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Frequently Asked Questions

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About Motivation Excellence®

Motivation Excellence is a performance improvement and incentive partner. We help companies Inspire Extraordinary Performance with the people who mean the most to a company’s success.

Our Business Strategy Solutions and Travel programs motivate teams, strengthen culture, and deliver measurable ROI. We specialize in personalized reward solutions, channel and sales incentives, data-driven program design, and full-service support for travel, meetings, and events.

We are large enough to deliver with confidence, yet small enough to collaborate closely!

Motivation Excellence was incorporated in 1985 by founder Greg Lewis,  the same year his first travel incentive program was sold. David Jobes, a longtime company leader, purchased the company in 2018. His legacy includes building an incredible culture, nurturing his leaders, and paving the way for future success. David passed away in 2024 after 32 years with Motivation Excellence, including 6 years as an owner/CEO. We honor David and his efforts; he truly Inspired Extraordinary Performance. The company remains in the ownership of his family. 

You can learn more on our Our History of Excellence page.

“Inspire Extraordinary Performance” is our commitment to helping organizations achieve results they may not have known were possible. It reflects our belief that when the right strategies, recognition, and experiences come together, people feel motivated to perform at their highest level.

We partner with manufacturers and distributors, typically those with complex sales channels, distribution networks, independent reps, and strong relationships with internal and external sales teams. Our clients rely on us to strengthen customer loyalty, increase performance visibility, and motivate the audiences who drive their business (including channel partners, distributors, dealers, brokers, producers, and sales organizations).

Motivation Excellence has deep experience in industries where incentives, channel relationships, and performance tracking significantly impact growth. Our strongest verticals include:

  • Construction & Building Products
  • HVAC & Plumbing Distribution
  • Manufacturing
  • Financial Services & Insurance
  • Wealth Management
  • Medical Device & Health Technology

These industries often face performance, loyalty, and channel engagement challenges that respond directly to well-designed incentive, reward, and travel experience solutions.

You can learn more about previous partners on our Case Studies page.

Motivation Excellence is not a SaaS platform provider, and we don’t believe in “one-size-fits-all.” Everything we deliver is custom-built, strategic, and centered on your business goals. Simply put: we turn business goals into inspired performance.

Our differentiators include:

  • A true partnership model: We operate as an extension of your team, not just a vendor
  • Data-driven program design: We analyze financials, history, and goals to build programs that are motivating and cost-effective
  • Flexible, scalable solutions: From points and personalized rewards to incentive travel experiences and performance tracking to marketing and engagement support
  • Full-service support: You can expect strategy, communications, performance management, analytics, and onsite event expertise, all under one partner

Learn more about Our Team. 

Our Engagement Strategy Solutions encompass the basis for our programs. From developing winning rule structures to delivering motivational reward options, we analyze data, industry history, trends, and specific client challenges to build a program designed to drive incremental sales and long-term loyalty. Our custom-built participant performance tracking platform and marketing support are wrap-around services that support overall success.

Our Travel Strategy Solutions combine deep industry expertise with trusted global partnerships to deliver unmatched incentive group travel that consistently motivates attendees year after year.

No matter how you use us, we are an extension of your team, here to fill whatever roles need to be handled. Our goal is always to Inspire Extraordinary Performance with the people who mean the most to your success.

When we say “fully customized,” we mean no templates, no off-the-shelf points portals, and no pre-made rules structures. 

Your program is built around your: 

  • Business goals
  • Industry dynamics
  • Sales or channel structure
  • Budget
  • Data availability
  • Participant motivations

From reward options to performance tracking and communications to incentive design, every element is crafted specifically for your audience and objectives. 

Our team works closely with you to determine what information matters most and delivers it in a format that’s clear, actionable, and timely.

We work as an extension of your team through every step of the process. This includes: 

  • Discovery sessions to understand your goals and audience
  • Data analysis and modeling
  • Rule structure and reward design
  • Communication planning
  • Performance tracking setup
  • Regular check-ins and strategic reviews

We believe the best results come from strong collaboration.

Absolutely! We work with partners worldwide to provide incredible incentive experiences wherever we need to take them. We’ve run travel programs all over the globe. For other reward options, like points or merchandise choices, we are educated in the different rules and laws in place in countries outside the United States. 

