Motivation Excellence Welcomes Cherrie Tebeau in New Role as VP, Sourcing & Industry Relations
We are excited to welcome a new member to our leadership team this week! Cherrie Tebeau is joining us in a brand-new role as VP, Sourcing & Industry Relations. Cherrie’s extensive background in the incentives industry will benefit everyone at Motivation Excellence, including clients, supplier partners and internal colleagues.
“She is highly respected in our space. Bringing her on board will deepen our already strong vendor partnerships, giving our clients the best pricing and most creative solutions to enhance our programs,” says Bob Graham, President & CEO.
In her 25 years in our industry, Cherrie has held positions in sales and travel buying on the incentive agency side of things, as well as procurement and contract negotiations for a destination management company.
“We are investing even more in our industry relationships through creating this position and filling it with Cherrie. She will be a huge benefit to our existing travel team and all of our clients,” adds Brad Hecht, Sr. VP of Travel & Chief Travel Strategist.
Graham envisions Cherrie’s role as one that will focus on how we provide and position solutions that will elevate our clients’ overall experience.
“Augmenting our travel sourcing team and contributing subject matter expertise during the proposal process will bolster our sales team. Having Cherrie dedicated to building new supplier partners and sustaining our current ones will have a positive effect for our clients through expanding options and ideas,” Bob explains.
Cherrie says she’s excited about joining the Motivation Excellence team because of our outstanding reputation in the industry.
“When I started sharing the news with my industry contacts, the responses I got were overwhelmingly positive regarding Motivation Excellence. That certainly makes the transition for me very exciting and positive,” Cherrie says.
To hear more about Cherrie’s thoughts on being a new part of the Motivation Excellence team, watch this short video.
Channel Incentives: Boosting Partner Performance and Engagement
Has your organization been looking for ways to boost partner performance and engagement? Are you tired of the same, old promotional gimmicks? If so, it’s time to try something new. Consider investing in B2B channel incentives.
Channel incentives are customized reward programs designed to do more than just show token appreciation for the job your partners do day in and day out. They are designed to go above and beyond in a way that truly motivates performance and engagement.
Designing and implementing channel incentives is what we do here at Motivation Excellence. We work with you to learn about your business needs and derive the best goals to meet them. It’s a consultative approach that we back up with the detailed dedication needed to run an engaging, successful and totally custom-created program.
Channel Incentive Elements
Channel incentives come in all shapes and sizes, so to speak. We appreciate variety because it gives us an opportunity to customize every incentive program down to the finest detail. The elements are flexible and include:
- Goals – being specific here is important to the design of the program
- Budget – will this come from incremental sales, vendor buy-in, a budgeted line-item, or a combination
- Rules – these lay the groundwork for success and expectations
- Performance management and tracking – data analytics are important to track for management and participants
- Rewards – travel, lifestyle upgrade packages or award points, to name a few
- Marketing – engaging participants is a special skill set and critical to the overall success of the program
We work with our clients to make sure their goals are met within their budget while meaningfully motivating the people who mean the most to the success of their business. A great channel incentive maximizes results and minimizes risks.
Channel Incentive Benefits
There are a lot of reasons to run an incentive with your distribution channel. One of the biggest is differentiation. If you’re in a market that’s saturated with competitors, running an incentive can be the way to gain attention and new customers. Channel incentives with motivating rewards can increase B2B customer loyalty, which can begin a lasting relationship well into the future.
Cost effectiveness is another benefit of running a well-designed channel incentive program. When we design a program, we like to see the program pay for itself, and then some, through incremental sales. Programs that run year after year can continue to bring in incremental gains as participants work to outperform their activity from the previous period.
Channel incentives can be very flexible too. They can run for a short period of time, like a quarter, or longer stretches. They can coincide with a new product launch. Incentive programs can include rewards for completing training, making your B2B customer an expert (and advocate) on your product versus the competition. The flexibility options are nearly endless!
