Avoid these mistakes in your Sales Contests | HK Academy

The full scope of what's needed in my psychological income from working for you, plus my physical income, what I need to survive, that's the whole package. And I believe sales leadership needs to be purposeful about that.

Well, wait, I was the trusted advisor.

Sure. And the only thing I'd like our viewers to know is you're talking to two sales guys here. We grew up in the world of sales, got into sales management, got into marketing and all that. So we're not pontificating from third base here.

That's a good point. And I think that alludes back to the why, which is that sales managers need to be leaders. Sales managers need to set the culture. They need to set the tone. They need to set the expectations. And the old saying goes, everything revolves around sales. So depending what's going on at the company at any time of year, I'm sure you've all heard of a SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Most sales leaders are sitting down, they're planning. They're saying, how do we advance the ball? What do we have to look out for? What is our competition doing? I mean, you folks know all that stuff.

But the thing that, when John and I first started working together, a lot of this, too, was that sales leaders need to be sensitive to the psyche of their sales team. And we all know it's not about the almighty dollar. It's how someone feels about their job, their employer, their personal growth, if they're advancing. It's how do I feel about working here? Which leads to motivation, which leads to advancement, all those kinds of things. So that's part of the strategy: what are you doing to further engage your sales team other than the almighty paycheck?

Could be considered a bribe if you're working in a channel. And we'll get into this a little later, but cash still has its place, obviously. We pay the bills, get our kids through school, all those kinds of things. But back to what I said earlier, let's just take working with a direct sales team, for example. A lot of that is back to the psyche of the salesperson, what makes them tick.

Let's give a sports analogy. Athletes make a ton of dough, but they still have the Super Bowl ring. They still have the Masters jacket for winning the Masters. All these things are items and memories that are built and instilled from creating some great achievement. Which, we know in today's world with a paycheck, we don't carry cash with us anymore. It goes to direct deposit. And two weeks later, you say, where did that money go? If it wasn't a SPIFF, it probably went to pay bills. So that's not really helping my psyche too much. That's what I expect to do from working for my employer. I expect to get paid.

The recognition part of the sales contest is where the driver comes in, where the motivation comes in. So that's one reason, again, back to the sales leadership setting the expectations. I usually say giving the sales team the arena to perform, just like a sports guy. I need to be out there. I need to be on the field. I don't get that sitting in the locker room. So if you put me in an environment where I feel like I've got an end goal, I am maybe competing with my other friendly salespeople, or in a channel, another channel partner, that kind of thing. When I start to see myself and maybe there's a leaderboard or there's some measurement or scoring, that adds to the motivation as well. Again, you don't get that with a paycheck.

Well, competition could be direct sales force. If you're, let's say, with a pharmaceutical company or some other employer, it's what is the competition doing, either in their channel or with their sales team. And let's divert to a channel. Many times in channel, depending on the product, the product might somewhat be a commodity, and what separates the pack? We also know the old cliche, relationship building is everything in sales. I've been involved with sales contests, if you will, sales incentive programs, where the key ingredient is really, hey, we want to get out there with our customers, our channels, sales partners, dealers, distributors, whatever. We want to get to know these guys, gals, whatever, play a round of golf, have a dinner with them, have a dinner with their spouse. That's the glue that brings it together and takes the commodity and uncommoditizes it, if that's even a word.

So after you're at an event, or even if it's not an event, you climb the ladder and they get to a special notch. Perhaps sales management calls that person and says, hey, John, we just saw the results for this month. Great job. Dynamite. You actually exceeded your sales by 18% from last month. Well, that tells that partner, that sales guy, hey, they're looking. They care about me. They were kind enough to pick up the phone and call me. I work with this other entity. I hear from them once a year, and it's usually because of a collection that's due or something. So a lot of this is back to people, and that drives your emotions. And that's sometimes what keeps, especially a channel partner, from going to a competitor.

I've also seen in direct sales where some people make a lot of money, and they're trying to be courted by the competition. And then when they get in there, if they're asking the right questions on their interview, they might sense that that culture isn't anything like the culture where they're at now. Is it really worth it to take the risk to jump ship from something that you like and you enjoy and you feel you're growing and you're being recognized and you're advancing, versus go over here for just a few more dollars and then that world doesn't even exist there? So it's also a package-type approach that keeps your current salespeople on board. And we all know if you lose your top producer, that's tough recovery time. It could be years.

I mean, if I'm a sales leader and I consider myself a coach, a mentor, a leader, again using a sports analogy, that coach wants to make sure that they have a direct connection to each player. Because every player is different. There's variables. And if that connectivity is there through these other emotional touches, sales incentive programs or whatever, then the full scope of what's needed in my psychological income from working for you, plus my physical income, what I need to survive, that's the whole package. And I believe sales leadership needs to be purposeful about that, because it's such an important ingredient.

To be honest with you, if I'm a sales manager, I don't want to lose my top guy or any of my people. Or the other people, let's not forget in this conversation, are the support people. Sales is, in some instances, a standalone. You're out there by yourself. In a lot of B2B sales, it's a team effort. So you've got your sales leader, your account manager, your customer service team. We've seen that all those people need to be involved in this process. Although we call it a sales contest, there's a lot of people that contribute to the sales effort and win business. So we can't forget them in these endeavors as well.

I think we addressed that. You need to get on the playing field.

Again, any manager, not only sales, I think one of the core criteria of being a manager is you need to be the inspiration to the team. That's part of your job description. If salespeople, employees wander, and you don't come up with things to inspire them, encourage them, that all adds to the glue and the culture of why people stick.

Well, you hit the nail on the head. I think both of us with past employers, maybe it was our lack of asking the right questions on the interview, but you show up and say, I can't believe they don't have this. Why is this not here? Where is this memorialized? Or I'm starting at ground zero. I thought I'd be at third base by now. Often when you design the sales contest, sales incentive program, and we'll get into that in a moment, if there's a need and there's a gap that sales management sees, you know, we're just terrible at this stuff, talk about collaboration from your team to get that process down. Because process is fundamental. It's blocking and tackling. It might be boring.

But that's where, within the confines of a program, in a holistic mode, you can get everybody involved. There could be an account manager, a customer service person, whoever, an assistant that says, well, what if we were to do this or add this to our process? Would that make this outcome better? That would be great. And bingo, yes, it would. And bingo, sales manager should recognize Karen or whoever for doing that. Thank you so much. Didn't think of that. You're on the front line. I'm not. We're going to now put that step into our process.

I use the word purposeful, be in the moment. And we don't want to dwell on this, but you didn't see this last night. The night before, we had a practice and we were trying to tell these kids, hey, in flag football, it's tough, you've got to grab that flag. We were showing this one young guy how to box out the other guy on the sideline to make them turn in. Because some of those kids get to the sideline, they're down, they're fast. And last night we were so happy, it actually happened. He ran and he stopped and made the runner go in. The other guy pulled the flag right away.

Then when we had a timeout, I went out to him, I said, Jake, you made that play. And he's going, what do you mean I made a play? He made the tackle. I said, no, he made the tackle, but you made the play because you turned the guy inside. That was purposeful. That was thoughtful. He didn't realize his contribution to the play. He made an assist. He had learned that skill the night before. Maybe a little bit was intuitive, a little bit was skill. But I was purposeful on recognizing him right then and there. And I know his parents saw me out there talking to him, going like this. I go, wow, look, he must have done something great. So it had a residual effect.

I only bring that up because as sales leaders, and we know in this land of hybrid work, you're not always close by your sales team. But that doesn't mean if you are made privy to something, you can't still send an email, you can still pick up the phone in this day and age. And those little touches along the way add to the big picture.

Well, and when we talk to clients, too, it's a balance. If you recognize, recognize, recognize, that's great. But after a while, the person may say, yeah, but where's the dough? Where's the trip? Or, thanks for the pats on the back, but is that all there is? Again, being purposeful, striking a balance. And the great part about sales contests and sales programs is they help you strike that balance. Because they're set in, it's a discipline to sales management. That's now a rail they have to run on. So it helps keep sales management accountable too, rather than kind of working on the fly.

There's going to be some cycle of measurements going on, like weekly, monthly, or whatever, that are going to ding the sales manager to say, oh yeah, it's the end of the month, we're going to get the standing reports, and everybody who's X percent above their goal gets X more points towards the end goal of the trip or something. So that's the nice part about it. You don't get that with the cash-only program.

I think we kind of got that across in the part about rewards and recognition. There's a physicality to it. If I'm in a sales incentive program and I win a 50-inch flat screen TV, or I get a new grill, or a new set of golf clubs, or the play stuff, the backyard pool for the kids, that does more than the paycheck because there's a physicality. Like, the box arrives at the house and the kids say, what's in that? And I'm like, well, Dad won that in the sales contest. He's going to set it up for you on Saturday. You don't get that with a paycheck.

Well, not to digress, but what actually got me into the business as I moved along, I started out in college doing door-to-door sales. I think the second month I was on this job, I was salesman of the month, and I got a little token, like a trophy cup kind of thing. So that was a pat on the back, job well done. That job was a stepping stone to my next position, because my employer said, well, you can knock on doors, you can do this job too. It was more industrial B2B sales. And I think the third year on the job, I came in as one of the top 10 salespeople in the country, over 200. I got a letter from the president of the company, that's a parent pharmaceutical company, and Omaha Steaks in the mail. Again, it's like, the steaks arrive, we open them up, the kids are going, what's that? Back to your dad's story.

And later maybe we'll cover how I got to experience as a sales guy the President's Club type of trip and getting to go to an island and all that when you're a young guy. That's a whole other story. The physicality, it's tangible evidence of a job well done.

Many of you are involved in a channel, and brand connection and brand loyalty, it doesn't matter if you are with a direct team, channel, and sales or whatever. That brand, the culture of the brand. And if I'm an employee or a 1099 guy, my loyalty to the brand. Again, these connecting points of a sales incentive program, other than the paycheck, are little shots that keep the glue there. And again, back to I'm in the channel, you call me because I had a great month. I go, hey, it was nice of John to pick up the phone and call me. Who does that in this day and age? Or we have a little quarterly program where we're all going to go golfing for one afternoon. If the top five guys in the region hit a certain goal, we all go out someday and play golf or pickleball or whatever. That keeps me in tune with you and keeps me loyal to the company.

To brand loyalty. I like hanging out with these guys. My other supplier doesn't do that. I get my check the end of the month for my commission and that's it. So that's an excellent point about the recognition, the contest, the program. Again, rails you run on, glue that has everybody come together, variable benefits that shoot off that main rail that aren't really the intention or the main objective of the program, but it's a nice byproduct of the program.

Usually in most companies, the comp plan is set for probably a year. I mean, if you're a channel that's straight commission or whatever. But companies, to pat them on the back, usually go through a lot of work to develop a comp plan. Maybe it's in-house, third party, or whatever. So that's, for most, cast in stone, unless there's a change in the marketplace that they need to shift their comp plan. And we all know that to try to go in and get the comp plan changed, there could be legal issues behind it. It makes people's heads hurt. Now, if it's a bad comp plan, it should be pain. But let's just say, hypothetically, the comp plan is a solid B.