Yes. Many clients come to us with a program already in place and want to improve the strategy, engagement, or results. 

We can enhance your existing program by: 

  • Strengthening rule structures 
  • Improving communication flow 
  • Adding performance tracking 
  • Introducing personalized rewards 
  • Aligning the program more closely with ROI 

Yes. If a full incentive or travel program isn’t what you are looking for, we can provide strategic consulting for: 

  • Program frameworks and rule structures 
  • Budget modeling 
  • Reward strategy and selection 
  • Participant engagement and communication 
  • Performance measurement & ROI 

We’ll guide you with best practices and actionable insights that align with your goals. 

Yes. Motivation Excellence has been honored with several prestigious awards that recognize the quality of our incentive travel experiences, creative execution, and company culture.

Our SITE Crystal Awards are among the most notable. Considered the highest honor in the incentive travel industry, the Crystal Awards celebrate excellence in program design, creativity, and measurable impact. Most recently, Motivation Excellence has been recognized for:

  • Excellence in Incentive Travel: Europe (2022)
  • Most Creative Solution Deployed at a Time of Crisis (2021)

We’re also proud of national and regional recognition as one of the Best & Brightest Companies to Work For® across multiple years. Additional honors include Hermes Creative Awards for our marketing and communication work.

Learn more on our Awards & Affiliations page. 

Compliance is a core part of our program design process. We work closely with your legal, finance, or compliance teams to ensure industry requirements or regulatory standards are met. 

Yes. We have several resources to help you dive deeper: 

As a full-service partner, Motivation Excellence handles every element of your group travel experience, meeting, or event.
 We support:

  • Destination and venue sourcing
  • Contract negotiations
  • Air, land, and transportation logistics
  • Registration and attendee management
  • Creative communications and branding
  • Agenda development and content support
  • On-site staffing and event operations
  • Engagement tools through Inspire
  • Production, entertainment, and speakers
  • Food & beverage planning
  • Surveys and post-event analysis

You choose how much support you need. We can manage everything, or just the parts that make the biggest impact for your team. You can find out more on our Travel, Meeting & Events page. 

Motivation Excellence designs custom, high-value travel experiences that celebrate achievement and strengthen long-term relationships

What makes us different:

  • We never use the word “trip”; we create experiences, not commodity travel
  • Each program is fully customized, with no pre-packaged itineraries
  • Our team provides high-touch planning and flawless on-site execution
  • We use Inspire, our proprietary mobile engagement technology, to enhance communication and elevate participant experience
  • We design immersive events and curated moments that reinforce your brand’s message
  • We focus on relationship-building and creating lasting memories, not just logistics (although we excel at all the granular details too)
  • Your participants feel valued, and your brand becomes unforgettable.

Inspire is our proprietary event and travel engagement platform designed to enhance every step of your experience.

It provides:

  • Personalized itineraries
  • Flight and travel details
  • Interactive maps
  • Photo galleries
  • Real-time messages and alerts
  • Destination details
  • Engagement features
  • Help Desk support
  • Surveys and reporting

It puts everything participants need in the palm of their hands. You can learn more on our Inspire page.

Motivation Excellence avoids the word “trip” because it feels ordinary — and what we create is anything but!

Our brand is built around designing incentive travel experiences of distinction: immersive, meaningful, high-value moments that people can’t plan on their own. 

Using elevated language reflects the elevated experience your participants receive.

Full-service planning can cover any or all of the following:

  • Destination research + venue sourcing
  • Contract negotiation + risk management
  • Air ticketing and ground transportation
  • Registration platform + mobile site (via Inspire)
  • Event branding + creative communication
  • Audio/visual production + staging
  • General sessions, breakouts, and agendas
  • Entertainment, activities, and off-site events
  • Food & beverage planning
  • On-site support from start to finish
  • Surveys + post-event reporting

No. Inspire is mobile-optimized and web-based, so participants access it instantly through a secure link: no download required. This keeps things simple, fast, and accessible for all users. It can be saved as an icon on a phone’s homescreen for easy access.

Inspire can be customized for international audiences, including translated content, localized event details, and multilingual communications. We tailor the platform to the needs of your participants, no matter where they are traveling from.

