Types of Decision-Makers

Who makes the decisions about engagement and Incentives, Rewards, and Recognition (IRR) programs is based on the audience for the campaign — employees, consumers or business customers, distribution and supply chain partners, and communities. When speaking to these decision-makers, you ought to remember that many aren't aware of the formal engagement or IRR field and related Enterprise Engagement technologies.

One of the big advantages of CarltonOne's technologies is the ability to provide solutions for all stakeholders. That means we can get our foot in the door of one department, demonstrate our capabilities, and sell laterally. The challenge, of course, is that many organizations have silos between different departments, sometimes significant enough to make it all but impossible to cross-sell, so it’s important to try to assess the culture as you get to know your first contacts.

Enterprise Engagement Solutions

As more organizations learn about an enterprise approach to engagement across the company, they will recognize the benefits of technology that can work across different departments. Also, it never hurts to build good relationships with anyone in the C-suite, particularly the CEO or the CFO.

Non-Sales Employees

In most mid-size to larger companies, the decision for most types of employee engagement, recognition, and reward programs are managed by human resources. At smaller organizations, that task often falls to the CFO or COO, who often is responsible for human resources as well. Or, at other firms, the job of sourcing engagement and IRR services and technologies is often relegated to a committee of lower-level managers and even employee committees, who usually have limited knowledge of effective practices and technologies. These same people would be involved with employee benefits and employee gifting platforms.

Sales Employees

Unlike in the human resources area, in which engagement and incentives, rewards, and recognition are treated as a cost with little return-on-investment (ROI) measurement, sales engagement efforts usually involve senior sales management, as the campaigns are directly related to achieving key performance indicators (KPIs). The task of finding an engagement solution will likely be left to a lower-level sales administration employee, but senior management often gets more involved specifically because the campaign is considered key to hitting a sales goal or objective. Generally, these same managers would be involved with gifting solutions.

Channel/Dealer Programs

Only organizations that sell through distributors, wholesalers, retailers, independent brokers, and agents use so-called channel or dealer incentive programs. This can include spirit and wine companies, insurance and financial services firms, automobile makers, consumer electronics, food and packaged goods, computer chips, and many other products and services. If the organization sells both directly to consumers and through resellers, there often would be a separate decision-maker for channel programs in either the sales or marketing division. Because the channel management departments are usually smaller, the channel management team often gets quite involved with vendor selection. Business gifting decisions reside in the same hands as most sales organizations, although it could fall to a lower-level decision-maker/gatekeeper.

Consumer Loyalty Programs

Responsibility for engaging consumers almost always falls within the marketing department. Larger organizations have someone within marketing specifically in charge of loyalty.

The Elevator Pitch

Even though the goal of all good salespeople is to close a sale as soon as possible, we usually have to get our audience's attention with a quick, benefits-focused pitch first.

The number one mistake solution providers make in their pitch is to focus on what they want to sell rather than what the customer wants to buy. This becomes immediately apparent when you view a solution provider's advertising or website. They focus heavily on rewards because that’s what they sell, even though the issue of rewards isn't usually high on an organization’s list of pain points. In fact, most organizations still buy rewards and gifts through retail because they are unaware that there are experts who can assist with program design, technology, and measurement.

No organization purchases engagement or IRR technologies and services for the sake of it. There is always a goal they are trying to accomplish—employee retention, productivity, quality, wellness, safety, referrals, or participation in environmental efforts; increased sales or a new product launch; repeat or increased purchases, referrals, and more attention from resell partners.

Your pitch should address the decision-maker's goal and explain how your services and CarltonOne’s solutions can help accomplish them.

What does this mean for your elevator pitch?

The story

Focus your marketing and sales message on pain points that engagement, IRR campaigns, and our technologies can address—not on your services and technologies. You can tell audiences:

• “Our clients come to us for help addressing key employee engagement challenges. We identify and improve issues to enhance productivity, quality, retention, and their willingness to refer.”
• “We help clients enhance culture and cohesiveness just like CRM did for customer management by digitizing all aspects of employee engagement and experience on a single platform that can connect all stakeholders to organizational goals.”
• “Imagine if your employees and other stakeholders gave you permission to lay cable into their hearts and minds so you could do everything possible to enhance their experience and performance while respecting their privacy.”