However, when you get into sales incentives, sales contests, there's more of an on-the-spot. I need this now. I need to put some energy behind this certain thing. We are getting whacked out here in the marketplace, I need to stop that somehow. So I need to get something on display at these dealers, or I need to do this. And I'm willing to run a contest behind that, or if it's a points-type program. So there's more of a currency, a fluidity, that sales leadership can dip into. They're not going to break the bank, and they don't have to go get the mothership to change the whole comp plan. It just allows sales leadership more ways to put an emphasis on what needs to get done and create the urgency to get it done. And the comp plans sometimes don't do that.

I think we touched on that a little bit. On the team atmosphere, when you really look at your participant base in any incentive program, you should be as inclusive as you can, because our human nature is, and I've seen this fault occur, where some clients think, well, we want to use this to incent our dealers. Well, what about the regional manager that calls on the dealer? Well, he's making enough money, we're not going to do that. And my first thing is, time out. Because what's going to happen there nine out of 10 times, the program's announced, the regional sales manager is sitting on the side saying, what am I, chopped liver? You can't even include me in this thing. And right then and there, there's maybe a little dissension, a little resentment. And you think they're going to go out and be the cheerleader you want them to be for the program? Probably not. So that's, to me, an unintended consequence of not being inclusionary.

Same thing is anyone wrapped around the sales effort, the sales team, they all make a contribution. Everybody's important. Include as many people as you can. And back to the family, I think we hit on that a little bit, either the onset or the deliverable could be, hey, did you guys know that Mom's in this program with ABC Company, and if she wins it, we're all getting tickets to Disney? It's not inexpensive to get a family to Disney in this day and age, here in California, that is. So that's like, wow, really? And maybe 90 days later, Mom's won the prize or whatever, and the family's going to Disney because Mom won her little incentive contest.

Well, there's a couple of terms. I mean, if you went back in my career, coming up through the ranks as a sales guy to sales management, if you would ask me 20 years ago, what's behavioral science, behavioral economics, neuroscience, I'd be going, nah, I didn't really study that much. It wasn't my hot spot in high school. But then I learned, again, back to what I said earlier in the conversation, I would encourage any leader to read up more or learn more about behavioral sciences, behavioral economics, if you will, because it's the psychology of how we act, how we think, and to be sensitive to that.

And actually in our programs that we design, we all know, and these terms you probably know, motivation comes in two forms, extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation. And to be candid, I would say most contests have an outcome of do this, get that. That's extrinsic. But there are things that I as a human being might find more intrinsic to me, things I like to do, and if I'm encouraged to do them, I might even put the pedal to the metal and do them more. So for instance, I think guys like you and I, we're curious. We always like to uncover new things. Or maybe it's just in our DNA to help somebody or mentor somebody. Now that's more intrinsic. That's how I operate.

Now, that being applicable to me, if sales management understands that about me, they can accelerate that effort, recognize that effort, by putting points or something against that effort in a sales contest. So for anyone here, we have this new thing going on, and if you'd like to mentor a salesperson or a dealer, we would surely appreciate that. And just as a token of appreciation for doing that, we're going to give you X points a month for doing that. And a big thank you as well. So that's not too much of do this, get that, win the trip. That's like, use your talents, your skills, what's in your DNA, so we can take your talent and apply it to the right application, so to speak, and get us to go further.

We're both Chicago people from way back when. If you're sports folks, Chicago's had some terrible teams and some great teams. But we remember back in the day of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen and all that. You were stealing money to go to the United Center to see these guys. And then all of a sudden there was a little disruption where Scottie Pippen, who was famous and nationally known, was feeling that he wasn't getting his due versus Michael Jordan. He was making a lot of money and they renewed his contract, and he threatened to quit. And they said, why would you? We're on our third run for the title. You're playing with Michael Jordan, all these guys. He goes, I just don't feel respected. I don't feel like they recognize my contribution to the team. Here's this guy making millions of dollars, but he was totally ticked and ready to jump ship because he just didn't feel valued, recognized, and respected.

Now, shame on the Bulls' management for that. We don't want to get on a rabbit trail, but you see, again, that's back to behavioral sciences, all this. Then you get a leader like Phil Jackson, who came in, and Phil was a head guy. He worked one-on-one with everybody. He had a different approach, and he was more like, if I can get in the head of the player and get them going and motivate them, they'll take care of the rest. I don't want that player going out there with any baggage on them. Back to inspiration, back to leadership, and let the talent take its course.

Well, let's start with the why now. Leadership needs to always be thinking ahead of the curve. Leadership needs to be thinking top down, bottom up. Sometimes leadership isn't in the trenches, so they need the people in the trenches to say, look out, we're starting to not do well over here, or we're losing customers because of XYZ. Or, on my last sales call, the buyer mentioned DEF and I've never heard of them before. I didn't even know they were in our backyard now.

At least in my past, I would actually have a monthly format in a process that had 10 points of criteria every month you had to cover. And one was, literally, tell me where we could get hammered. That was the title of it. And it was amazing the outlet that gave the salespeople to come back. They went a little around in different areas, but it was healthy, because they would come back and, back to my point, say this person used to be known for this in the business but they're now branching off and they're getting to our segment. That's number one. Number two, where we can get hammered is our deliverables are not where they need to be. We need to get better at that. There's a gap there. So there's a lot of information coming from the bottom up.

And with a sales contest, a sales incentive program, those are things the sales leadership has, not only their common sense to fix it, but again, to reinforce it, get it out there, maybe give a reward for it. The main reason I've seen sales leadership use these programs, it creates churn. It gets an urgency to something. Hey, I get the paycheck. I get quarterly bonuses. I get a year-end bonus. A lot of programs in the sales world are based on base plus a year-end bonus. A year is a long time. And where's my giddy-up in between? If I'm comfortable and I say, well, I'm making a base and we're comfortable and maybe I'll get a bump at the end of the year and maybe I won't, and everything's just flatline, nothing's going to happen with the salesperson. However, if that can be changed up, even though the comp plan is the same way, if I can get in there every month, every quarter, and add a little fuel injector to it, and put people in the area of competition and reward them for that bottom-up information, that again all rides on the rails of a sales program.

The staples that I always recommend people put into their sales programs, in simple man's language, are suggestion submissions. Sometimes people just need that little extra whatever to get off their duff and think a little bit harder, think smarter. And now I might have a reason to do it, because the more suggestions I give, I'll feel more valued, or I'm getting brownie points to go towards the big trip or things like that.

And as we all know, there's a different set of dynamics when you're working with a direct sales team that you maybe have more control over. You can meet with them on a more regular basis, those kinds of things, versus an indirect team. Sometimes on these indirect or channel sales, I may know John, the principal owner of this contracting business, but John might have five foremen that I don't even know. This way, through the mechanism of a sales incentive program, I can be more inclusionary and say to John, hey, in this program we'd like to get your four guys involved. We don't even know who they are. Let's get them registered, enrolled. And now you've got more feet on the street in an exponential manner. And then those guys down there, because they may be, back to your point, working with other competitors, they can start telling the parent where you're great, where you have a gap, wherever.

And again, if you've never run a sales program, I think a lot of sales leadership just thinks, okay, [inaudible], then again, why do I need to run a sales incentive program when these guys, if they hit quota, above quota, are making a boatload of money? All right, fair enough. But look at everything we've just been talking about for the last so many minutes. There are so many other tangents of a sales incentive program that actually engage people to think harder, that can become part of marketing and sales and operations. And those are the three things that make every business work. So that's the point about engaging others and getting information from people from the bottom up.

Well, maybe there's a point too. We use the word sales contest, I think, because that's the common man's language. If I go back to my learning curve, I used to think of contest. But we all know contest, the pure definition of it, is there's a winner and there's losers. Unless

Unless everyone gets a trophy mentality. So we switch over on my side of the track to say sales incentive programs. It's much more, what I'd say, comprehensive.

Then when you get back into sales comp versus sales incentives, it's striking the balance of the right mix of each. And there's some folks that I've been around that think cash is king. Why would we want to do that? And I think that's just the gap in their knowledge, based on what they don't know that they don't know. Look at what we just talked about with behavioral sciences, behavioral economics, those kinds of things. If you had a scale or a teeter-totter, I always encourage sales management to think of it like an 80-20 blend, or 90-10. It should be heavily based on your compensation, no doubt about it. And let's not change that, let's not mess with it, as we said earlier. But that extra little 10 that may be at the discretion of sales management, that's like the cliche icing on the cake, cherry on top, or whatever. And that's where I get this psychological fuel from working with the company. It doesn't need to be an exact balance, but I see that cash is over here and maybe the incentives are a little lower. But that 20%, if you don't have it, can have a big gap and a big effect on what you're not going to get from your sales team.

Well, we'll cover too, in a little bit, that when sales leadership is convinced that they want to give this a try, it's extra work. I mean, I'm a sales leader. The comp plan's in effect. I go out there, I hold people accountable. That's my job. End of story. I start getting into this endeavor of building out a sales incentive program, there's going to be some thinking through. There's going to be some economics behind it. There's going to be investment behind it. A lot of things we'll cover in a little bit. It's a little bit of extra work. And especially if you don't know the steps, which we'll cover, of how to do it, it can make your head hurt.

So I think that's the reason why some organizations have not really gotten into running sales incentive programs, either lack of knowledge or the giddy-up's just not there, you know, what's in it for me or whatever. But I think the organization is shortchanging themselves by not thinking of this and addressing that 20%. We said you need to address what's in the headset too.

So it's not just hearsay. The IRF is the Incentive Research Foundation, and that's a third-party entity that studies programs, their outcomes, and the behaviors within programs. Like any research facility, that's what they do. They take a sampling and then they give back reports. The nice part about the IRF for any sales leader is it's third-party information. So if I'm a sales leader and I know I'm going to be trying to pitch this to upper management, but upper management may have the same bias, well, we pay these guys a ton, why would we want to run a sales incentive program? This information that's non-biased can come to the meeting and say, but here's what the research says. And we all know that opinions are opinions and data is data, research is research. It's hard to argue with the research. So that at least gives sales management a shot at moving this program over the end line and getting it endorsed.

So the Incentive Research Foundation, I think it's IRF.org. They've got a ton of stuff on there. They're tied in with Northwestern, I think, right?

Yogiisms. No, I can't take credit for that. Again, back to our human psyche. When we have money in the bank, our headsets and our logic is, I've got to live, support my family, pay the bills, college, orthodontist, whatever it might be, and that's where my psyche goes. However, if I'm in an incentive program and I have to redeem my points for a new set of golf clubs, that's the only thing I can do. So it justifies me using that currency, that particular way to get that. It kind of reduces any guilt that if I were to go into my own little pocket of money and go out and spend $900 for the golf clubs, which may create some consternation on the home front, it's like, do I really want to do that? But over here, hey, it's on behalf of the company.

It frees me. We know in some of these sales incentive programs that involve some really nice trips, you're talking in the thousands of dollars that the value of that trip may be. And again, if I'm going to take $10,000 out of my bank account to send the family to Hawaii for seven nights, eight days or whatever, a family of four, it's not inexpensive these days. However, if I can do that on behalf of my company by redeeming my points or winning that trip, and a lot of the trips are designed right, back to the spouse, back to the inclusionary, back to the partner, whatever. Now that whole entity can go, either pre, post, or during, because the main component, the person earned it. And let's go before and spend some time, or let's stay later, but the airfare and everything is paid, part of the incentive program.

