Everyone's and Incentive Expert!!

Over a year ago I made a proposal to a prospect for an incentive program for his customers. After a few meetings of back and forth debate on some key program issues, the customer decided to do the program himself to save money. Such is life in this business, you don’t win them all, and lucky sometimes to win even 25% of them. At the time I didn’t get the business, I mentioned to him that he could have problems with some of the issues that we had debated. I said that his objectives were out of line, his reporting and feedback mechanisms wouldn’t provide the type of meaningful analysis that the customers or his company would need, and that the type of awards and amount of payout would not tend to motivate the participants.

This week I contacted the prospect about how his program did. He mentioned that it was a complete bomb, no objectives were achieved, they had a very difficult time measuring and reporting on the data, and he had lots of complaints about the awards used. Problem was that even though it woefully underperformed, he still spent a great deal of his budget.

I’m not relating this because I’m any super guru on implementing incentive systems, far from it. But I do know some of the basic elements that help to make them successful. No wonder as I mentioned in one of my initial posts over a year ago that only about 1/3 of all incentive programs actually produce results. For a list of some of the reasons why, please click here.

Be well, Be happy, Hug someone!