Understanding the prospective client

Before targeting an organization, look at their web site and LinkedIn page to get a sense of their business; determine potential pain points, or other factors that might affect their receptivity to an engagement or IRR solution. Are they well-established, up and coming, or a launch? Are they in a growth, mature, or declining industry? Do they publish a Corporate Sustainability or Human Capital Report? What do they say about their people on their website or in their report? 

Understanding the potential decision-maker

Make sure to check the LinkedIn profile of anyone you are contacting, as well as the profile for their organization. It also helps to find the names of other related decision-makers under the People tab. Read their introductions and review their backgrounds for indications of their priorities, values, and view of people in business. Try to find key words you can use in an email, call or voice mail or discussion that demonstrates you’ve taken the time to get to know who they are.

Getting in the Door

Generally, sellers of engagement and IRR solutions should start by focusing on companies with annual sales of at least $10 million or 50 or more non-sales employees, salespeople, distribution partners, business-to-business or other customers.

After you find the appropriate companies to target, you'll have to identify their decision-makers. The key challenge here is that almost no one has the terms "engagement" and "IRR" in their titles. On top of that, there is no standard buying season, other than the time leading up to the fourth-quarter holiday season. And while many organizations plan their engagement strategies and tactics for the year ahead, some seek solutions to address a short-term program.

The only way to optimize the chances of success is to identify the companies you wish to do business with and provide them with helpful information on a regular basis. This strategy sets you apart as someone who wishes to help rather than just hit a sales quota.

Most salespeople also agree that between voice mail, email, and the remote work environment, it has become more difficult than ever to break into a new prospect. Obviously, most salespeople start wherever they may know someone who knows someone or by frequenting business events attended by prospects. These remain highly effective way to make a connection with someone willing to take a call. And after you establish that initial connection, the best way to build relationships is by providing useful information (such as a statistics and research studies) via email and occasional calls and voice mails.

Build your prospect list

LinkedIn provides useful tools in its Sales Navigator platform (for about $50 per month) that enables you to develop targeted lists based on the types and sizes of companies you are trying to reach. To access the email addresses of people who do not provide them, there are paid services such as ZoomInfo and others that offer this information for most business professionals.

Tighten up your story

Once you find decision-makers and their contact information, develop a message to use in your emails, calls, or voice mails that focus on the benefit to the recipient, not on what you are trying to sell. Include useful information, research, or case studies to substantiate your points. Tag content posted by potential customers or influencers in your field and follow potential customers.

Create a call to action

Give someone a reason to speak with you, such as a complimentary evaluation of an issue they're facing to create an additional benefit. Or surprise and delight them with a carefully selected gift or tip after the call.

Provide examples of how you’ve helped clients

With new prospects, a key goal is to reduce the sense of risk. Having case studies of programs you or CarltonOne have implemented can have an impact, especially if you can share the client’s name. People want reassurance that your organization has experience with situations like theirs.

Tell your story through LinkedIn and an e-newsletter

Use your own LinkedIn platform to share useful information and insights at least twice a week. Then combine that info into two e-newsletters a month with four news items each from the LinkedIn posts using a platform like Constant Contact or Mailchimp and track the people who open your e-newsletters. If you have loaded the complete contact information into the e-newsletter platform, the report will show the email and phone number of the person who opened or click through from the e-newsletter, so you can just pick up the phone to call or email them.

About a week after sending out each e-newsletter, call and email those who opened or click through with a personalized message. There is no reason to tell the person that you saw they read your e-newsletter, because they may not even remember that they did. Do not use this call to sell, but rather to find out if you can help.

The percentages are low for results in this process, but the return on investment (ROI) is very high since one sale can more than pay for the effort.

Discovery Selling

When a salesperson finally has a prospect on a call, it’s tempting to jump right into the presentation process. Of course, the person needs to know how your organization can help, but the best approach beyond the initial introduction is to listen. The more your prospect opens up, the more you learn about how your organization can help.

One of the major reasons salespeople are hesitant to ask questions is because they often feel ill-equipped to provide on-the-spot solutions. In fact, there is no reason to offer on-the-spot solutions, because the discovery process starts by disclosing that you are asking the questions to identify specifically how your organization can help. You can say that you will either be able to provide some immediate insights or suggestions or will get back to them shortly. (After the call, you can contact your CarltonOne team for answers).