You were included. I know you say it wasn't a sales incentive program in the true sense, but I would argue it was an incentive program. What was occurring was nothing, and through this program, something occurred, and it encouraged them and inspired them to get the darn signage right. Now, I would also argue that if the processes are right, and the signage is right, and there's more apparent views to the person walking down the hallway saying, oh, that entity does this type of training, they may stop in, they may be intrigued, that eventually leads to a sale. So there's these steps to the sale that can be recognized and rewarded in these programs. And then back to the outcome of that program, it's everything we've been talking about before. If we're just back to the paycheck, same old, same old, the sponsoring entity does not get the luxury of bringing all that inclusionary and new ideas to the table.

And again, in the delivery of that, I did not go on the trip, but I think the spouses went. So they get to know each other and that kind of stuff and all that glue. And maybe the owners are meeting one day and the spouses do something else, or there's a group dine-around you do. All those dynamics add up to, again, back to what we said earlier, the brand, the culture, the likability, who I'm hanging out with, who I'm learning from. More than just a paycheck, that might have kept them more in with your organization and computer learning and training than the ABC competitor you had. And, you know, I hear you still talk about that trip. That was like a decade, two decades ago.

Probably goes without saying again, when you look at the typical DNA of a salesperson. People in sales, they're more extroverts than introverts. They're more social-type people. Doesn't mean that introverts don't have their place in sales, they do. I'm just saying that there are certain attributes that usually align, even in assessments, to salespeople. Do they have the hunger, desire, grit? Can they take rejection? Do they have good people skills and social skills? And I think we're like this. We're social beings. You take the two of us guys out and we have to be careful about how much jabbering we can do, exactly as you're telling right now. But we thrive in being in a social environment.

And therefore, if I am a salesperson or dealer and I feel like I'm just in a cave by myself all the time, I don't feel I'm growing. I'm not learning. It seems like the company sends me my bonus once a year and that's about the only time I hear from them. After a while, I'm going to say, is this the place where I should be hanging out? So all these things come into the big picture.

And then again, it's been documented through research studies, since hybrid work is now more commonplace, that the younger generations are working from home and they don't have the social outlet of going into the office and talking about the football game on Monday, from the weekend results, and all those good things. So the more these programs bring people together, it could be even Zoom.

And the thing that I really like, and I'm passionate about the business, is when I'm running an incentive program or an engagement program, whatever you like to call it, for an employee base or a sales team, now I've got to be purposeful. It keeps me accountable. The rails are set. There's going to be benchmarks and time, a calendar put against this. I am now responsible for further leading and inspiring, and it keeps me on track. Even if it's a Zoom meeting once a quarter to talk about something, or we're all going to come into the home office or whatever every six months. Again, back to culture, back to ebbing and flowing, back to the right balance. It's the cliche in the business, it's the total reward system. It's not just cash, it's not just incentives, it's the right blend of everything to make me grow and learn as a person and feel good as to who I'm working with.

Well, we're all consumers. And I think it's safe to say most of us are on some type of point system right now through a hotelier, an airline. We get air miles, or we get Hilton Hotel points or whatever. So it's not strange to us to be earning points as a consumer. And that helps keep us loyal. We might book this Hampton versus something else because I'm on the Hampton Inns program or something like that. What's happened in the incentive environment is, again, points tend to be an easy metric to accumulate, assimilate, and work with. Then points go against certain indicators that are achieved. They have to all be pre-thought. And again, points become a currency, a value that I can use as the sales leader versus the dollar.

Now, we can make the points worth whatever you want them to be worth. But now, again, back to my human psyche, I know a dollar is worth a dollar. I may not know what 100 or 1,000 points are worth over here, other than if I get 10,000 points, I know I can get a grill. I might think, okay, let's just say it's a very casual Weber grill that you can buy for 90, maybe it's $100 or whatever. I might have a perceived value, but I may not support it. No different than I ask this often to people. So are you in a hotel department? Yes, I am. So why do you think the hotel is at X number of points, you get a free room night or you get water when you check in? They go, why don't they just give you that in cash? And they go, yeah, good point. I said, because you'll have an idea of the value of that. If the points are structured correctly, and let's say if you book three nights, you'll have enough points to get one free night. It takes the economics out of the equation, and it puts it back to this other currency. You might have an idea, but not spot on. But it starts thinking in chunks of points. To do something three times to get my free hotel night. Human beings.

And it's actually been proven, the IRF has shown, that if you structure programs correctly, and let's get back to the salesperson, because they are most cash motivated and nothing wrong with that. My measurement is dollars. That's my standard measurement. Now you give me points and I can't quite figure it out, but I know I have to do these three chunks of these two steps to get there. I can actually spend less in points than the dollar. I could spend 80 cents on the dollar and still get what I want from you at the end of the program. Now I've saved 20%. And that 20% in the financial saving can help offset the award cost of the program. So CFOs, I think, need to understand this as well.

If I can go to the CFO, which I've done in the past, and I've said, hey, you know, John, I'm not going to make it dollar for dollar in this program. I think of a dollar as 75 cents on the dollar. That's what I'm going to be giving them in points. And he goes, I like that. That's a savings on our money and our expenditure. And now I'm not messing with the comp plan either. I'm augmenting the comp plan.

When we're working with folks in sales management that have never done this before, let's face it, in the world, everybody's hurried. You're trying to get an idea across. If you go into your key management with a 19-page document, it ain't going to happen. They're like, what do you got? What's in an email, or what's on two pages I can digest here? So we say, okay, let's just keep this real simple. Let's go in and have a paragraph about the concept. We call it concepts, financials, logistics. Let's talk about the concept, and that's why we want to do this, how it would possibly work. Then the financials would be what it's going to cost to make it work, if it's points, what a point is going to be worth. And then how we can get this done, the logistics of all this. You can almost do that in two pages and a few paragraphs.

And back to the ROI, sometimes in that document you can have an ROI or an estimated ROI. But sometimes return on investment doesn't always mean that it needs to be cash either. Back to, if I can run a program for my sales channel that's going to get me in front of more people and start to create relationships, back to a term that you use, that creates more lifetime value for me and that customer way down the road. So selfishly, I might choose to be running the program to get the connectivity, the glue, the stickiness with that particular customer. That's maybe one objective of running the program, because I'm going to lock you in, and we're golf guys and we like golfing or we like going to ball games together, or whatever the application may be. But sometimes that could be short and sweet. You need to tell management why you're doing it, what it's going to cost, and what you expect the outcome to be from it. Yeah. So let's talk about the CFL, I think is what you said. What is it again?

Not terribly. I mean, everybody might have their own style. It's just something that, let's keep it simple. Let's keep it short. Let's keep it sweet. Something that I can look at in five minutes, have a conversation with you and say, hey, thanks for putting it on paper. Makes sense. Yeah. See you.

I mean, it's always better if you can tie a financial gain to it, a savings or some type of gain. And the key word, too, when you run these, I like to put a little incremental gain. In direct sales, as a sales leader, I've always advocated to sales leaders, look, the salesperson has some type of goal of attainment. That's their expectation. That's why you're on the job. That's where you get paid. But if I can get a little incremental boost from you by 20%, then that's my incremental gain. From that incremental gain, I'm deriving some type of incremental profit, and depending on that incremental profit, I can take a smidgen of that profit and now that becomes the funding for my points or whatever.

I think it's a roadmap and more or less a visual too, because I often tell this story. I've been on some sales outings, and maybe we'll go one night. Now, I'm not a great bowler. I mean, last time we did this, I don't think I have bowled in 10 years. And I'm like, oh, gosh, I've got to bowl.

I can still break 100. Don't take me. But here's the analogy. So now you're out there, you've got, let's say, team one and team two to keep it simplistic. And bingo, there's a scoreboard. There's a leaderboard. It's got Brant, John, Mark, whoever, Billy Bob, whatever. And so after a while, first frame, everything is neutral. But by the third or fourth frame, you start seeing. And I'm sitting there saying, oh, crap, I'm running third on my team here. Nobody's said anything to me yet. But it's now visual. There's a leaderboard, in a sense, in front of me.

Now, let's strip that away, and let's just say I went bowling by myself. I'm the salesperson out in the field. Nobody's watching. Nobody's looking. I'm not in this competitive arena. I don't get a strike. I don't get a spare. Who cares? It's just me. But now when I'm in this arena and I'm in competition, my adrenaline starts going. My attribute of ego and competitiveness starts coming out. Plus, I don't want to be embarrassed. I want to show I can do it. I'm going to kick it up a notch. It cooked my psyche into the visual camaraderie, competitiveness. That happens when you're running sales incentive programs via dealers, salespeople, whatever. There's going to be a standing report. There should be. Or there's going to be a visual of a leaderboard and how people are doing, monthly, weekly, daily, or whatever. And that keeps things going, keeps things fluid, and keeps me thinking, oh gosh, I don't want to be the last guy on the list here.

And we'll get into, again, back to what we said earlier, the SWOT, the leader needs to be saying, what are we good at? What are we bad at? What do I need to improve? What's coming down the pike? Where can I be opportunistic? So even if that's the framework for the rails of your incentive program, there are other areas of indicators you can put an emphasis on. For instance, in some industries, there might be a certification process. And a lot of guys, I get it. I get it. I don't get it. I don't get it.

Well, hey, John, we're running this program. And, i.e., we noticed you've been with us for three years now. You don't have your certification. So one of the goals we're putting in this program for you, John, is if over the next six months you go through the training and you get your certification, we would like to recognize that and reward you with ABCDEF. And you might say, hmm, now I'm going to use my discretionary effort that was latent over here, pedal to the metal, and try to get my certification. Not only because I have a reason to do it, but management is kind of looking at me to do it. So there's this expectation, and leadership has to set expectations, whether it's direct or indirect or whatever. So it's more than just the top line, or maybe bottom line profit. A lot of other variables can come in to help move the incentive program along and get outcomes you want from the incentive program.

Well, let's go back to, not a great analogy, but when you talked about Productivity Point and really the main aspect of the program was not sales, but we talked about that step of the signage and the foot traffic gets me in. I may get a sale I wouldn't have gotten because I didn't have signage. So same thing. I want you to get your certification, John, because that's a point of difference when you're out making calls. And if you're at all thinking as a salesperson, you should say, by the way, do you notice I have a CPM on my card? And they'll go, yeah, I noticed it, but I don't know what that means. And then, in a nice way, humble bragging, so to speak: well, the only reason I put that on there is because that means in my industry I've been trained and I've been certified to do that. And what that means to you is you can be assured that this process will work correctly, because we've already been down this trail. I am certified to do this. And we found that probably less than 7% of people that may be presenting the same service do not have the certification. Now that's a point of differentiation. So you can see where the incentive program, eventually, if it all connects, can lead to an outcome of a sale down the road because you're different.

