycle of each portfolio company. The firm has a strong combination of financial backing, industry relationships, and deep domain and operational expertise to accelerate growth. With more than $1.0 billion in committed capital, Grotech supports early-stage companies through investments starting as small as $500,000. For more information, visit http://www.grotech.com.

About Sturdy

Founded in 2020, Sturdy is an AI-forward autonomous Customer Intelligence platform that proactively identifies churn risks across all customer-facing silos. Sturdy analyzes unstructured customer interactions—emails, calls, support tickets, chats, and more—discovering revenue threats, pinpointing root causes, and delivering cross-functional insights in real time. Sturdy has analyzed billions of customer interactions, giving it one of the largest proprietary datasets in the category and enabling its models to surface insights faster and more accurately than competitors. At a time when customer retention is a top priority for every business, Sturdy turns the noise of customer conversations into a strategic advantage.

For more information, visit www.sturdy.ai or reach out to Joel Passen at joel@sturdy.ai

Integrations

Product Update! Sturdy now integrates with Jira

Joel Passen
March 10, 2025
5 min read

We’re making it easier than ever to turn customer feedback into action while saving businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. With Sturdy’s new Jira Connect, any AI-powered Signal in Sturdy can be automatically logged in Jira—helping teams capture, prioritize, and resolve issues faster than ever.

Sturdy for Jira is a Game Changer

Every team needs to know more about their customers. 

Turn customer feedback into valuable Jira content automatically. Sturdy’s AI accurately detects feature requests, bug reports, and other critical product feedback. Customizable agents then deliver this context-rich intelligence to a configurable staging area in Jira with all relevant user and account details, such as segment, ARR, and more. The content is objectively summarized automatically. From there, assigning it to an epic, task, sprint, or release is just one click.

Productivity Gains that Move the Needle

Businesses are unknowingly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on something as simple as manually logging Jira issues. A single customer-facing rep wastes nearly 87 hours annually on repetitive data entry—scaling up to a staggering $354,200 per year for a team of 100 reps. By integrating Sturdy’s AI-driven automation, businesses can reclaim thousands of hours, improve productivity, and reinvest those savings into growth and innovation—all while ensuring more accurate, real-time data flows into Jira effortlessly.

Align product teams with customer reality.

By centralizing AI-powered insights in Jira, Sturdy ensures that product and engineering teams get a complete, objective picture of what’s working, what’s broken, and what needs to be built—without relying on anecdotal feedback. Customer-reported issues appear in Jira moments after they happen, ensuring your product and engineering teams stay ahead of emerging trends and critical bugs—without the lag of traditional reporting.

Effortless setup, immediate impact.

Sturdy’s turnkey integration takes minutes to configure. Once connected, your team gains instant access to context-rich, structured feedback—helping you make faster, data-driven decisions that improve customer satisfaction.

Want to get started? Click the 'Schedule Demo' button at the top of the page.

Integrations

Product Update! Sturdy Now Analyzes Customer Slack Channels

Joel Passen
March 3, 2025
5 min read

We’re making it easier than ever for teams to tap into the power of customer conversations. With this integration, Sturdy’s AI-driven insights—trained to spot key behaviors and trends unique to your business—are now right where your team works. That means more proactive decisions, better collaboration, and a serious productivity boost.

Here’s how Sturdy works with Slack.

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  • Stay on top of every conversation. If your team works asynchronously in Slack channels, it’s easy for important feedback to get lost. Sturdy keeps you ahead by surfacing critical insights before they slip through the cracks.

  • Act fast, not after the fact. Whether it’s a service risk, a feature request, or a potential upsell, Sturdy helps teams spot and respond to what matters—without disrupting their workflow.

Seamless sync with your tools. Sturdy doesn’t just stop at Slack. Insights discovered in customer Slack channels automatically flow into Jira, CSPs, CRMs, and other systems, ensuring the right teams get the right info—without extra work.

How many customers will you have to lose before you try Sturdy?

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