After providing a concise, benefits-oriented summary of how your organization helps clients, it’s important to shift the focus to the interests of the potential customer. While you need to know their budget, generally it appears self-serving to ask that question. It’s best to assess the opportunity by asking more indirect questions. You can start with a message like this:

“Before I dive into the details of how we help clients, it would be useful to you if I can better understand your challenges.”

Depending on the type of audience your client manages, you can ask:

“What are your most pressing priorities or challenges when it comes to engaging your people?”

Obviously, if the answer is that the organization has no challenges, the individual is either deceiving you or themselves, or you have quickly learned there is not much hope for a sale.

When prospects do identify a challenge, it’s your job to flesh out the specifics to determine if you or CarltonOne can help. Depending on the challenge, follow up questions can include:

• How urgent is this challenge?
• What is the benefit of resolving this challenge in terms of dollars or other measurable results? (This helps you determine budget potential.)
• What is your current strategy for addressing the issue?
• Are you satisfied with the path you are on?
• What have you or your organization done to address this or similar problems that have occurred in the past?
• Are there any other solutions you are looking at right now? What type of solution looks most promising right now?
• Does your organization have a digital engagement and/or rewards solution of any kind?

Chances are, if the client is uncomfortable with these questions, they're either not qualified or too embarrassed to answer. Be attentive to body language (which is why video calls are so important until you can meet face-to-face).

Remember, you do not have to provide prospects with immediate answers. Your job is to take good notes and to carefully repeat back your understanding of each point so that you are certain of what the prospect has said, which also lets the prospect know you're listening.

After recapping your understanding, you'll know to focus your presentation on the features that address their challenges or opportunities.

At some point in the meeting, you can either float some initial insights on a possible solution or set up a follow-up appointment with the prospect where you can share specific recommendations. If the prospect requests that you send the recommendations in writing first, a good answer is to say that it always helps to have one more quick call to discuss ideas before putting them in writing. If the prospect insists otherwise, you have no choice but to put those recommendations in writing and request a time for the next appointment to discuss.

Never leave a sales call without trying to set up a time for another call. The best way to do this is by letting the prospect know how a follow-up will benefit them.

What to look for in Enterprise Engagement Technology

There are dozens of platforms for employee recognition, sales and channel incentives, customer loyalty, and gifting. Some of them specifically focus on rewards, others address assessment and feedback, performance management, communications, social recognition, learning, referrals, wellness, safety, and more.

Enterprise Engagement platforms like Power2Motivate support all or most of these key engagement levers on one platform, no matter what the audience.

This means that a client can begin with something as basic as a gifting program or employee service rewards program, and gradually add features and even different types of audience programs as needed.

Because engagement almost always involves the same key elements no matter what the audience, an Enterprise Engagement technology platform is far more cost efficient and scalable than a platform that only focuses on one specific aspect of IRR. Using multiple software applications to address these issues significantly increases the cost of integration and reporting, while diminishing the user experience.

CarltonOne’s technology is used by organizations for all types of engagement and IRR programs, addressing all sorts of engagement issues.

When evaluating engagement technologies, it’s important to ask:

1. How many years has the company been in business; what types of clients does it have, and does it have any clients in your industry?
2. What is its business model for the technology, advisory services, and rewards? Are they setup or SaaS fees and/or monthly minimums? Are points payable upon issuance and/or upon redemptions? Is there a breakage model—retained fees for unredeemed points?
3. What types of audiences can it help engage—sales and non-sales employees, distribution partners, customers?
4. What types of specific engagement features can it support (communications, assessment and feedback, learning, social recognition, rewards, benefits referrals, wellness and safety, analytics, and more)?
5. Is it necessary to pay for the entire platform or is it possible to get started with a basic program?
6. What kinds of customer support is provided in terms of program design, measurement, or implementation (this includes communication and any training)?
7. What platform is the software written in—something widely used or highly proprietary with only a small development community?
8. What types of reports can the technology provide for level of engagement, demographics, behaviors, performance, feedback, willingness to refer of users, as well as overall outcomes? Is the data exportable for use in advanced analytics?
9. What are the rewards options—cash, electronic or plastic gift cards, merchandise, experiences, individual travel packages, online travel bookings—and how will they be fulfilled in countries worldwide?

Steps to Success

Here is a concise guide on how to make sure your program is effectively designed and implemented on your technology platform.

