Author: Rob Miklas

At Quality Incentive Company, Rob is responsible for leading the company’s business development efforts in both the employee recognition and sales/channel arenas. He has more than 10 years of experience in the recognition and incentive industry, having served as president and CEO of Atlanta-based Loyaltyworks before joining QIC in 2011.

Taking Incentive Programs Back to School

August 26, 2014 by

Taking Incentive Programs Back to SchoolAs I travel around the country these days, I encounter the unmistakable signs of the “back-to-school” season – more traffic, football games, advertisements for school supplies and less crowded airplanes, just to name a few. It’s been a couple of years since our family has experienced this rite of passage first-hand – and I must admit that I miss the excitement a bit.

For us, the return to school meant encountering the possibilities and challenges created by new coursework. In addition, there were the new relationships with teachers and fellow students to be navigated. But perhaps the most important adjustment was the reapplication of the discipline required for success – which inevitably waned during the relatively unstructured pace of summer.

Reflecting on this, I think that our existing and potential clients can learn a few things from the back-to-school season when it comes to incentive programs.

  • First, this is an excellent time to ask whether education could play a role in helping drive business results. For example, if you are running or contemplating a channel incentive program, consider adding a product knowledge quiz to your program platform. Not only do such quizzes advance the expertise of your channel partners, they tend to raise overall awareness and enthusiasm among program participants.
  •  Secondly, those of you who are running sales incentive programs might benefit by considering the addition of classes of customers who are not now participants in your program, but should be. By so doing, you might identify a new participant who becomes your new best friend (so to speak).
  •  Finally, there is the topic of discipline. I can tell you that here at QIC we plan to use this season to systematically review our processes and procedures to make sure that we are operating as efficiently and “smartly” as we should. I encourage all of you who are running incentive programs, be they sales incentives or employee recognition, to do the same.

No matter how old we – or our children – get, we can all learn something in the back-to-school season. Please don’t hesitate to call upon us if we can help you with that process in any way.

Program Design: Balancing Meaningful Budgets and Measurable Expectations

June 3, 2014 by

Our sales team recently worked on a channel sales opportunity that highlighted the importance of program design – specifically balancing the program budget and participant expectations. The key to success in this process is to understand and reconcile the following factors: the value of expected incentive earnings that will be meaningful to the program participant,… Read more »

Setting The Value Proposition of Your Incentive Program – How Much is Enough?

December 9, 2013 by

I recently had a somewhat mundane, yet ironically valuable, experience that highlighted for me the importance of establishing an appropriate value proposition in your customer incentive or channel sales incentive program.  Here’s the story. I purchased a number of items at a national-chain drugstore that has a loyalty program. After supplying my program ID and… Read more »

Having an Employee Recognition or Incentive Program Is Valuable – Making It the Best is Critical

November 8, 2013 by

Two recent publications, the 2013 Incentive Market Study (Incentive Federation, Inc.) and the 2013 Colloquy Loyalty Census, present a number of very interesting facts and observations about the recognition, incentive, and loyalty market. Among the more salient of those facts are:  74% of U.S. businesses use non-cash rewards to recognize and reward key audiences, and… Read more »

Program Reviews: Key to Employee Recognition Program Success

October 16, 2013 by

It’s that time of year when many of our clients evaluate the employee recognition, or customer incentive programs that they sponsor with an eye toward their continuation and/or expansion in the upcoming year. Curtailment and abandonment are also options, but let’s not dwell on those possibilities! In all seriousness, whether the news is good, or… Read more »