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On the Edge: Don't Define Yourself by What's on Your Award Invoice
March 02, 2009
How long until incentive travel bashing expands to incorporate all incentive awards?
By Paul Hebert
The incentive industry is taking some hits, especially travel awards with high-end amenities and activities. But although incentive and meeting travel is the current lightning rod for most media and politicians today, it's a short walk from bashing incentive travel to bashing programs that have substantial merchandise or card awards. I would expect to see some of those programs being scrutinized and, in many cases, cancelled or scaled back in order to head off any negative fallout.
Editor's Note: For more on recent events regarding Congress' and the public's perception of incentives, read "Hotel CEOs and NBTA to Congress: Stop Bashing Travel."
Now, those of us in the industry know in our hearts that is a short-sighted response and our programs, and by extension our industry, doesn't deserve that treatment—but it is the reality.
We have a couple of choices given that reality. We can hunker down and weather the storm. We've done it before; some of us will do it again. The natural result will be some consolidation of the industry where smaller players will be bought or disappear, or a retrenchment of the larger providers, waiting for the next wave of incentive boon.
I suggest we can take a different approach and really look at what we do and redefine our value to businesses. The real survivors (and next wave top companies) will be companies that use this negative as a way to really define their value and look for new ways to leverage that value.
Looking Deeper by Asking Questions
The days of $10,000 per person travel events may be over (for a while—you know these things are cyclical) and many companies may scale back their traditional points-based programs to funnel more of that cash into their compensation system to shore up employee W-2 income—but there are a huge number of ways incentive companies can help if we just look at what we do differently.
Start by ignoring your invoices. A good friend once said "You sell what you invoice," and it has never been more true than in the incentive business. For years and years, we have defined ourselves by what we put on the invoice. All the internal discussion on what your company does and provides goes up in smoke when the invoice is cut and the client sees "travel," or "points," or "deposits." That is what they think you sell. And why not? That's what you get paid for.
Want to change that? Change the way you start the process and just maybe it will change the way you finish it.
The Five Why's
Toyota made famous the "Five Why's"—asking "why" five times to get to a root cause, or a more specific cause of a problem. I suggest we loosely apply the "Five Whys"—it could be the "Five How's" or simply the "Five Questions"—to incentive applications in order to help us find ways to leverage our history, our expertise and our capabilities in new and different ways. If you follow this exercise you can almost always find a root problem you can assist in solving.
As an example, your client may want to eliminate their annual employee meeting. You could say, "Thanks, since I do travel programs, call me when you want to run a travel program."
Or, you could follow this path…
"Why did you run the meeting originally?" (Usually transfer knowledge, increase morale, etc.)
"Do you still need to do those things?" (Usually yes.)
"If the need is still there how will you accomplish it without a meeting or a travel award?" (There are a lot of options available, but that's a another whole article.)
"Will people need to learn a new process in order to do that?" (Obviously, yes.)
"How will you educate and motivate that change in order to make your option successful?" (Now you're seeing it.)
In other words, if you define your business as a deliverable—travel, merchandise, debit cards, certificates—you look for those words in your client conversations. You listen for, "We need an award," or "I need to recognize" or "How do I motivate?" But by defining your business as a company that helps companies direct behavior through incentives, you hear different things. Now you listen for words like "change," "different process," "new products," "different channels," "different tools." These words give you the ability to walk through the Five Questions to get your client to the point where they realize they cannot do something different through sheer force of will. They need to influence the behavior of those participating in the change in order for it to be more successful.
I've seen many, many presentations and sales calls around incentives and awards. And too many times, the client will say, "I don't need an award program." And many times they are right. They don't need an award program; they need a change program or a training program. What they really want though is a successful change program, a successful training program, a successful product launch—none of which are possible without engaged people, and engaged people is exactly what we do.
Redefine What You Do and the Opportunities Start Popping Up All Over.
As an industry, we have talked about this at cocktail receptions and meetings. Yet, I still see so many of my cohorts fall victim to defining what they do by what is listed on their invoice, rather than what resulted from the program they sold and implemented.
Redefine what you do and you will be able to easily create new opportunities and new revenue even without the stalwart travel incentive program or the national sales meeting.
INCENTIVE online columnist Paul Hebert is currently the Managing Director at i2i, an influence consultancy, (www.i2i-align.com). Over the past 20-plus years, Paul has worked with many Fortune 100 clients to develop non-cash reward and recognition strategies within an overall audience engagement plan. Paul writes a monthly online column for Incentive on incentive industry trends, and he blogs about the incentive industry and how to best engage your target audiences at his own blog, Incentive Intelligence (http://incentive-intelligence.typepad.com).
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