Many of the platforms that are available now, back to what John said earlier, what you need to decide, if you wish to embark upon, I'll say, investigating or exploring this, is it something you can do on your own after you learn all these elements? Or might you say, hmm, I don't really have a point system or platform, can I shop that in the open marketplace? So that's something you need to decide. But the other thing is all these other indicators that you can bring into the program. You can bring them in, you can take them out. It's the flexibility of that.

And that's why usually there's a stop and start. So you can run an incentive program, let's just say, for six months, for a year. And then maybe you take the first quarter off next year. And then you just run it for 90 days because you have an urgent need next year. But at least this tool is in your tool bag as a sales leader, to emphasize whatever, whenever you want to do it, as a need comes up. Because you're probably not going to get the same fluidity by going to the CFO saying, I need more money to run this. And back to points, back to a currency, all those things. So that's why, once they're in, you usually have to sell it in once and it'll stay. There's stickiness to these things.

Yeah, rails. It becomes a brand within the company. We'll give it a name or a theme or whatever. And to be candid, there's been many times we've run an incentive program, it's set, it's the platform, and somebody else from the company will say, hey, can we use this for ABC? And we're going, like, of course. I never thought of that. That wasn't one of the things we were thinking about before. Within these systems now, you can put LMS, like learning management systems, in there. You can put quizzes in there. There's a lot of functionality that adds to the end result, means-to-the-end type of things. Then the almighty hit your quota or go above quota, get points.

Well, and not to get on a rabbit trail, but sometimes we see where sales leadership will embark upon investigating the sales incentive program, and, back to your point, other people see what's going on in the sales department. So can we use that over here, the safety guy? And then HR may say, you know, we only do a milestone anniversary, but, you know, we need to start doing things more on a monthly basis. The only reason I bring that up is back to our mention of being curious. Sales leaders can often bring things to the organization that upper management is not thinking about. And if you're the guy or gal in your company that embarks upon running this sales incentive program, and it finds its way to meander over to other pockets of the company, well, in your career, that's going to be an attaboy and attagirl for you too, because you're bringing a great contribution to the company that nobody would have fallen off a chair and thought of if you weren't running the sales incentive program. I'm not saying that in a mode of greed. I'm just saying that that's being a corporate good citizen. And you don't know where these things can go. It's got to get a start. That's all.

Not profound, but objectives have to be thought through. And sometimes it probably dovetails with this. I encourage sales leadership to be the thought leader and start it, but then quickly surround your thoughts and collaborate with other people that are going to probably have a hand in this. As the old saying goes, no man is an island. Back to what's going on in the marketplace, why we're running this, [inaudible] be in a program? What should the priorities be?

And I also recommend you can't come out of the gate with 19 objectives. It's not going to work. It doesn't mean you may not have, let's say for argument's sake, 10 objectives. Well, maybe you start with three or four of them, see how that goes. And then you always keep the other six in mind and just introduce them at a different time. I'm speaking for myself. I can't remember on a daily basis. You want me to do seven things and I'm going to get points or whatever for it? A couple, I'm there. And if you want to change it up in 90 days to be a couple more, that's fine too. So the objective needs to be well-defined, what I'd say prioritized, and then we'll get to where that's going to be included at the end line as well. But don't do it in a vacuum, is what I'm saying.

I mean, if I'm going into management, I'm going to say, here's the three objectives of why I'm running the program. Whatever they could be. And we'll get into it, there's a host of what they could be and why they could be. But that's always back to, can those objectives be, number one, are they reasonable, attainable? Let's not put pie-in-the-sky stuff there. Number two, can they be measured? Will you have a metric, a means to measure it, so you can show you met your objective at some point? Was there a gap? Did you go over your objective? Did you go under your objective? Wherever it's at.

Yeah, I usually say put it in a PowerPoint. The first rung in the ladder is you've got to sell management on why you want to run this and what you expect the outcome to be. And here's the objective of the program. Here's what I wish to accomplish by running this. So yeah, PowerPoint's perfectly fine. But all I'm saying is, don't go in there with 19 objectives. Nobody's going to remember that stuff. I'd say, ballpark, three to five and you're in good shape.

Audiences, again, what we've been talking about, try to be as inclusionary as you can from whoever influences or is part of, again, in a sales environment, makes a contribution. The nice part about these programs, it doesn't need to be one-size-fits-all. So let's say John is the business development guy. You're going to have your set of objectives, but maybe the support team is pumping out the proposals, and their objective may be to get proposals done within, just pick a number, within seven days from the request of the salesperson, because we've been running at 10, 12, two weeks, and we want to put a little giddy-up on that and get it to the guy so we can get in the field a little quicker. So each participant in the audience of the program can have different objectives, as long as they can be measured, assigned to them. Again, it's not the end goal of total gross sales. It's the steps along the way that you're measuring, calculating, recognizing, and rewarding for.

Well, it is their job, but again, we're looking for the incremental gain, the incremental improvement of this. So yes, there's the job, but we all know, back to behavioral science, if you want me to do something two times and you're willing to pay me X for that, and that's my quota, and we have an agreement, I do this two times, you give me X, we're clean. But if I do it four times, and I do it four times three months in a row, and there's nothing there for me, my human psyche is going to say, if there's no monetary gain, no recognition or whatever, why am I busting my hump doing this? Apparently, they're okay with me just doing this two times.

So, again, back to cash, back to rewards, there's an expectation of what you do in the core program that is expected of you as a sales hire, dealer, whatever. If I can demonstrate I brought extra to the party, the sponsor is rewarding for the extra, not the expected. And that's how the program should be designed. That's an important component, because I'm the first to say, we're paying these guys for this. Yes, we are. But we really don't have a format. And even though we may pay John for number two and three, after John does that for three months, if he's not hearing that we really appreciate it, he's got six more than what we thought over three months, John might be saying, I don't think they really care. Nobody loves me. I didn't get a phone call on this. Yeah, I'm Scottie Pippen. Why am I busting my hump for these people? So all these things have to work in a connected fashion.

Well, if you have model A, and they're over and above the marketplace in their compensation program, and let's just say they're 30% better than anyone else, some guy might be intrigued by that. He jumps ship. But model B is, we're in the hunt in our comp program, but we do this, we do this, we do this, we do that. It's a more well-rounded approach. At the end of a year, if you interview either one or two people, who's happier? It's the guy that has that balance. I'm making a decent living, it's a decent comp program, I'm rewarded, I got this trip, I did this, I did that, they've recognized my family. The other guy goes in the bank, paycheck, sometimes I wonder if they even— That doesn't help my psyche going to work every day.

Kind of yeah, kind of no. KPIs, key performance indicators, that's the steps along the way that need to be achieved to get to the end goal. So if I want, let's just bring it down to second grade, if I want more sales and I'm in a B2B environment, that may mean that my people need to have X number of appointments, X number of presentations, X number of demos, or whatever. So an indicator might be, we expect our people to have four appointments a month. That's in their paycheck. That's in their base. And if you're underperforming, you should be, boom, boom, gone.

Now, this John guy, he's getting six appointments a month. Well, that indication of four versus six, I think he's going to move along faster, quicker than the other guy. And we want John to keep getting six appointments a month, maybe even seven, incremental gain. And we're going to pat him on the back. So an indicator gets you to the— And where, again, the nice part about sales incentive programs, and maybe back to points as a currency, you can put an investment of points against that indicator. So for instance, John, you're expected two, or whatever number I said. If you get, or you expect four. If you get the fifth one, that's X number of points. If you get the sixth one, that's Y number of points. You get the seventh one, that's the big, you get triple points. That's how you build it out.

So what sales management needs to be thinking about are, we can rattle off a few, but there's so many indicators in sales. I've used a few: demos, appointments, the number of proposals you're generating. If you need to get client wins, client losses, I mean, we have to expect there's going to be attrition in every sales environment. But if you can retard that attrition, that's a Yahoo. I've seen programs run where an indicator is the more we get better customer satisfaction scores. And maybe we can monitor that. That's a sales ploy to bring to the sales environment to say, hey, Mr. Buyer, I know one of the things in the unknown here is how we're going to service your account. Let me show you how we've been tracking over the last year with this, because we measure ourselves. And they put that on the screen or in a PowerPoint.

So I'll bet you there's, again, and it's back to how the sales management wants to mold the program and put an emphasis on what indicators are needed now or are most important to get us to our end goal. Common sense would say the indicator should be connected to your mission and your goals of where you want people to go. It can be an indicator. It's like, gosh, I'm looking at all my channel principal owners, and we've got 62 of them and only 14 of them are certified. That's terrible. So are you going to get the whole shooting match done next year? No. But what if you could get another 30% of those channel principals certified over the next year? So your objective would be, I want 30% more dealers certified at the end of the year. An indicator is going to be if they come into a Zoom meeting and want one personal regional meeting, that's an indicator. We're going to reward them for coming to that, all toward the end goal of my outcome being 30% more principals got certification last year. That's how it all kind of marries together.

Now the rules, let's get back into the rules. The rules would be, John, here's the program for our certification. One of the rules may be, you have to get your butt to a regional meeting. Or we're going to have six Zoom meetings, and we expect you to be at least at four of them. So you start blending the expectations that's engulfed with the KPI as part of the rules. And then there's a lot of other things with rules, because we know, and I think we'll get into this, there could be some manipulation sometimes with salespeople. There can be, what's the term, sandbagging, if you know what I mean. Oh, I'm going to put these few sales over here and not let them know what's going on until I catapult into the start of the incentive program. And the great thing about people in sales who come up through the ranks like most of us, been there, we know those deals. Or back to your collaborative team, when you involve people and run the program, they say, you know, we should look out for ABC or DEF in this program, because somebody could snooker us here.

Well, within rules, and we go over this with folks who are helping them set up programs, you need to put disclaimers in there. Who's eligible? That could be a rule. It's like playing a board game. Who's eligible? How you move the parts? Where you go up the ladder, down the ladder? What counts? What doesn't count? You have to be forward thinking on that, and you want to make it fair and reasonable, obviously, but you also have to be thinking of any, what I'll term, unintended consequences. And time frames, eligibility, maybe tax implications, that the company's going to pick up the tax liability or it's going to be the responsibility of the salesperson. That's good communication. Let them know up front. You don't want people calling you during the program saying, well, I didn't know this was— That's the way it was supposed to be. And we're going to stub our toes and maybe not think of every rule, but all we're trying to instill now is you just can't spray and pray this.

I mean, you need to think this through, and you need to have some sounding boards within the company to say, this is what I'm thinking, how this should run. Where did I miss something? Well, you didn't really talk about ABC here. Thanks. Didn't think of that one. And back to sometimes why we run pilots, is because of that. Something will bubble up in a pilot where we're going, oh, didn't think of that one. Didn't even know that existed or that could happen that way.

And you need to be reasonable about the rules too. I mean, the sales guy can't say, well, where's the document? There's 102 rules here. It's like, I can remember four. You need to be reasonable. I think that, and there is the 80-20 rule. Usually when we're helping folks with designing programs, from past experience, there's a bucket of certain things that are fundamentals in rules. And then in the structure, we can get into that later, rules, program designs, tiers, flights, where people might be placed within the program. But usually it's more about how we expect you to behave in the program and what counts and what doesn't count. So when Fred sends in his invoice or documents his claim online, and the program ended June 30th and Fred said, well, it's from August 16th. So what? You go, Fred, right in the rules. It says all invoice claims must be submitted by June 30th. You didn't do that. Oh, yeah, I see that [inaudible]. But that kind of thing. Or else, people, you know, I hate to say it, some people will get a little greedy and try to bend the rules. I've seen it.