We support a wide range of meetings and events, including:

  • Sales meetings
  • Buying Shows
  • Leadership meetings
  • National and regional conferences
  • Product launches and showcases
  • Training and certification events
  • Customer appreciation events
  • Recognition events
  • Advisory councils and executive forums

Whether you need a high-energy general session or a multi-day global summit, we build the experience around your goals. You can learn more on our Meetings & Events page. 

Trade Shows and Buying Shows deliver measurable business benefits such as:

  • Increased brand visibility
  • Stronger relationships with customers or channel partners
  • Hands-on product experience
  • Opportunities to negotiate and close business on-site
  • Centralized cost-efficiency compared to individual sales visits
  • Curated spaces designed to influence purchasing behavior

Motivation Excellence can manage everything from booth setup to customer engagement strategies to on-site coordination. You can learn more on our Trade Shows and Buying Shows page.

Yes, many incentive travel programs can be structured to be self-funded through incremental sales growth. It’s actually our preferred way to build a program.

Our team uses data modeling and rule structure design to forecast budgets, goals, and ROI, helping you determine whether your program can pay for itself through performance.

Yes, we can and do provide these options, either using your company’s software (Teams, Webex, etc) or suggesting a more robust alternative. 

The earlier the better, but honestly, we’ve helped a client plan a global sales meeting after a restructuring in less than 4 months. We have trusted partnerships around the world that allow us to pivot quickly when needed. 

See our quick turnaround case study here.

We design and manage a full range of incentive and rewards programs. 

Our solutions: 

Costs vary depending on program type, audience size, reward structure, technology needs, and ongoing engagement. The biggest driver of the budget is your overall goal and the challenges you have to get there. We work with you, your data, industry history, and trends to develop a rule structure that drives incremental sales, which can pay for the cost of a program. 

Depending on the complexities and technology resources needed, we have launched programs in as few as 6 weeks, but realistically, we prefer closer to 8-10 weeks to properly build an incentive program.

We absolutely can! We have the capabilities to translate copy into different languages without a problem. The biggest hurdle with international incentive programs comes with the reward part. Some countries have specific laws we need to be aware of, and many don’t have the robust reward point redemption options that the United States has. A travel incentive works well for most international participants. 

A channel incentive is something that rewards your distribution partners for choosing your goods and services over competitors. Our programs keep your company front of mind and build long-lasting loyalty for continued growth year after year. Often, a channel incentive program is the differentiator between your company and the rest of the field. If there are multiple companies running channel incentives, then the reward becomes particularly important in motivating behavior changes. 

Our B2B customer loyalty solutions focus on strengthening long-term relationships with the partners who drive your business. These programs may include:

  • Point-based loyalty
  • Tier- or achievement-based recognition
  • Personalized reward paths
  • Exclusive experiences or events
  • Training and product knowledge incentives
  • Growth accelerators and milestone bonuses
  • Exclusive group travel experiences
  • Access to company executives
  • Buying Shows with valued partners

We build loyalty systems that deepen engagement and keep your brand top of mind all year long. You can find out more on our B2B Customer Loyalty page.

Our Personalized Rewards programs are flexible, high-value recognition options that let your internal sales teams, channel partners, and key business contributors choose rewards that truly matter to them. Rather than offering generic merchandise, we curate experiences, lifestyle upgrades, and reward paths that match your participants’ goals and motivations.

They can earn rewards by reaching personalized milestones, achieving program goals, or engaging in desired behaviors — all tracked through a branded program portal.

You can find out more on our Personalized Rewards page.

Our reward solutions include: 

  • MAXRewardsYourWay: Aspirational lifestyle upgrade packages — premium experiences, home upgrades, wellness bundles, luxury items, and lifestyle enhancements curated around participant interests.
  • MAXRewardsNOW: Instant gift card codes for popular retailers and restaurants for fast, easy redemption.
  • Concierge Shopping: White-glove, one-on-one support where participants request virtually any item or experience — and our team sources it for them.
  • Online Award Offerings: A curated marketplace of merchandise, experiences, and travel-related rewards.

Everything is customizable based on your program’s goals, audience, and budget. We only use in-house customer service representatives who have extensive experience with our company and reward fulfillment. 

