It’s every trainer’s worst fear: a roomful of disinterested, “tell me something I don’t know” participants staring blankly at you, or worse yet, not even feigning interest.
Jeff McRitchie, vice president of marketing at MyBinding.com, says he encountered this too often when his customer service and inside sales teams met for important monthly training sessions.
“It reached the point where some of them were nearly asleep,” he says.
Because the information being provided directly impacts future sales revenue, this was not a problem he could allow to linger. What’s more, embarrassment was added to insult in McRitchie’s case because some of MyBinding’s suppliers were occasionally invited to introduce new product lines at these monthly meetings and witnessed the disinterest firsthand.
McRitchie decided extra motivation was in order and introduced impromptu quizzes into the mix. Now, participants who provide the best answers are rewarded on the spot with gift cards. Correct answers to his questions are worth $10 or $20 Starbucks gift cards. He also uses the meetings to publicly recognize non-sales customer service reps that have used their training to improve client interaction. These recipients receive gift cards for as much as $50 to local restaurants.
McRitchie says he also arms the visiting suppliers with gift cards and allows them to come up with their own method of handing them out during new product training sessions.
Of course, McRitchie understands the most effective way to keep employees engaged during training is to provide pertinent information that directly impacts their job performance. But even when that’s accomplished, it can be a challenge to hold people’s attention throughout regular training sessions.
The gift cards add extra excitement to the meetings and help reinforce key points. “It has really improved their focus,” McRitchie says. He also appreciates the opportunity to recognize non-sales team members in front of his internal sales team because it reinforces their importance to the overall effort.
Growth in gift card use
The effectiveness of gift cards as employee incentives is not surprising. As the popularity of prepaid cards has soared over the past decade as gifts for birthdays and holidays, they also have been used increasingly by companies as incentives and rewards for employees, channel partners and customers. According to a 2011 report by the Incentive Research Foundation (IRF), gift certificates and debit cards are the most frequently used category of non-cash rewards for both sales and non-sales employees.
In the IRF’s “Incentive Industry Trends Report 2011,” 17 percent of respondents indicated a greater use of prepaid cards in their programs. Also last year, Scott Jeffrey of Monmouth University reported that gift cards were used significantly more than cash, travel or merchandise
for employee and partner rewards among the 170 participants in the survey
“Many incentive program managers are selecting prepaid gift cards as awards, presumably due to ease of use and the believed preferences of employees,” Jeffrey states.
One benefit of gift cards is their higher perceived value, especially when the reward falls in that gift card sweet spot of $10 to $75. When you’re trying to motivate employees with incentives in that price range, gift cards have a lot more impact than cash, says McRitchie.
But he also believes enough in the motivational muscle of gift cards to use them when larger incentives are appropriate. Besides its in-house telemarketing sales team, MyBinding.com, resellers of binding machines and related office supplies, has a team of field sales reps that call on businesses in person and typically make larger sales. These customers are government entities, architects, law firms and other businesses that frequently print (and need to bind) long reports. Some binding machines the company sells cost several thousand dollars.
Occasionally, MyBinding.com gets exclusive rights to sell a new, high-end binding machine before competitors have access to it in exchange for a guarantee to sell a minimum number of the machines. McRitchie says he often puts a “bounty” on that model in the form of a $50 or $100 gift card for each sale and he watches the sales team hustle after sales.
“It’s all about whether that incentive is going to drive the action you want,” he says. “We had a monthlong offer to get a gift card with every sale once and boy, did they sell that machine! One person got $900 in gift cards,” he says.
Remember to measure ROI
Ben Dolan, vice president of marketing at Partner Professional Staffing, says gift cards as recognition items have become a popular part of the corporate culture at the Cincinnati-based recruitment firm, which specializes in placing professionals in the health care, information technology and finance industries. The company has enjoyed tremendous growth, even during the skittish economy of the past few years. At a weekly meeting of the in-house sales staff of 30 to 35 reps, anyone who has reached certain goals gets to draw from a grab bag of assorted gift cards. The cards for area restaurants and retailers range in value from $10 to $100.
“It’s something people get excited about and laugh about. It’s really built up camaraderie,” Dolan says. “If we ever stopped it would disappoint people.”
The privately held company spends upwards of $14,000 annually on gift cards, he says. “It’s a real commitment in terms of the partners putting money into these rewards.”
As with any good incentive program, Partner PS, as it is commonly called, makes sure the return on investment exceeds the cost of the rewards. Dolan records what gift cards are pulled and by what employees. He notes the division the employee works in and what goal was reached that qualified that employee to pull from the grab bag.
The company also uses gift cards in its promotions. At a recent trade show, anyone who visited the Partner PS booth could enter their name in a drawing for a $1,000 Best Buy gift card