Again, budgets need to be based on what's reasonable. What's in the budget naturally is the investment in the program. And when you run some budget scenarios, there's many things that encompass budget. It's not just paying for the indicators. There's probably three or four things that talks about the components of a program. And so obviously, yes, there's going to be the outcome of the deliverable of that award, be it a trip, be it points, whatever, that's an expense. However, if your program needs a platform, and that expense on that part of the budget is what I'd say variable, that's going to be as greater or poor as the program runs. But you need to come up with something in your budget that's middle ground.

Secondarily is, if I need to run this program on a platform, meaning some type of system that's on the web that my salespeople can go to, they go in and they see the rules, they submit a claim or they submit a document, or the home office is doing that, we're taking information out of Salesforce and spitting it back, whatever that is. And maybe there's a learning management system on this tool. We can cover that way down the road. But I need to centralize this. This is what I mean about a platform. And there's platforms out there that are ready to go, chassis built, you just put the aesthetics on the way you want. There's a cost to that. You may have an implementation cost. You may have a monthly cost to run it. So that's the second part.

Third part, which is really important, that I see doesn't get as much attention, and I hammer this down on people, it's back to the communication of the program. And this is where you need sales management to get creative, have some fun, bring in your marketing team. You're going to need to give this program a brand name, a moniker, a thought, a theme, whatever. And not that that's cost, that's just what's in our headset. But in a mode of communication, we know there's a few ways to do that. There's personal communication, there's digital, on our phones and our laptops all day long now. And then there's physical communications. So what you need to do is say, I can't set this program and then just let it go on its own, because three months later people are saying, what is that? What happened? I don't really hear much about it anymore. So you need to put your marketing hat on and put a campaign together that says, I'm going to have this many touch points: town hall, meetings, events, talk it up. Maybe if it's a channel program, or at the offices where the sales guys are, there's a poster in the lunchroom. I don't know. Maybe there's some form of physical sheet or placard or something that can go out there. We run programs where there's a retail-type system and people go in the lunchroom and there's a big old 24 by 36 inch poster about, you know, running for the sun program and da, da, da. You do this, you do that. And so there's a cost to that.

There's going to be a fixed cost. If you're really thinking it through, you want to benchmark that against a calendar and the number of frequencies of hits. It might be a combination of high tech, high touch, meaning that certain things are going to go out across the wire on the internet. Certain things are going to be mailed. Maybe there's a kickoff to the program. I know when we worked with you, we had a couple of themes. We did that one theme, it's a whole new ball game. And to announce the program, they actually got a little box at their house, and there was a signed baseball in there by some famous athlete, and it's like, it's a whole new ball game. And it was a nice little deliverable. So it got me going, wow, what's this all about? And then they had to come to the meeting to figure out what the new game was going to be and how it was going to work. But let's just say, for argument's sake, there was 50 people that needed to get that. The kit might have cost $10 each. It's the expense right there. It's a fixed cost.

So that's three things. And then the other thing, back to sales management, is if you feel you need help on this, there'll be a charge for that that you need to factor in. And that could be all across the board, depending on how much you need, where you need help, those type of things. So those four components are pretty much what is going to make up the budget.

The byproduct too of a great campaign, it gets talked up. Back to what we said earlier about inspiration, leadership, expectations, that program can actually start to demonstrate the personality of the leadership. It could be fairly straight and narrow, it could be gimmicky, it could be fun. I mean, guys like you and me, we like to have a little fun along the way, so we can put some silly things in there in the campaign. Your guy with a banana, you know, you have some token memento bananas put on. I don't know what you do. But that's where the sales management needs to get the team together. If you don't have the internal resources to pull it off, go to an agency, do something. But it's such a key. You can have the best indicators, the best budget about the indicator, the best trip out there or whatever the end goal is. And if you don't communicate it constantly, purposefully, and make it fun and exciting, the program is not going to thrive. It's going to just collapse.

The old saying, you know, what's in it for me? It's right down to the guy packing the boxes in the warehouse. If he's just getting X bucks an hour and that's it, that guy's going to say, I'm not seeing any pats on the back. I'm not seeing any advancement. I made a couple of suggestions. I bought tape at a lower price. I saved the company $100 last week and nobody said anything. It's like, I'm not real thrilled about working here.

Now, again, back to management, back to being purposeful, back to sales leadership, back to supervisors. If the culture is, we want to recognize, we want to instill, we want to show you appreciation. We want you to be thinking. We want you to be innovative. We want you to be collaborative. That sets a whole set of dynamics. Because maybe that guy you're saying have the conversation with the leader says, do we do this, Paul? Do we do this, Frank? No, we don't. So what is their motivation? That's not their fault. That's your fault. Sometimes they're asking the problem and the problem's right in front of their nose. And they just need somebody to tell them, we need to shape this differently. We're the cause of it.

Yeah, my favorites, which people, I don't know why this is, it's even in employee programs and incentive programs, are the elements of collaboration and suggestions. And then last, something that you and I talked about, is unfortunately salespeople don't go 10 for 10. We're like baseball players. If we get three out of 10, that's pretty darn good. That's a really good batting average. But it's so important to say, well, where do we miss on the six or seven out of 10? So we turn that under lessons learned or stories shared or objections I encountered, those kinds of things. So one of the indicators can be, have you made a worthy suggestion about AB, or try to get as definitive as you can. Did you bring some intel to the company that, oh, we didn't know that, we can copy it, or here's how we counter it? And again, it's not always related to the almighty dollar. It's the means to the ends, is the steps along the way.

So to be succinct, yeah, I think things which have this psychological effect, collaborating, making suggestions, and being innovative, if that's in the program and I'm recognized or rewarded for it, that makes me feel good too about working here. I feel like I made a contribution. Somebody listened to me. Wow, I'm seeing that contribution actually happen. I've seen companies name things after somebody who invented it. They'll give it a funny moniker. So that adds up to, hey, this is a fun place to work.

We're going to do a playbook, and it's like, you know, corner out, post down, you know, something or other. And then they might have a name, like a generic football name. And again, they'd come up with names like, well, let's call that like Taco Bell or, you know, whatever. And then we're shouting down in the field, like, Taco Bell, King Burger. But, you know, that's because Jake said, let's call it that. We go, okay, that's cute. Let's call it that. Same thing can happen in business.

Well, that's a benchmark to go by. And one of the things that we often find, you know, the old saying, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it, is that you may have an indicator that you need. But then you say, oh, I don't know how we get the information to even measure that. And sometimes you'll find you run a program to create the way to measure it, because there's just some data not being gathered or collected someplace. And maybe it's because of lack of initiative. Maybe it's there, but somebody said, I didn't know we needed that. I didn't know that would be an important component. Or maybe there's some systems that need to be married up to get that. But so anyway, it needs to be measured.

And, you know, specific means that it needs to have like a beginning and an end. Here's what we want you to do. Here's how we're going to measure it. And is it reasonable? I mean, we've all been victim in sales where somebody says, okay, I got the quotas for next year. You're 140 percent above last year. You're 192 percent above last year. The guy goes, no, this ain't going to work. I'm looking for my next job, you know, top down. But if things are attainable and reasonable with a stretch, and then back to, is this really relevant to what we want to get done here? Just process it. Again, you can't go out of the gate with 19 different objectives. So the indicators are going to be related to the objectives, and you can't have 19 of them. So you have to, if you want to say prioritize, is it going to be relevant? And there's where some thought needs to come behind all this. So back to if you're running these programs, your head's going to hurt a little bit, because it's going to take some time and energy to figure this out.

The one thing, though, I didn't get into budgeting is you want to come out with a framework of a budget. There's fixed cost, there's variable cost. We talked about the elements of where the budget should be spent. The biggest variable is going to be in how the program's going and the outcome of the rewards. But there might be instances within the duration of the program where you need to up the ante a little bit. So you need more budget. And that may be against a variable of an indicator. So like, hey, if we get more applications in this month, we want to gin up before the seasonality cuts us off. So if you get more applications or more proposals in, like triple points. That's going to hit my budget, but hopefully the end line is it also increases my probability of getting more sales.

So there could be some factor that comes into your life while you're running the incentive program that wasn't a known thing that you're counting on in December. Now it's April and you're going, oh my goodness, this happened, or this, we need to run against this or up this or overcome this somehow. I'm going to need more budget to do it. So you have to, I guess the word is, put a little contingency fund in there for the unexpected. And if you don't spend it, that's great. And if you need it, you're not surprising—

Yeah, I would say that when you look at the big pie, again, you've got to put the budget against the impact of the awards. But maybe that's going to be, if you're working in an admin program, that's going to be maybe 10% of your budget, that fixed cost. I'd actually advocate that the communications is going to be a little bit more. So maybe there's 10, 15 right there. So it's almost like 75, 25. Again, you want to weight it so the emphasis is going on the rewards. Try to keep your fixed costs as low as possible. But in that pie, that's about where you should be and where you should come out.

I mean, if you're running a program, let's say, for instance, a company wants to run a program and there's a fixed budget. There's fixed budgets, there's open budgets. You always want to try to have an open budget, more incremental gain. You pay for it. You love paying for it because you're seeing the advance. But let's just say, for instance, it's fixed. And the manager says, all right, we'll give you $50,000 to run the program. And you go out, you get a platform, you get a provider, you get a consultant, you put a great communication program behind it. And all of a sudden, you spend $20,000. Well, $20,000, he gets $50,000. That's not jiving with me. If you did all that and your cost to operate the program with a platform or maybe some communications, $5,000 against your rewards of $50,000, we're good. Now, the type of programs we run, we're sometimes at the hundreds of thousands. But even then, we have to sit back and reflect, okay, when we put it on a spreadsheet, where's our communications budget coming in against the end line? Is it too little? Is it too much? Can we scale it back? Posters and all that stuff.

We're going to mail the palm trees to John's house, all that stuff. Well, you know, the palm tree costs us 25 bucks to mail. Let's get something a little similar that costs 10 bucks to mail, that kind of thing. But that's just a framework of where the budget should kind of fall out.

Well, again, leaders, if you put your thinking caps on, sometimes there's a manufacturer or a vendor or somebody else who augments your sales process. This is going to help them as well. So I remember a while back, we were running a, might have been for you or someone else, we were running a trip to a certain resort. But the communication budget was a little thin. So I called the resort one day and talked to the GM and said, hey, you know, we've got this ABC company out your way and, you we're going to bring 200 people here. And they were looking at the ABC property, but we decided on you, the DEF property. And they're kind of squeezing me a little bit. What do you mean squeezing? Well, we want to kind of announce the program and put the flavor of the Rocky Mountains in it. So you happen to have any apparel that you sell in the gift shop, like a hat or a hoodie or something with your logo on it? And I'm going to need 200 of them.

There's 200. You can always ask something. And I got more responsive. Well, yeah. Nobody's ever asked me for that before. I love it. And I'm going, well, I just thought of it. But hey, I get 200 of something at $20 each. That's something my sponsor does not have to pay for.