Performance is the goal

It's important to recognize that while properly designed engagement campaigns can have a measurable positive impact on performance and other desired outcomes, poorly designed programs can have negative consequences by encouraging people to cut corners or otherwise manipulate their behavior to obtain rewards and recognition.

The challenge is that many managers believe it’s as simple as coming up with a goal, picking a nice reward, announcing the campaign, and hoping the carrot offered for success and the implied “stick” for failure will do enough. In fact, common sense and research confirm that your program will have much greater chances of success if it addresses all the key levers of engagement.

This is where CarltonOne’s Enterprise Engagement technology comes into play. We make it easy for you to address all the key levers of engagement to ensure people will succeed.

Step 1: Identify Goals and Objectives

• What do you want to achieve in qualitative and quantitative terms?
• Has anyone ever achieved that level of performance in the past and if so, what was done to accomplish that goal?
• What specific actions will help achieve the desired goals (for example, making more sales presentations, reporting workplace hazards, referring employees or customers)?
• What obstacles potentially stand in the way of success?

Step 2: Determine the Potential ROI and How it Will be Measured

• What is the benefit of achieving these goals for your department or organization?
• Who will collect the information and how, and with whom will it be shared?
• How much of the incremental performance can your organization share with those who achieve or exceed their goals?

Step 3: Establish the Rules

• What specific results or actions will earn rewards and recognition? It’s always a good idea to have an employee resource group available for suggestions and feedback to ensure buy-in.
• Establish the value to the organization of achieving those results in dollars if possible.
• Based on the value to the organization, establish the value of the rewards offered to people for achieving those goals.
• How will those results and actions be tracked? It generally makes sense to have about three performance measures, at least one of them the desired outcome, like a sales target, and two others encouraging actions related to the sale—making more cold calls, making more presentations.
• How will you make sure that only the top performers who would have achieved your goals anyway aren’t the only ones encouraged to enhance their performance? It pays to reward everyone in an audience for incremental performance so that you benefit from encouraging the middle-60% and not simply your top performers—this is called an open-ended structure.
• How long will the campaign run?

Step 4: Plan the Campaign

• What type of regular communications and related leaderboards will be used to make sure your audience is fully aware of the campaign and how they are doing?
• How will you assess their performance and engagement with the platform along the way?
• How will you make sure everyone has access to the information they need—not only to work more effectively, but to feel inspired, such as case studies, news, or research that supports their efforts?
• How will you foster mutual support and encouragement across your audience? This is where the use of social recognition technology comes into play.
• What will you do to create a sense of fun and excitement in terms of intangible recognition and tangible rewards for incremental or superior performance? The goal is to identify the specific types of tangible and intangible rewards and their value, which is required to express meaningful appreciation commensurate with results.
• How will you continually monitor results and adjust along the way should certain aspects of the campaign fall short?

Step 5: Configure your Enterprise Engagement Technology Platform

• Based on the requirements of the campaign, including the behaviors being tracked and reports required, configure your technology to address all the key engagement levers in the plan. This is where the benefits of Enterprise Engagement technology comes into play—it’s much easier to address the key levers of engagement on one platform than to integrate multiple platforms into one user experience and reporting platform.
• In the deployment plan, be sure that all administrators, managers, and employees fully understand the features of the technology. A fun way to make sure everyone is fully trained on the technology is by letting them earn bonus points for accessing a tutorial and passing a quick test on how to get the most out of the platform.
• Set up reporting that tracks how often people use different features, what they're using each feature for, and how this correlates to their demographics and their performance.
• Test the campaign with a select group to ensure users know how to easily interact with each of its features.

Step 6: Implementation

• Treat each launch as a campaign—consider a print and/or or electronic “launch” kit, with very clear ongoing communications, providing people with tips, case studies, success stories, recognition, gamified learning opportunities, and the ability to provide feedback.
• Check the reporting weekly and get updates from managers and employees on their feelings about the campaign; better yet, use an assessment module that lets people provide instant feedback.
• Depending on the length of the campaign, hold weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly meetings with key stakeholder on the results to identify trends, problems, or opportunities for improvement. You want to have enough time to take corrective action if problems occur.

Step 7: Measurement

There are multiple ways to measure the outcomes of an engagement or IRR campaign that are generally easier to evaluate than other performance improvement efforts.