Channel Incentive Management
This part is really important. A channel incentive that is launched and not managed after that will die a quick and quiet death. Management includes participant engagement. It includes regular metric checks. It might mean the program gets tweaked from time to time to maximize results or avoid costly hiccups. Working with a skilled partner, like our experts at Motivation Excellence, is the best way to ensure success and minimize risk. We recently published a blog reviewing how we handle performance management and tracking within our B2B loyalty and incentive programs. It includes a detailed Q&A with our Client Performance Manager, so if you have questions about what it entails please check it out. In the meantime, here’s a quick list of some of the ways we work with our clients to manage their loyalty or incentive programs:
- Regular client review sessions set up at intervals that make sense for the program and client
- Marketing support like emails, postcards, texts and gift mailings
- Data-driven performance websites that give management and participants one place to get instant program updates
- In-house customer service for participants redeeming award points or registering for a group travel reward
Channel incentives are a must in today’s highly competitive market. They are critical to boosting performance and increasing engagement. For more information about how we develop and deploy channel incentives, give us a call or shoot us an email today. We’d love to give you a free consultation anytime!
Performance Management & Tracking Yield Key Business Intelligence for B2B Loyalty and Sales Incentive Programs
Loyalty and incentive programs can be truly transformational. When designed and executed well, they provide great ROI for your company and stronger relationships with the people who mean the most to the success of your business. In addition, our clients gain valuable business intelligence through our performance management and tracking offerings. Sometimes, we provide information they didn’t even know they were missing!
Our Guide to Group Travel Incentives for Sales Teams and Channel Partners
Group travel incentives are a major part of our business here at Motivation Excellence. We are firm believers in group travel incentives for sales teams and channel partners because we’ve seen decades of positive results. With that in mind, we have put together a small guide offering a rundown of everything you should know on this topic. Reach out to us for more information about arranging group travel incentives for your organization.
Why Group Travel Incentives Work
Group travel is a fantastic incentive on many levels. For example, incentive travel motivates sales team members and channel partners to achieve their sales targets by way of a tangible and exciting reward. Travel is something people look forward to, especially when it’s something they couldn’t necessarily plan on their own. And, even though it’s being paid for through increased sales by the earners, to them it feels like it’s on the house!
Group travel incentives also work for sales teams and channel partners because they:
- Enhance engagement and loyalty
- Strengthen relationships with the people who mean the most to your bottom line
- Provide a competitive environment that boosts sales
- Provide a means of attracting new talent for internal teams, and new customers for external channel partners
- Offer the opportunity to combine both work and rest in a beautiful setting
- Create lasting memories that emotionally tie the travelers to your company
Best of all, group travel incentives offer a significant return on investment (ROI). Travel events ultimately pay for themselves by generating sales, differentiation in the market, and loyalty.
How to Plan a Successful Group Travel Incentive Program
Planning is critical to pulling off any group travel incentive. The planning stage has a myriad of critical steps, including these:
- Define Your Objectives – This means figuring out the purpose for the incentive and what you hope to accomplish for your target participants.
- Establish a Budget – Exactly what the experience looks like will depend heavily on your budget and how you plan to generate it.
- Choose a Destination – The destination should motivate your participants, match your budget and tie into the theme of your incentive program.
- Tailor the Itinerary – The itinerary can be a mix of team-building exercises, activity options, leisure time, and networking with company executives and fellow high achievers.
- Personalize the Event – As you zero in on the end of the planning process, be sure to find ways to personalize the event.
- Communicate – Engaging with your target audience before, during and after the travel incentive is important to tying the experience all together for your winners.
The level of planning directly correlates with the effectiveness of the experience. Our travel team at Motivation Excellence has 40 years of experience creating and executing award-winning incentive travel programs. When you work with us, we can offer our expertise on the rule structure to qualify, the destinations that will work the best for your budget the best way to motivate performance improvement.
Why Working with Experts Is Worth It
Running an Incentive travel program is definitely not DIY. Enlisting the help of an expert is worthwhile for several reasons:
- Our industry relationships, decades of experience and contract negotiation skills will keep your budget in check, while delivering incredible service and attention to detail.
- We can handle everything from planning to executing, including all logistics, performance management and marketing.
- We have access to exclusive experiences that would otherwise be unavailable for your event.
- We customize group travel incentives to maximize their business impact, thereby maximizing ROI, while minimizing risks.
- And most importantly, we make sure it operates to exceed you and your participants’ expectations
Any organization can arrange for employees or partners to travel. But maximizing travel incentives requires a lot more than going online and booking a few hotel rooms. If you are interested in how group travel can benefit your organization, Motivation Excellence is standing by to help.