Just a real simple example of, is there anybody else in your circle? Sometimes when we're working these channel programs, there's a co-op. The manufacturer wants to put some skin in the game, or we'll offset the cost of the awards too. Because they're like, oh, you're running this program? This is going to help push more something out the door for us? Everybody has a budget somewhere. You just need to know how to tap into it. So if you can get a couple, three prongs into other people's areas that will help fund your program, you need to be thinking of how you could possibly do that.

Well, you just have to ask. If you're the sales leader and you've got your little task force to help you run the program, and, hey, Jennifer, don't we work with that promotional products company where you get all the swag for the employees, that kind of stuff? How much business do we give those guys here? We're spending $100,000 a year with those guys. We do the onboarding kits with them. Hey, can you go back and maybe put a little bit of whatever and tell them we're running a sales thing? Can we get like 50 more of those kits, gratis?

It can't hurt to ask. And often, because the ask never occurs, the deliverable never occurs. And again, every manufacturer, every vendor, they've got some money tucked away somewhere that, when you get two or three of them to ante up, it can really help you in your budget. Just a key point to keep in mind.

Yeah, I guess let's take the points off the table. That's an award. It's not the reward, but it's the means to the end. I can redeem possibly throughout the program, or if I hit a threshold I can redeem my points, or I've got to get X points to be involved in the President's Club and be considered to take the trip someplace. So that's just the means.

Oh, you don't really need points. You can just set out measures to say that if you do this over this time frame, we're going to measure you and there's a metric that you're scoring. But it doesn't necessarily mean it has to be points.

Because it's fluid. I can, again, back to cash, if I'm the sales leader and I know, let's say if I value it just for argument's sake, a point at a dollar, then I can start manipulating points in a currency that I don't really have to discuss as a dollar, but it's X points. And usually it's something that's not going to be involved with the compensation program. So it gives me, I'll use the overused word, currency to put against initiatives that my comp program doesn't address.

Now that doesn't mean you always need points. You can run contests and programs. And we didn't get into it in the structure, you can run a program and have contests within. Now, let me use an example there. And maybe we use golf as an analogy. Those of us who play golf, not very well, there's a score at the end of the round.

But I think we've all been on corporate outings where, when you're playing golf, let's say the score is 72 points that I'm striving to get. However, there might be a long drive contest, a closest-to-the-pin contest. Nothing to do with points. It's just whoever on your team gets closest to the pin at the award banquet. But everybody in the team is going to get something, because you're my team and you hit close to the pin, so the four of us win something. But there's no points against it. It's just a measure. It's a point in time. It's scored, and it's rewarded.

Oh, gosh. There's pros and cons to each one of those. For years in the incentive business, merchandise was kind of the base staple of things, and I'm talking about brand-name merchandise, really nice items that you'd buy at retail. When you're structuring a program, merchandise is usually right in there as being affordable, but it sets a goal too. So if I want a new set of golf clubs or a new piece of electronics or something, and I go through my incentive program, I'm thinking, I want that Bose comfort headset. I don't want to go out and spend $230 of my own money to do it. So that's why merchandise is attractive.

Then gift cards started coming into the marketplace years ago, and they have their place as well. Now, most of these are delivered digitally, right to your phone. But you can do this, get a gift card for X, or do this and get points to a gift card of your choice. There's a different way you can do that. Pros and cons of gift cards, pros and cons of merchandise.

And then the most costly award still seems to be, from the sponsor standpoint, the travel. Now there's individual travel, where in the structure of the program I can earn a trip of my choice based on how I wish to spend my points. Or within the program, there's these three things you can do for travel. So if you want to take the cruise, the golf outing, or the spa stay, that's up to you. That's another way to do it. But our common sense tells us travel is going to be more expensive than the Weber grill. That's usually more upper tier.

However, you can get creative and seed in a learning experience, go to the chef's thing, cooking. So you can have these experiences now, depending on what's in my intrinsic self that I like to do. You love to cook. I might like to take guitar lessons, and Guitar Center's great, but it's going to be excellent. But if I can get that in my points or offset by the company, my intrinsic self might like to do that. What I'm saying is the awards can be as far as your imagination wants to take you. I've seen people do inside staff: you get a day off, you get a special parking place, you get the banana. That's where, again, personality, fun, however you like to do it.

But I'd say in the pecking order, it's gift cards, because you can buy a gift card at low value. You can get a gift card for—a Starbucks gift card. If you want to get something of merchandise that's worth it, you're going to be in $100 and above. And then the travel slots are a little bit more expensive, and tickets, events, I guess I put as a subset of travel. It's amazing, I'm a sports guy, you're a sports guy. If you want to take a family of four, we live here in Los Angeles, to a Rams game, in this day and age, and now given that we're going tomorrow and we know exactly what we're paying, which we're happy to pay, I think.

But I was saying to myself, the way tickets and events now work, it's kind of like airline inventory. Like the Rams are playing this team. They're bad. Tickets are X. Oh, the Rams are playing the 49ers, interstate rivalry. Tickets are Y. There's a premium price for the tickets. So therefore, you're thinking cheap seats are in the hundreds of dollars for a sports outing. So if you're a family of four and you want to take your family to a pro football game and park and buy pizza and a Coke, you're going to drop like a thousand dollars. Easily. And that's just, let's park that. It's absurd. It disturbs me.

However, if I'm in my incentive program and there's a portal where I can redeem for events, concerts, tickets or whatever, again, back to justifiability, it's not my money, my paycheck. I have to spend it because I earned it in my points. Yeah, I'll go see the Willie Nelson concert. I'll go to the Rams game. I'll go to these things.

And the only other thing I can emphasize is, naturally common sense would tell us, try to have a choice factor. You might be a golf guy. I'm a travel guy. I'm a cooking guy. So when I'm in the program, some people don't like to travel. If you say it's a cruise, you might've lost 30% of your audience right there. Personally, I love cruises, but other people say, I'll never go on a cruise again. I might always get sick, or I don't like the water. But if it's a cruise, a golf stay, or wine tasting, totally different thing. You're probably going to hit somebody. The end of the story is always include awards that are going to attract the widest audience for you. That there's a deliverable net award that the participant says, I want that.

I'd say that in the industry, points are probably used 70, 80% of the time as the means to the end of the program.

Well, it's another way. That's, like I'm saying, your imagination. You hit on it a little bit earlier. The other thing that leaders need to be thinking about now is the changing demographics of the workforce. And when you're a sales leader, you have to think about, as a marketer, back to thinking of your audience. If you're in a certain industry, you might be working through contractors, and these guys founded the business 20 years ago, old gentlemen, and they've got salespeople coming in who are 25 and 30, and maybe somebody's a boomer and somebody's a millennial. You have these mixed generational zones in our workplace.

And not only that, that's the reason it does kind of dovetail with keeping the awards out there that's something for everyone. Because I may be of a certain generation where I'm very about my social environment, helping others. And if I can use my points to donate to a charity of my choice or an affinity I have, that might really get my juices going, because I'd love to give this entity a donation, but I don't have the extra hundred bucks this week to do it. But if I can do it through the incentive program, yahoo.

And some people, again, don't like group travel. They might say, I don't really want to go and hang out with my boss for—I don't like the guy in there. And if that's the only award, I'm out. But if I can do that, or if I don't want to take the group trip, I can do this trip on my own, or I can subsidize it by getting backyard furniture, a new patio set, then that's fine too. Again, it needs some thought. It needs to have a deliverable that everybody can get excited about. And it's back to generational differences.

Themes, as you say. And again, sales leaders, we're all creative people in our own right. There might be something going on with a company at a certain point in time, or just in the culture of a company, that they want to communicate through some type of theme, mission, end goal, whatever it might be. All those things need to be taken into consideration, because the theme, again, should inspire action and where we want to be at the end of the program.

Have fun. Again, think of it in a logistical manner. It should be imprinted on some things. Down the road, you want to instill the impression somehow. You don't want to have a theme that's like 14 words long. Short, sweet, to the point. And again, put your marketing hat on. And again, the word campaign. This is a slogan, a moniker, whatever you want to call it, that is going to take you through the duration of the program.

Some companies just have one, and every year they just call it the same thing. You can use Point of Excellence every year and change the KPIs that you want to emphasize each year. Or each year you can change it up. Or you can have the master program that's a name of X, and then you can run these short-spurt programs and call them Y. Over the next 90 days, right out of the gate, we're going to have the Fast Start program to the Point of Excellence. And here's how the Fast Start program works. If you do this by this, da-da-da, by the end of April, whatever, you're going to get da-da-da-da-da-da-da. So you've got a master theme, a sub-theme, you have core umbrella initiatives, and you have sub-initiatives to run within the contest, within the program.

Well, see, they set it and forget it. They probably didn't.

So you're strutting in with your briefcase? Oh, it's huge. Hey, Fox, where did you get that?

Get on a rabbit trail. One of the things that intrigued me about the business, and what actually catapulted me into the business, is it was my second job after selling the cleaning things where I got the Omaha Steaks. My first award was the cup for selling door to door. My second award, and these are physical awards with the president's letter and the Omaha Steaks. And then, I think in the third year with this company, they hung out this travel deal. And I had never been to the Bahamas. I'm like a 28-year-old guy or something. I wasn't well traveled. And lo and behold, I won it. And then my wife and I got to go to the Bahamas for four nights, five days.

And we went with other people in the regions who had won their region. It was a regional program. I won my region. It was six states, and I came in first. So then, other people, I've heard of them, but I never met them. The mucky-mucks, to use a term, went down to the program. They didn't know who I was. Which was great. They're in a home office somewhere and they never heard of me before. And nice guys, we had a delightful time. And bonds to this day still from that. And memories of that trip. And it was the red carpet treatment.

And I remember I went up to the admin desk at the trip and my intuitive self said, well, the company's running this. These people must work at the home office to run this. So I go, oh, you know, Karen, I don't think I met you or whatever. So do you live around Grand Rapids? No, we're with ABC Company. We run this trip for you guys. We're the hired help. And I'm going, oh, wait a minute. You mean you just do this for other companies? Yeah, that's our business model. We're the incentive provider for your company. The destination, we get the people there. What's the name of your company? So I started researching these incentive companies, which I didn't know existed. And I then took the initiative to approach a couple, three of them, and I got myself a job.

And off track, stepping stone: guy selling door to door, wins a little moniker cup, then gets into a legitimate B2B sale, selling industrial chemicals. Then I switched gears to go to the insurance business. And it had some physicality because of physical damage and things like that. But then I won a trip. So when I went to the incentive potential employer, I had a story to tell about been there, done that. I've been a participant. I've seen things come at me, what I like, don't like. I'm a little bit more schooled now. And that was enough to get me a start in the incentive industry. And kind of a stepping stone.

Key management goes, key leadership goes. And boy, that in and of itself, because often, depending on the size of the company, the guys in the region don't get to meet the key executives of the company, which is a shame. However, when people can take off their business face and just come down to being people, and they're at an event and they're on site, and sometimes those President's Clubs will be the right balance of maybe meetings. Definitely couples get around, they do a dine-around, maybe there's an award ceremony, a final banquet or something.

