How to Add Value to Your Sales Incentive Trip

Are you designing an incentive travel award this year because “we do it every year”? If you didn’t do one, would your sales people be disgruntled? Maybe your leadership team would be too?

Incentive trips can sometimes seem like a commodity: the only thing that changes is the destination. In order to make sure your incentive trip is more than just a different stamp on a passport, you may have to go back to the beginning…

Are you rewarding the right people?

Usually there is a fixed number of spots budgeted for the trip – in this example, let’s say there are 10. How do you determine which people will go? The program structure is incredibly important. It should:

• Reward people who made the biggest impact on your organisation
• Take into consideration impact on sales goals, performance improvement and behaviours
• Be transparently measurable with progress updated frequently

The point of the incentive is to get people to reach and over-achieve their targets. If the program is designed to reward the same people year after year, only that segment of your sales force will give any attention to the incentive. Are those people truly making a big enough impact for you to show an ROI on the program spend? If you don’t know, it’s time to measure. And if they aren’t, it may be that you’re running a loyalty program rather than an incentive program.

Are you using the right metrics?

The best incentive structures will give everyone an equal opportunity to achieve, taking into consideration:

• Experience (new hires and tenured professionals)
• Product mix (does everyone have access to sell the same widgets)
• Customer segment (selling in low-population versus highly populated geographies)
• Market segment (number of high-volume versus low-volume accounts)

Sometimes people don’t feel they have a good chance at earning and look for ways to justify not being engaged in the program. By anticipating their objections and normalising the metrics, you can increase their motivation and keep them engaged over a longer period of time.

Are you rewarding the right behaviours?

It seems obvious that sales people should be rewarded for meeting their sales targets. While that is vital, it’s also important to look at how they’re representing your brand. Are they meeting sales targets at the expense of internal relationships? Do they form solid customer relationships? Do they follow processes or instead create a lot of work for their support teams? Do they demonstrate your values? Are they just in it for the money?

These kinds of sales people may have their place in your organisation, but should they be rewarded as the crème de la crème? By earning a spot on the incentive trip, others are getting the signal that these kinds of behaviours are acceptable – perhaps even role-modelling them to try and achieve the same accolades. Instead, consider a behaviour-based component as a qualifier to earn the trip.

Are you using the right reward?

Promoting the destination can be fun: the sights, sounds, tastes, activities… you’re creating emotional engagement by helping participants envisage an event that they can’t wait to experience. Or so you think. Not only do you need a venue that is new and exciting, but you also need to take into consideration the diversity of your demographics. Every year, more women, minorities and disabled professionals enter the workplace. Heightened awareness of various religions, sexual identities and social stratifications are brought to the forefront, and for the first time in history, four different generations are in the workplace at the same time.

While there may have been a time when everyone was happy with a sand-and-surf destination, or a golf-and-spa resort, there are many more lifestyles to take into account. To make the incentive trip truly motivating (as well as memorable and enjoyable), create an experience that allows for choice, and use an agency that is well-versed in catering to different preferences. If your achievers opt out of going on the trip, you’ve wasted a lot of money and resources.

Are you having the right conversations?

If you’re a person who needs to justify a program like this to executive directors, financial officers or purchasing, you might commonly hear the phrase “pay for performance”. An incentive trip can certainly provide the motivation the sales team needs to perform. However, the true ROI comes back to the program design: having the right people recognised for the right achievement with the right reward.

It can be difficult to have a conversation about changing metrics with those who control the data, and even more difficult to talk about changing recognition philosophy with those who are comfortable travelling with the same achievers each year. The alternative could be that the program budget is cut – leading to an uninspiring award, or that the program itself is cut – leaving a big hole where your recognition program used to be which can send the wrong signals to the sales team.

There are many pay for performance designs that demonstrate ROI while still motivating your regular top achievers. In fact, these designs often have the benefit of motivating an even greater percent of the team because they don’t feel they’re fighting a losing battle with the perennial winners for a spot on the trip.

Take your incentive trip to the next level by proving its impact on your organisation!