Sales Incentives Motivate Performance Improvement and Retain Talent for Long-term Gains
Blog Summary:
· Sales incentives drive measurable performance improvements by motivating your sales team at all levels—especially the middle 60%, which can yield significant revenue increases with even small gains.
· Flexible and well-designed incentive programs align with business goals—everything ranging from short-term boosts to long-term engagement can inspire both individual and team achievements.
· Incentives support sales team member retention and loyalty by adding value to compensation packages, enhancing employee recognition, and fostering a culture of appreciation and motivation.
· When structured correctly, incentives can pay for themselves through incremental revenue gains, compliance, and best practice adoption, especially when rewards are meaningful and tailored to the sales team’s preferences.
Sales Incentives Offer Many Benefits
Getting incentives for outperforming your peers is instilled in us at an early age. Whether it was selling the most Girl Scout cookies for your troop or the most wrapping paper at your elementary school, taking a run at being the top contender definitely could have predestined you to a life in sales as an adult. But, if the reward for being the best wasn’t very good, the motivation to get to the top fell flat too, right?
Running well-designed sales incentive programs at your company can bring in a variety of benefits for both your business and your sales team. You can plan short-term and long-term programs. You can target segments of your sales team to motivate unique behavior changes at different levels.
Rewards for achieving goals can range from exclusive group travel experiences to points that can be redeemed online for almost anything, including individual travel, lifestyle upgrades, trending merchandise, and special event tickets. You can also reward in tiers, so those who bring in more business get rewarded at a level equal to their effort.
Our experts at Motivation Excellence know how to create sales incentive programs that Inspire Extraordinary Performance and can pay for themselves, plus deliver great long-term gains.
Improve Performance
Improving performance is the number one reason our clients run sales incentive programs. Sales incentives have a proven record of boosting performance and can be effectively used to motivate your entire sales force. The Incentive Research Foundation shows how even a small gain from the middle 60% of your team can yield significantly more revenue than the same shift in your top-performing group.
That’s why employing a targeted incentive plan can be a lucrative deal for everyone involved. Your best performers can vie for the top reward, but anyone making improvements gets something. This can encourage healthy competition within your sales team while also motivating achievements on a personal level. When performance gets better, so do the reward opportunities!
Incentives can be very flexible. You can run year-over-year incentives, or schedule them for shorter time periods if it makes sense for your sales cycle. Encouraging sales of a specific item, either because it’s brand new or yields a better margin, can lead to quick gains. The built-in excitement over a limited-time incentive helps drive momentum. Engaging in longer term sales incentives allows team members to plan ahead and perhaps drive in bigger gains. They’re also a great opportunity to track valuable metrics that can be useful for end-of-year review periods.
Whether they’re short- or long-term, sales incentives can keep your team engaged and motivated to perform at a higher level than they did in the period prior.
Retain Talent
There are quite a few things that add to the desirability of working somewhere. Obviously base salary, vacation time, and health insurance are at the top of the list for many! Offering additional benefits like a flexible work environment and education reimbursement can be very appealing as well. Recognizing milestones and special achievements, along with offering incentives for your sales team, helps build a culture where people can see themselves thriving for years.
We advise our clients that retaining top talent, and thus, increasing profits over the long haul, takes three distinct compensation elements: salary, recognition and incentives. They each have a role to play. Combined, they offer stability, acknowledgment, and engagement.
For the recognition and incentive elements, the rewards are key to making these worth the extra effort. They need to have value to your salesperson. If they don’t, they won’t offer anything to an overall benefits package. If they do, you’ve created additional ways to make your team feel valued.
Incentives Can Pay for Themselves
The right rule structure is imperative from the start of any incentive. When we know our clients’ goals, target audience, and some simple sales data, we can build an incentive that pays for itself – and then some – just with incremental gains.
Determining the desired rewards and their cost allows us to back into the performance expectations required to earn them. Selecting motivating rewards, like a group travel experience with company executives to Thailand… or the ability to earn once-in-a-lifetime tickets to a big sporting event… or the option to rent a vacation home for the family, is the lynchpin for the incentive to be successful.