And it also helps the key executives when they're on these trips. They often, back to the insulation, they don't hear from the bottom up, and they're out there and something will come up. But everybody categorically goes away feeling better. And even key executives, because they don't get to go on a lot of trips either. And it's kind of a nicety for them when you think about it. So they're out rubbing elbows with their warriors and the sales force, the sales team, getting information, getting dialogue. And the club effect takes place. And I've been on trips where they say, Brant, can't wait till I see you next year. I expect you to earn it again next year. And I'm going to win the longest drive.

Well, and I overuse [inaudible]. There's a strategic reason behind this. So when you're talking to the higher-ups, again, the parent needs to set the master strategy and the execution of that. But embedded in that strategy and tactics of running a sales incentive program, be it dealer-based or direct-sales-based or whatever, based on whatever they're confronted with, back to the SWOT analysis at that time and place, the strategy of a sales incentive program is right in there. The tactics are all the things we're talking about. Do you run it on a platform? Do you run it yourself? What tchotchkes do you send out? All those, what awards. They're all the tactical part of it.

But the fun part that I think guys like you and I thrive on is that's all secondary. The main thing is right at the start. Why are we doing this? Why are we running this? What do we expect to see from it? That's strategy. And should this be embedded? And I've also seen it flip where, once it's run, the sales management may bring the thought process, the sales leadership or executive leadership, the CEO, and then the CEO won't let it go. It becomes like their little baby. It should be. They start to own it. Like, hey, Brant, where are we going next year? What's the program? What theme are you guys thinking of? Have you thought of this? Have you thought of that? And they start to buy into it.

And another observation, again, it really depends on market size, culture, companies. And I say this with all due respect for CEOs, CFOs. The [inaudible] is many CFOs, CEOs have never carried a bag. They have not been sales guys, sales women, out in the everyday, the heartbeat of the organization. Salespeople, they're the warriors. They're out there taking the arrows. Getting rejection. We strike out seven out of 10 times. And we're still standing.

That empathy sometimes is not there from leadership down, because the people at the top have not done it. Now, that doesn't mean they can't do it. They just haven't been, in their career, the guy to do it. Leadership bridges that gap is they have to come back and do this with confidence to explain to the owner, the leader, the CFO, hey, John, here's what we're going through here. Here's the dynamics of what's working down here. And I respect, you were never on the truck. You were never driving around. You're great at this, but this is why we need to do this. And this is what we now need to solve. And this is why I need to do this to keep our best performers. Because at the end of the day, I want the glue that keeps the best people hanging around here. And anybody with intelligence, how do you say no to that, even if you're the guy at the top? But don't take it lightly. Not everybody that's at the top has been the sales guy.

It needs to be in a repository that the pre-thought, like you're saying, and taking some of the unknown or unexpected out of the equation. Nobody likes surprises. So when you give an opportunity, maybe you start with Q&A to educate the audience, but then you will also allow them or equip them to say, if you're reading this Q&A and we missed the Q&A, please come back. That's nice, because sometimes sitting in the boardroom, you don't think of everything. And again, that actually is glue, because people then say they're collaborating and they're helping structure the program.

Hey, I read your Q&A, but there's nothing in there about if this happens at this time, what are we going to do? And you're like, oh, we didn't think of that one. Thank you.

That's all, again, thought through program structure. It's always nice to have, and maybe let's go back to budgets. I think the optimum program is to have an open-ended budget. The more you do and the better game we're advancing, the more budget I'm willing to put against this. I'll spend dollars all day long. Why put a limit on it? If we're advancing the ball. So that's open. Who's going to care if we're advancing the ball, so to speak? So that's component number one.

But where the team comes in is, again, what we said earlier, is that leadership needs to be thinking about who am I trying to influence and who's making a contribution to the end sale. And I don't want to get too far off the trail, but you can run a sales incentive program and be inclusionary to a lot of different people. One company, it was small enough company, I could walk in the back room where the boxes were, where the product was being shipped. And I was having a conversation and I said to the one gentleman, so where do you think you fit in the picture? He goes, I wrap boxes all day. I put tape on them. I said, not really. I said, when we in the sales team are out talking about something, one of our things is we say, but the deliverable is going to happen within the next [inaudible] days and it's going to be insulated this way when you get it, and nobody else does that.

So when I explained that to him, and the importance of what he thought was just wrapping a box, if it had insulation, no insulation or whatever, how that helped me in the sales process. So then we actually started to measure for them, because they're a human being and they're packing boxes and sometimes they get distracted and element A, B, and C goes in, they skip D and go to whatever. It happens. Able to measure the outcome of the packaging, and we involved the back-end people in the sales incentive program. We had it from front end to back end. That's a great team.

And they're not sales guys, but what we brought into them, and we instilled in them, back to culture, back to feeling, back to collaboration, back to getting my juices going, is their end delivery was real important in our sales process. How it looked, was it timely? Was it packaged correctly?

Yeah, that's in structure and design. Again, we always recommend that if you can demonstrate improvement, but again, you don't win the contest. So for instance, positive and negative about President's Clubs. When I run into a company and say, oh yeah, we're already doing this. We run a President's Club. They're good and bad. That's great. How many people earn the trip to the President's Club? The top 10%. Yeah, exactly. And you have a sales force of 300 people or whatever. So there's like 30 people or so and spouses.

So I'll say to them, okay, well, that's good, but there might be a trade-off in running that program online. Well, what's that? What happened to the guy that came in 31st, but still improved his sales by 26%? I said, how do you think he's going to feel? Oh, well, probably not too great. So I said, okay, maybe we need to put a little bit more behind this, that there's going to be brackets. Yes, these top percent win. And I've also designed President's Clubs where, if you get to a certain level in the President's Club, you got a suite. If you get to another level in the President's Club, you got a regular guest room, and you still go. So here you go, like a contest within a contest, or brackets or tiers.

But then when you run the program, if you can measure self-improvement, but they just don't get over the bar to get to the trip, I can get my own individual trip because I don't go on the mucky-muck President's Club, or I can get some item, or I can do whatever with my points, then I feel I've been included, and by golly, I missed it by one, but I still was recognized and I still feel good about working with this place. But President's Clubs in and of themselves, you can be careful, they can do harm sometimes. And you don't want to leave anybody, they were left out, or this program stinks, or whatever. I improved my sales by 30% and John goes on a trip and he edged me out by one percentage point. Don't want that. Or he had a layup. He had a gimme. All those things. He had all my clients that we changed our geographic boundaries and all that kind of stuff.

can be done. Always, again, if you're running a program yourself, it goes under the banner of communication to some degree. You need to tell people where they are, just like if you're playing a board game you see how you advance. The same thing in these programs, people should see where they stand. Call it a standings report, if you will, for some [inaudible] language. But you need to communicate how people are doing along the way.

And that's as creative as you can be on the back end. It doesn't need to be super elaborate. We've worked with some companies that have a few thousand people in the program, and we're getting the data out of Salesforce, these guys are implementing the data, and then we just go take it from that. There's an exchange, it ends up we calculate it, and it goes into points, and at the end of the month they say, we had these objectives, the data says you did this with these objectives, you get XYZ points, and now that's in your bucket of points, trip or whatever. But you can have 15 salespeople and do the same thing. The mechanism and the rules are the same for everyone. It's only the numbers that change. The framework of everything is the same.

Training and resources, meaning product knowledge, sales training.

Yes. It's back to certifications, back to learning, back to learning from others. There's many programs. There's a fair amount of a learning component to it. The old saying, you can be motivated, knowledge, you're going to end up zero. And then if you get all the product knowledge in the world and the skills, but if you don't have an end line and money, so what's in it for me? So you need the triangle working for you. Always consider that.

And the other thing in programs too, it's like, am I in control of my own destiny? Which, again, if it's all team-based, sometimes you're not. But it's kind of like the bowling thing. If I'm in control of my own destiny and I set my own handicap and I beat it, that's up to me. And if my team wins, out of the four people bowling, 14 bowling tonight, that's great. But my own individual goal is I've never broken 100 before, and tonight I did.

Yeah. Again, every business is unique. And the only thing that we can advise as trusted advisors is be thinking of that. Whatever your industry is, or unique to your industry or your team, most sales leaders rise from the sales force. So they've been there, done that. They know the game. When you're in sales management a long time, you start to lose that because things change down here and you're not the guy doing it anymore. So you need to be able to tap into your team, because you're now a bit insulated, and have them reveal what may be wrong or not quite ethical. Again, it's back to the culture of the company. Some companies are do whatever it takes, and other companies, I want it better by the law. I don't want to be known for this. That's what our competitors do. And that's not how we operate here.

Well, sometimes, blessing and curse, what we're saying is good for the business overall. That's how you want to operate. Sometimes the incentive program will bring that more to a focal point because it's confined in a time frame or something, and it might, in a bad way, encourage people to do bad things because I know there's a this, that, and an end time zone.

And we've also read stories where, based on program design, I think it was one of the major banking industries years ago, were running some program for people about, you know, you're going to get these incentives based on this. So they weren't really doing things that were in the best interest of the customer. And it was maybe poor program design, but it then became unveiled to the consumers and public, and it took a long time to recover from their account managers saying things that were very manipulative and not true because at the end of the day, the account manager goes, oh, that one's for me.

But an analogy too is, back to your point, to work out. If I haven't worked out in, let's say, 10 years, well, maybe I need a trainer to say, okay, you want to ease into this. Here's what you want to be thinking about. Because the old saying is we don't know what we don't know. And physicality and working out, that could really be something bad. But in business, it could be something bad too. Unfortunately, I've showed up sometimes after people have run the first program on their own and stubbed their toe, and it's like, I thought I told you that. But okay, thanks for not including me.

And then also in the deliverable of these programs, I remember one time we proposed that there be a group trip, and the guy says, oh, we're taking care of that ourselves. Okay, well, you're going to have like 90, 200 people on this trip. But, you know, Susie in the back is going to be down there two days ahead. We're taking care of that ourselves. And so, well, number one, is that what Susie's hired to do? Is she skilled? Well, she's just running a trip. You know, she's just, people checked in.

And fortunately for me, a couple of things went wrong. Like there was bad weather one day. And people were getting in late. And the hotel got overbooked because of the no-shows. And then they got in, there wasn't a room for them. Things like on site that this gal from the company was not skilled in, the process of meeting and events and knowing things. I had to do things in a precautionary manner. Another guy got hurt on the golf course. And they didn't know what to do.

And I was telling this gentleman in our proposal, we have two people. And he goes, what do you need two people on a trip for with like 100 people? It's like overkill. And I'm going, Frank, because you want this, your job on the trip is to be out there being in the club, being with people. You don't want the worries of Brant and his wife didn't get in, or they're at the airport, or somebody's not feeling well and has to go home, or this guy got hurt and needs to go over here. You need runners to do this. So you need a base person that's going to run everything, and a contingency person for the variables. And you know what, I hope we don't need the contingency person, but then this way you've got your bases covered, and you can focus on the deliverable.

Oh, into the pool? Into the pool. I was hoping you'd say a pond.