• Start by evaluating the specific results being generated during the campaign correlated with your forecast and/or past performance, tracking it by your top performers, middle-60% and others.
• If you assigned a dollar value to the results or behaviors being encouraged, run an ROI report showing the benefits against the costs. Remember that ROI can be measured on qualitative goals as well—like seeing whether goals were attained or not.
• Study the behavioral data—what is the relationship between the performance of people and their usage of whatever engagement features you have included on the platform? The more you can correlate data from different engagement features, the better you can establish what works and what doesn’t and with who for future planning purposes.
• Based on that analysis, seek to determine which combination of engagement features/levers have the most impact, if any.
• Several months after a campaign ends, you can track the same metrics to see how performance and behaviors have changed.

Step 8: Reporting

Ironically, the three areas critical to effective return on investment get the least attention in most programs: program design, ROI measurement, and reporting. The process of reporting includes up to five steps:

1. Collecting the data

One of the most important factors in reporting, beyond identifying the information that can help drive better decisions, is making sure the information is easy to accurately collect. Look for information people are already collecting and using, or which people would find useful if it was available. Be sure to involve key stakeholders in these decisions, as well as consult with the Enterprise Engagement technology company or your human resources management about their systems.

2. Analyzing the data.

Many companies do little more than measure an audience's response to or awareness of a campaign, rather than seriously analyzing the quantitative and qualitative ROI. The benefit of combining results with behavior metrics is that you get to see the correlation between outcomes and actions.

For example, if the organization achieves its goals without people participating in the engagement campaign, then an immediate hypothesis would suggest that either the results would have occurred anyway or that the rewards were sufficient and well enough communicated to participants.

On the other hand, if further analysis shows a high level of breakage, otherwise known as unredeemed rewards, that could indicate a lack of appreciation for the full value of the reward.

Or, if people engaged in all the tools provided, and you still didn't reach your goal, then obviously other factors contributed to performance.

Clues about the potential reason could be available in the assessment and feedback tool of the platform used to set up the campaign. Whatever data is shared should come with at least some facts-based hypotheses to explain the outcome and make suggestions for future efforts.

3. Distributing information to the right people.

The campaign champion shouldn't only share the data and analysis with other managers and their direct reports but with the CFO or even the CEO if possible. It’s important to have an accessible record of the business principles the campaign was based on and the measurable results.

4. Acting on the data.

The biggest mistake you could make with employee engagement surveys is not doing anything with the results. The campaign champion should be ready to make sure that whatever findings come out of the program are shared with all interested stakeholders and the appropriate action is taken.

5. External reporting.
   
   More and more companies are now publishing Human Capital/Sustainability reports that explain their people management activities. If your company publishes such reports, you should contact the person in charge to make sure they're aware of your efforts, especially as they relate to employees, in case what you are doing is important to disclose publicly. Click here for samples of Human Capital reports.

Getting Started

We believe most executives will soon see the benefit of Enterprise Engagement technologies for all their stakeholders, just as they did for CRM technology. In the meantime, any company can get started by addressing a specific department, audience, or business challenge, such as sales, wellness, safety, referrals, or recognition.

One of the advantages of the Enterprise Engagement technology provided by companies like CarltonOne is that you can start with a simple program and grow from there.

The goal is not only to test the efficacy of a more formal, technology-based engagement effort, but to gain experience before you use it throughout your organization.

Organizations can start with any one of these different types of programs and expand in almost any direction:

• Consumer and business customer loyalty; to customer support, sales, and sales support; to all employees to create a customer-focused culture.

• Employee recognition for engagement in organizational goals or key behaviors as well as gainsharing for goal achievement.

• Sales incentives for performance and in support of key sales behaviors; to sales support employees; to all employees to create a customer-focused organization.

• Channel programs focused on the distributor partner owner for purchases can extend to the that company’s sales force and customer service personnel for both sales and repeat business.

• Safety or wellness incentives; to employee engagement efforts that promote key organizational behaviors or rewards for productivity, quality, service, and more.

• At any time, an organization can add surveys and enable feedback, learning and quizzes, social recognition for peer-to-peer and manager-to-peer recognition, or incentives for referrals to look for the connections between the various layers of your service value chain.

The great news about Enterprise Engagement is that you can walk before you run — you can be confident that the end-result is a new level of focus, alignment, and dedication across all stakeholders towards your organizational goals.