Sales incentives can certainly be a fun, creative, and flexible way to motivate improved performance. This blog focuses on internal sales teams, but everything we’ve written is true for channel partner incentives, too. If you’re interested in reading more about the benefits of channel partner incentives, please check out these recent blogs:
How Incentivizing Channel Partners Helps Your Business Thrive
Channel Partner Engagement: Common Challenges and Overcoming Them
The 4-Step Process for Measuring Channel Incentive ROI
Explore our website and reach out to us if you’d like to consult about how best to run a successful incentive for your company!
Elevating Performance Through Incentive Travel: Uniting Sales Teams and Channel Partners
Unlike traditional bonuses or SPIFFs, incentive travel taps into deeper psychological drivers: the desire for recognition, the thrill of exclusive experiences, and the opportunity to connect with peers in inspiring settings. Research shows that:
86% of sales professionals rank travel rewards as more motivating than cash incentives (2022 IRF Destination Preferences Study)
Channel partners who attend incentive travel programs demonstrate 32% higher year-over-year retention (IRF Partner Study 2024)
The reason is simple: Incentive travel transforms transactional relationships into shared journeys of success.
Sales Incentives Are Important to Channel Partner Loyalty – Here’s Why
Key Summary
Channel partners boost sales—They act as an extension of your team (dealers, distributors, reps) and need incentives to stay loyal.
Incentives drive performance—Travel rewards, competitive perks, and training motivate partners to sell more and stick with your brand.
Long-term success requires alignment—Shared goals and strategic rewards (like exclusive benefits) strengthen partnerships and growth.
We love channel partners here at Motivation Excellence. We understand they are integral to the success of many of our clients. So, if we can motivate them with sales incentives, we know our clients will be happy. The big question for you is this: why are sales incentives so important to your channel partners?
What You Can Gain from Group Travel Incentives
At Motivation Excellence, we LOVE group travel incentives! For sales incentives, whether for your internal team or channel partners, a group travel award is coveted, and thus very motivational. For the right audience, travel experiences as rewards are phenomenal ways to engage, connect and foster performance improvements from the people who mean the most to the success of your business!
Group travel is a complex beast. But, with us as your partner, your team and participants only see the shiny, fun exterior because we put in all the sweat equity behind the scenes. As with any sales incentive, it needs to be managed in just the right way so that participants are engaged and rewarded, and our clients are secure in their budget and goal attainment.
A Plethora of Goals
Group travel incentives can be defined by one or more goals. So, it’s important for businesses to really understand what they want to accomplish before designing an incentive program that culminates in a group travel award. Below are examples of five goals we routinely design travel incentive programs around:
1. Improving Performance
According to the Incentive Research Foundation, an estimated 91% of travel incentive participants find travel incentives ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ motivating. Those are some impressive numbers! With a fantastic travel program as motivation, improving performance to earn it gets some added priority. Of course, offering the right destination for the audience is a critical component. Budget also comes into play, but we have 40 years of experience helping clients fit great destinations into their budget.
2. Relationship Building
Group travel experiences are great at building relationships between the executive team and the people working so hard to improve the bottom line. Planning small group activities or dinners so leadership can interact with top performers in a relaxed setting is one way we nurture relationship building. When you see a whale breach 100 feet away together, the shared experience builds memories which create fondness and leads to loyalty. Significant others become more than acquaintances which can lead to friendships outside the business world.
3. Building Brand Loyalty
Travel awards tend to be powerful and positive experiences. For B2B channels, they’re also a great venue to add value to a business relationship through networking and training sessions. Including preferred vendors, adding small group session options and organization product demonstrations will highlight how your business is able to put all the pieces in place for easy one-stop-shopping and support.
4. Sharing Organizational Insights
Yet another opportunity group travel offers is the ability to spend time sharing organizational insights with sales teams and distribution partners. Announcing a new product, giving insight into company goals and strategies or offering best practices for continued growth or steps to the sale are all ways to connect with your internal sales team or B2B channel partners. Combine all that with being in a great location with plenty of fun activities too and you’ve captured attention and fostered engagement.
5. Building Momentum
Showing appreciation to the people who bring the most to your bottom line not only strengthens relationships and increases loyalty but if done well, it motivates them to continue to qualify year after year! And each subsequent year likely brings with it a larger goal, which means your company continues to see performance improvements long after the group travel experience is over.