Really important to do those kind of things. Well, that's why we're not trying to sell. Yes, you can run these programs yourself. But there's a mental part of putting the program together that we're discussing now. [inaudible] program of delivering it. So that could be the goods, the gifts, the trips, or whatever you want to call it. And that's not what you guys were hired to do as sales leadership.

So in that budget, I would recommend you say, all right, maybe it was a short term, and I can kind of get the data and manipulate. I don't need a platform, but you might need a reliable source to get the goods out the door. And if you're doing a trip, have a third party be involved, or we can recommend some people, because you don't want that mental exhaustion of all that after you've gone past the finish line. You don't need that aggravation. And it can easily be budgeted for. The incremental gain will offset the cost of having a third party in to do that. And again, back to you don't know what you don't know. If you've got a good deliverable on your platform, a good deliverable on your awards and your trip, then you can sleep at night.

And you and I did that when you ran your first program. I had a few under my belt by then. And I was the guy telling you, John, look out for this. John, look out for that. And you had a small group. We sent two people, but everything went off without a hitch. And you're back there. When are we going to do this again?

Pretty self-explanatory, the banner of walk before you run. How long do you run one? That's in correlation with what the master program should be. But I think you usually have a minimum of a month to run a pilot. And you try to take a subset of the audience and involve the audience and tell them why you're doing this. You're doing this to work. It's funny when I recommend this to people, they say, really? And I say, yeah, trust me. Back to trusted advisor.

So when you're running a pilot, you want to be as inclusionary as you can with the people back at your home office and the people in the field. Because you're bringing those two entities together to say, we're running this to debug it. And we need input from the top down to the bottom up. We don't want to go, let's say, ultimately the program is going to run against 500 dealers and contractors, and you're taking a subset of 25 in a certain region to try it. Well, back to, and there's a psychological dynamic here as well, inclusionary, overused terms. The people at the home office all get their hand in the say in this. The people in the field get to contribute.

Now, there should be some baseline of what the home office delivers to say to the field. Chew on this. How does it look? How does it smell? How does it taste? Well, you don't say this. You don't say, good point. Thank you. Then they're measured. They're doing it. And the end result into that is, 45 days later, you'll already, if you've done it the right way, you already have the buy-in of those 25 guys that were involved in the pilot. And they can be your evangelist to the other 300 people you're trying to get to or whatever it is.

And you learn so much from doing a pilot. And I hate to say it, you might do it and say, this just isn't going to work. Now that we've done this, maybe this is the best pilot we ever ran because it's not going to work. It doesn't work in our environment. Not the right place, not the right time. We were thinking of running it from dot to dot to dot to dot. We've got to postpone this until Q1 of next year.

Again, you can do the pilots on a narrowed-down type of budget. You don't have to put so much investment in communications or platforms or those kinds of things. But it's back to basic marketing. You always want to test-run it before you go out and drive it for sure. So pilots are important.

Amen to that. Can bite you in the you-know-where. And then reporting and monthly program end. Well, back to communications, back to one thing you and the team need to be talking about is how are we going to measure ourselves? That measure correlates to some type of data you're taking in. That data is going to be put in a scorecard as something of what was my baseline? Where am I at now? Have I shown incremental gain? Have I shown incremental improvement here? And then any other variables along the way too.

We've all been discouraged where you're a guy in the field and you're busting your hump. And let's say you go through a 90-day period, and it's, say, January, February, March, and it's like April 15th. And it's like, well, what the heck is going on? Where do I stand? And then it's April 30th. Well, what's going on? And then it's the middle of May and you're not hearing anything, and you start to get a little discouraged and whatever. And it's because the back end didn't think they needed more time to collect that data, put it together. Who's going to put it together? You need to be timely with these things. All the more reason to run a pilot.

Specific and timely, and make sure the measure comes out, that it's, again, attainable, reasonable, all those things we said earlier about SMART, but that somebody owns that part of it too. Because the measurement part of the program and collecting the data, that's got to be somebody in the team.

Well, and I'll admit, in my, if you look at a gap in me and my sales management style, data was kind of boring to me. I want to know the end line, but the means to get there, and the data and the metrics and all the extrapolation, all that stuff. It was like, let somebody else do that.

I'm not saying that some people are really into the data and the numbers and analyzing all that. However, I'd like to put it in the Moneyball analogy. You know, the book, it's the baseball theme where this financial guru guy kind of shows up at the baseball team. I think Brad Pitt's in the movie. The Billy Beane story. And it's just coming into play that Billy Beane is a manager thinking, you know, most coaches are ex-players and they think Billy Joe is going to do this.

But so this other guy, I forget his name, Noah or something, he comes in, he starts saying, you know, I've been looking at the data. And Fox, when he's playing day games, he's going like two, three for four. But at night games, he's like one for four. And if he's placing this kind of picture versus this kind of picture, he starts putting together this data, which the coach would never have thought to do. [inaudible] of Moneyball and data, and again a balance. I think it's a little bit of the gut feel but a little bit of the data. It shouldn't be one totally the other. That the economics of that provided Oakland to accelerate their wins and actually get to the World Series because he started managing in a Moneyball way of using data and human beings together to get to the end line. And I only bring up that story because if you're not a data guy, it's an important part of the component.

And if you're not good at it, get somebody else to do it that thrives on it and brings that information. Because the point of this is at the end line of the program, you're going to need to look back at the data. And prove that there was some type of improvement. And the analytics show you should repeat this again. That's what you're aiming for.

It kind of goes back to the data, when actually back to what we did when you were talking about the trip you earned. We always had our, and this is a component of celebrate the wins, we always had a customer eval of, let's say in that case, the trip. Number one, I would line up the internal team that helped run the program and celebrate with them. Yahoo, we ran a darn good program. Don't leave them out of the equation.

It's kind of like another sports analogy where leadership needs to be thinking this way. When the Bulls were winning great back in Chicago and they got the rings, who got the rings? Everybody in the building center got a ring. It was very inclusionary. They celebrated that championship. You know how they made those people feel who were fringe players but they still got a ring, for like thousands of dollars? So that's celebrate the win, the internal team.

Then it's the input from the customer, if they felt, man, you guys ran a dynamite program. So like the travel coordinators on that trip, we gave them a little extra special recognition because you came back and they don't think they're salespeople, but I'm the first to say, you go out, you help our client with the trip or the platform, and we win that they want to do it again. You just made a sales contribution because we renewed that account. So celebrate there. And then you celebrate with the company or the employees to tell them the results that have occurred that moved the needle and where the mission and the advance of the company need to come from. So to me, you can't over-celebrate.

But just make sure it's inclusionary. Because if, again, if you have a President's Club, and again budget-wise you can't afford to send the sales assistants or the teams, but if John wins the trip and John comes back and he's talking to everybody about how great Tahiti was and all that, what do you think his admin people are— I did all the hard work, and he wins the trip.

Ifs, contingencies, thinking about that, what's a bad outcome? What could happen? You can't solve it all the time, but you're just trying to think about it. The other thing too that we found about celebrating wins, and again, I bring the marketing team into this, is that's fodder for go-around when you show the success stories. Like you guys had a cruise and we took photos of different things in your excursions and things like that. So that becomes the allure of next year when you're promoting to the channel or whatever. Hey, on the X trip of this year, we did ABC cruise and we stopped at these islands. And then that's part of the communications for next year, and people, the visibility of that and the psyche of how that starts to train your brain. It's like, that's a damn good trip. Like, I want to go on that. And I get that for free if I just meet these measures here. So you can use it for that. Great recruiting tool.

The thing is, well, we've been pontificating here for a while in this course, and you can see of the framework of 10 things, each one deserves a certain amount of time and a certain amount of attention. The heads-up is the analogy, pushing the snowball uphill, it's tough. Once it gets up there, you're pretty well okay on the other side of the mountain. But go into it with the realization of it's going to take time, it's going to take energy. Back to what you and I talked about, and you've done this, I know, in the past, is treat it like a legitimate project at the company.

Some companies are good at project management, some companies are not so good. It can go through the same litmus test of project management, put it in that scheme, and then get stakeholders' buy-in and key folks on your task force. You don't need 22, but I could easily see that there's four on a team. And then go ahead and implement from there. And then again, if you run the pilot, that's time. So yeah, you've got to earmark some time against this.

Well, you know, if you're the sales leader, it's pretty much who's around you now. If you're working with your CFO, you're working with marketing, you're working with assistants, you're working with IT. You may be not thinking of it, but it does touch almost every part of the company. To some degree, maybe a little bit of human resources, because human resources are pretty good. We have a direct team and you're running a sales contest for the direct team. But there may be some state law or ordinance or something that the sales leader guy is not thinking of that the HR guy would think, look out for this, look out for that. And maybe they're just needed for a meeting or two and then they drop off.

But at the end of the day, and we've both been with companies like this, you want buy-in from the company. It might be your idea as a sales leader and you brought it to the dance, but you want everybody dancing during the dance. And you don't want naysayers coming back to you as a sales leader and saying, well, John ran the program and he never asked me. We know how this stuff occurs in companies. So as long as everybody gets a seat at the table at the beginning, maybe they don't have to stay for the whole meal, but at least they have their time to give their input. That lends for a healthier outcome.

Yeah. Well, you can find people like us. You can go to the internet. We've discussed the components you'll need. It's not 52. It's like four. And like any other research, always go with trusted advisors, people you know, a referral, somebody who's run a program before, knew somebody that had the I's dotted and the T's crossed along the way. And maybe you can, in smaller companies, we've helped in just a consultative fashion to be the guide, to be the accountability person.

I know sometimes in my life when I'm working with a sales leader, they have all the best intentions, but other sales variables come into their life, and they're supposed to meet on Thursday about the incentive trip with their task force and they missed the meeting and they forgot it. Or they're just saying, I'm so busy and other stuff. But yet if we're there and say, hey, on Thursday at this 2 to 3:30 we're going to meet about the thing and it's going to be Zoom this time, in person this time, then that third party is actually in a nice way nudging and holding sales leadership and the task force accountable for getting this stuff done. It all depends on how you like to operate as a sales guy. I'm always the guy that I like to be coached. I like to be trained. I'm not afraid. I've got enough confidence in myself. But if I had a third party come in saying, hey there, hey there, that's going to make me better at the end of the day.

No, but you had all those notes, and here's what John gave me to go by.

Sure. We should have, could have, ought to have done it, and maybe do a soundbite or something like that. But I think in the recap mode, it's a worthy endeavor. You're the leader. Again, the leader needs to lead. You need to bring things to management that they may not be thinking of. But you want to do it that you're on solid footing when you do it because your reputation is on the line for this.

And I've seen it go from the sales leader bringing in staple of the company, which is just great. That helps your personal career. And it's something that sales leadership, myself, you have taken to other entities. There's a story to tell there. When I was at ABC, we realized this gap. We put this behind it. Here's the results we got from it. We know how to do it. We didn't stub our toe. That's another thing in your toolkit that becomes part of you being, if you wish to stay in sales or be sales leadership or move up the rank. It's another thing in your arsenal.

Absolutely. Bye.

The full scope of what's needed in my psychological income from working for you, plus my physical income, what I need to survive, that's the whole package. And I believe sales leadership needs to be purposeful about that.