Today Whitby, ON-based 360 Incentives, an on-demand incentives management services provider for manufacturers, announced that it has closed a $7.65 million funding round led by OMERS Ventures with participation from Klass Capital and Round 13 Capital. The company will use the funding to add to its marketing and sales teams and continue building out its channel engagement and incentives management platform. Since publicly launching in 2010, the company has built up a client base that includes 75 global brands including Samsung, LG, and GE.
Founder and CEO Jason Atkins spoke with BetaKit about how 360 Incentives is looking to use its platform to disrupt an industry with a multitude of fragmented vendors. “It’s really a SaaS-based platform for large-manufacturers to execute all of their promotions and engage all of their channels,” said Atkins. “Typically companies use hybrid solutions…they have all these different vendors that are out there. We bring them on a single platform. So it’s one point to connect with their channels.”
With channel promotions increasingly becoming more important for manufacturers to stay ahead of the curve, 360 Incentives’ platform, which is available on iPhone, iPad, and as a web app, enables them to engage and keep tight reins on their activity to help improve relationships with stakeholders. It offers almost 10 different modules, including sales incentive programs (SPIFFs), customer rebates, and loyalty rewards to name a few, and allows manufacturers to actively manage and pay out claims via direct deposit, reloadable or prepaid credit cards, direct deposit and other methods all on a single dashboard. Companies can also export data to CRM platforms like Salesforce, SAP and Oracle.
Examples of how companies would use 360 Incentives include helping a sales rep to claim a commission, or a customer submitting a rebate, helping manufacturers can oversee the entire process. To get set up they can choose the individual modules that best meet their channel needs with a $2,500 set up cost per module and $1,000 for each additional module, $1.25 per each transaction, and $50 per each internal user per month. The full suite costs them $5,000.
The platform is the channel marketing counterpart to B2B sales companies looking to leverage technology for everything ranging from making introductions with IntroHive, gamifying sales incentives with LevelEleven, and leveraging advocates to open doors with platforms like Influitive. According to Atkins, the channel marketing space is currently primarily served by several different fulfillment companies, however 360 Incentives looks to bring the industry to speed via its platform. “There’s a lot of marketing companies or fulfillment companies. It’s an industry that hundreds of years old…we’ve really looked at it and said ‘how do we bring technology to it?’” Atkins added.
Despite having several global brands using the platform, Atkins said the company’s focus for 2013 will be on marketing and sales to get the 360 Incentives name out there. In addition, the company will continue to add to the number of modules that manufacturers will be able to access. It also has its eyes set on international expansion, with mostly North American clients but plans to open its platform up to Europe. With the funding secured, it will now have the necessary resources to execute on its growth plans and digitize a process that previously required a great deal of paperwork and processing.