Take Advantage of the Latest Trends
We advise any company considering group travel incentives to partner with a trusted incentive travel firm. It’s a niche business, but knowing you’re with a company, like Motivation Excellence, can take a lot of stress off your shoulders. We do the heavy lifting. Our years of experience add up to risk mitigation for our clients, creative ways to get the most out of a budget and global partnerships that reap rewards wherever we go!
We also know what’s hot in group travel right now and how to best motivate your target audience.
- Personalization – When participants get choices on a travel experience, they’re able to make it more personal to them and their guests. Our Inspire travel technology creates personalized itineraries, including transportation, selected activities and a daily agenda. There are other ways to make a group experience more personalized, and we use them all.
- Free Time – One of the biggest trends of the last several years is offering more free time to the daily schedule. Not only does this save some budget for our clients, but it allows their participants the opportunity to truly relax without having every minute planned. “Bleisure” (business + leisure) days offer a more balanced experience for everyone.
- Cultural Experiences – Incentive travelers like to feel immersed in their travel experience. Getting off the tourist path, and finding unique places, usually only the locals know about, offer a glimpse into the significance of cultural traditions and activities which tend to be very impactful.
- Exclusivity – We like to plan travel experiences no one could plan on their own. Travel awards should be built with a wow-factor (or multiple) to really drive home to the winners that they’ve accomplished something extraordinary and are being treated as such.
If your organization wants to plan a group travel incentive we’d love to connect with you to offer our insight into successful programs. Motivation Excellence has 40 years of experience designing, planning, and implementing group travel incentives for channel partners and sales teams. Let’s get started on yours today!
Cooking Up the Best Rule Structure for Successful B2B Incentive and Loyalty Programs
The ingredients matter, but so does the way they’re mixed together.
Perhaps the most critical component of building a successful incentive or loyalty program is the rule structure. This happens to be one of our specialties. While each client and program are unique, there are several preferred ingredients when it comes to crafting the best recipe for minimum risk and maximum results.
- Company goals
- Target audience
- Past performance data
- Market growth potential
- Measurable actions
- Rewards that matter
With the proper rule structure in place our clients enjoy more than a scent of good things cooking… they get a solid taste of a winning strategy. Let’s take a look at the benefits of a good B2B incentive or loyalty program.
Control Your Budget
No one wants to be surprised by a budget running out of control. With a good rule structure, our clients have security with their numbers. There won’t be shocking overages because we tie the desired behavior with a reward value that doesn’t exceed expected individual gross profit contributions. Many of our rule structures actually plan for a program to be paid for entirely through incremental gains. This is true for reward points or travel programs.
Reduce Your Risk
With Motivation Excellence as your expert partner, we can anticipate common pitfalls, advise alternative ways to meet your goals, and use our experience to recommend the best reward structure for your program. When it comes to a points program, that means suggesting point values, award options and earning periods. For incentive group travel programs, it means selecting the right destination at the right time of year, negotiating advantageous contracts and advising on number of winners, among many other things.
Adjust as Needed
A good rule structure builds in metrics that can be evaluated throughout the program, not just at the end. Doing this allows our clients the ability to adapt to mitigate any potential underperformance, while maximizing likely wins. For a points program, that could include offering bonus points for certain underperforming categories. For a travel program, it could mean adding extra spots on the travel experience based on how well participants are performing.
Segment Goals & Rewards
Sometimes, especially in B2B loyalty programs, having tiers makes sense. Different groups of customers have different purchasing histories and potential, which our clients can nurture or expand on. A top performer award, like a travel experience, can be paired with a points program so all participants who achieve their goals are rewarded at a level in line with their performance. For a points program, offering a wide variety of redemption options allows everyone to find their own motivation to succeed. Some may want to work toward a travel package for their family, while others might want to spend their points on home improvement projects.
There are so many ways our team can work with our clients to truly customize incentive and loyalty programs. It all starts with creating the rule structure that benefits the client and motivates their participants, so everyone walks away with a desire to continue growing a strong relationship.
We’d love to meet with your company to talk about the best rule structure for your particular set of ingredients. Together we can bake the perfect program, layered with elements custom to your needs.
