An incentive program, by its very nature, should increase your sales and profit above the cost of the program. That’s simple. What’s not simple is designing and setting up the incentive program to make sure that happens – and continuously revising the program as your business and needs change. There are many factors to consider in the set-up process:

• What are your overall sales goals? Long term and short term?
• Is there a lot of variability within your target audience in terms of volume?
• Do you have enough information about your target audience to be able to create an incentive program that will appeal to them? Demographic and other info can be very helpful in designing an effective incentive program.
• What else can you think of that will improve your business that you could get out of an incentive program? Better relationship with your target audience? Better data on how your target audience behaves? Feedback on your target audience’s experience doing business with your company? Competitive information?

Answers to the questions above will help you decide which type of incentive program is best for your specific situation. Maybe you need to break your target audience into groups to make it more fair/attainable – higher volume and lower volume for instance. Maybe there’s a lot of variability within your target audience in terms of demographics, in which case you might want to consider offering multiple trips to different destinations (you would probably only want to consider this for larger groups – 300+ attendees). We’ve had clients in the past who implement a group incentive travel program to increase sales/profits and end up appreciating the additional data that’s gathered and analyzed as part of the program even more than the ROI. In many cases, a group incentive travel program will increase loyalty to the company sponsoring the incentive, which doesn’t just produce higher profit for the year of the incentive program, but for many years into the future as a result of that loyalty.

Whether you currently have a group incentive program or are thinking about starting one, the best thing you can do is to get a group incentive travel professional involved to help you design and implement your program. You don’t know what you don’t know. But you probably do know that you don’t want to miss out on a chance to really get the most out of your investment!