How Channel Partner Incentives Help Your Business Thrive
Channel partner engagement is a priority among companies that rely on partners to distribute, market and sell their products. B2B loyalty and incentive programs are a great way to capture your channel’s attention and business. If channel partners feel more connected to your business, or more motivated by an incentive you’re offering that your competitors are not, you’ll see the net result in increased sales, often over a long-term run.
The Channel Partner Relationship
Channel partners can be amazing assets! Tending to this special relationship is critical to outshining your competitors in the same field. Distributors often carry competing product lines. Turning the attention to your brand can be tricky, but in the long run it’s very beneficial.
For our clients with distribution channels to consider, we’ve seen great growth when they’ve introduced a B2B loyalty or incentive program. Programs can reward partners for going through product or steps-to-the-sale training, in addition to increasing their purchasing and selling habits. When our clients help their channel partners grow their own businesses, a solid and loyal relationship starts to take hold, which pays dividends well into the future for both of them.
Tangible Channel Partner Contributions Worth Incentivizing
Loyalty and incentive programs are all about motivating behavior changes that positively affect your business. Your participants are rewarded for meeting new goals, which brings ongoing incremental sales increases to your business. How and why you motivate your distribution channel is critical to a successful relationship. Here are some reasons why you should consider implementing an incentive or loyalty program this year:
1. Market Expansion
Strategic partners offer market expansion into new geographic regions and customer segments. They can provide access to industry verticals without requiring a huge upfront investment. The goal here is growth. A channel partner’s established networks reduce barriers to market entry, thereby facilitating more growth in a shorter amount of time. Engaging with these new networks through a B2B reward program can help you find a foothold in a new territory.
2. Increased Sales
The basis of any loyalty or incentive rule structure is capturing increased sales. The equation is often very simple: Partner meets stated goal and they get stated reward. Loyalty programs reward from dollar one and often include tiers that correlate with amount of activity. Participants can level up or down depending on their ongoing purchasing habits. Incentive programs often have goals that stretch the normal behavior of a customer’s yearly purchases and rewards them for meeting or beating the stated goal after a predetermined stretch of time. Both programs’ rules need to factor in what will motivate the participant, while bringing in increased sales and gross profit.
3. Brand Awareness & Loyalty
When you’re one brand among dozens vying for the attention of distribution partners, offering an incentive program can be what shines a light directly on your company. Perhaps one of your competitors is running a group travel incentive to the Bahamas. Sure, it’s a great destination, but in your industry it’s a pretty common one. Offering a fresh new destination can turn heads to your program pretty easily. Adding in customer exclusive events or training throughout the year can also create engagement opportunities that become reasons channel partners choose to buy more of your products. Keeping your brand top of mind is a great way to increase sales and loyalty.
4. Product Launch
An incentive or loyalty program is a great way to introduce the latest and greatest! A product launch could add a bonus element to an existing program, or it could be the reason to start a program in the first place. Ramping up excitement is critical to a successful introduction. A short-term incentive can produce sales on day one. A long-term incentive can ramp up the rewards for increased sales quarter over quarter or year over year. New product training events and access to company executives are engaging elements that can help bring in sales immediately and set up a landscape for a beneficial partnership long into the future.
5. Product Focus
Some of your product lines might be more profitable for you than others. A B2B incentive or loyalty program is a great way to steer share of wallet toward the categories that have the best margins for your company. You can still reward on any sale, but by rewarding more heavily on certain skus, you can create more demand for the products that bring in the highest gross profits.
Plenty of Reasons to Reward with Channel Partner Incentives
If your channel partners are vital to your company’s success, you definitely want to explore the use of channel partner incentives to grab and keep their attention. For them, it shows how much you value their partnership. For you, it creates incremental growth potential on a continuous basis.
We have a library of information on our blog page regarding B2B programs, including the best rule structure elements, how to keep your program flexible and measuring ROI within channel programs. We are here as your resource from pre-launch through re-launch every year. Our experts at Motivation Excellence can discuss the best options for your particular situation. We look at your goals, audience, budget, and current and potential sales data, among other things to create a solution custom-built to your business. We know how to Inspire Extraordinary Performance with the people who mean the most to the success of your business. Let’s connect to get started!