MAXRewardsYourWay offers curated aspirational reward bundles designed to elevate participants’ day-to-day lives. These packages include:

  • Luxury home upgrades
  • Premium tech bundles
  • Wellness and fitness packages
  • High-end outdoor or recreation gear
  • Lifestyle experiences tailored to personal interests

MAXRewardsNOW provides fast, convenient, digital reward codes for well-known retail, restaurant, and entertainment brands. Participants receive codes instantly via email or through the program portal. It’s ideal for programs where immediate recognition, simplicity, and rapid fulfillment support greater engagement.

Our Concierge Shopping experience is a premium service that lets participants request almost any product, experience, or curated idea, and our in-house team sources it for them.

Participants simply tell us:

  • What they’re looking for
  • A style, concept, or brand
  • Their available points or budget

Our team provides options, manages the purchase, and handles all customer service and delivery needs. It’s a human-centered service that makes high-value rewards feel effortless. 

It depends on the reward type:

The more the better. We find that some companies don’t have access to meaningful data in one location or don’t understand how to use the data they do have. While we love diving into numbers, we don’t have to have any historical data to begin a program. Knowing who your participants will be and what behaviors you’re trying to motivate are great stepping stones. 

We will take a look at what you do have and see what we can build from it. We do have clients that start, perhaps not even knowing which sales are attributed to which person, and we end up building a warehouse of business intelligence in that first year. 

We use a consultative approach with our clients. After knowing your goals, challenges, audience, and desired reward structure, we can build a rule structure that safeguards your budget and allows for tweaks as needed. 

We have built them in as little as six weeks, but realistically, we’d like 10-12 weeks before a program launches. 

We need to know your goals, and then we can develop KPIs to track throughout the program to make sure it’s on track to meet your definition of success. Our performance tracking experts can compile a variety of data points and deliver specific results based on program parameters. 

Yes, many of our programs are designed to be self-funded through incremental sales growth.

By aligning goals, reward values, and program rules with your financial targets, the additional revenue generated can cover the cost of the program.

This approach is a key part of Performance by Design®.

Performance by Design® is our proprietary, financially driven planning process that uses your business data to build the most effective incentive or loyalty structure possible.

It’s a consultative, analytical approach that helps us:

  • Understand your company’s sales history
  • Model multiple earning scenarios
  • Forecast program outcomes
  • Establish meaningful reward structures
  • Identify risk and opportunity areas

It is the foundation for many of our most successful, self-funded programs. You can learn more on our Business Strategy Solutions page.

Performance by Design® uses your historical performance, category trends, audience segments, and projected goals to model:

  • Expected incremental growth
  • Reward cost ranges
  • Key performance drivers
  • Return-on-investment (ROI) scenarios

You’ll also see detailed financial projections before launching your program.

DRIVE is our behavior-focused philosophy for motivation, built around five components:

  • D = Data, understanding where you are today and where opportunities lie.
  • R = Rewards, choosing meaningful, motivating recognition. 
  • I = Intelligence, turning data into insights and smart decisions. 
  • V = Visibility, giving participants and leaders clear views of progress. 
  • E = Engagement, sustaining momentum through communication and experience.

You can learn more on our Business Strategy Solutions page.

Performance by Design® focuses on the financial and structural foundation of your program (modeling ROI, scenarios, and rules). It’s our foundational approach to building successful incentive programs.

While DRIVE focuses on the human side of motivation, it helps you understand what inspires your audience and how engagement is sustained.

Together, they create programs that are both cost-effective and behavior-driven.

Yes. We have many programs that last more than 10 years and continue to be very strong! We are not a “set it and forget it” provider. We are in constant contact with our clients to provide real-time updates and tweaks as needed. Our rule structures are built to be evergreen when they can be and allow for growth and evolution of program goals and rewards. 

We LOVE to build custom dashboards and performance tracking reports for our clients! We can get very granular, or stay at an above-the-trees level. Reports can vary depending on who is accessing them. A participant report will focus on their progress toward the goal, while a company management report can look at overall sales, or sales by person, region, SKU, or any other iteration that exists. Our reports can all be exported to Excel, too. 

We deliver updates based on your needs and goals, which may include:

  • Monthly summaries
  • Quarterly insights
  • Real-time dashboards updated daily
  • Mid-program recaps
  • End-of-program reviews

Need More Assistance?

If you didn’t find the answer you were looking for, we’re here to help. Whether you’re planning an incentive program, exploring personalized reward options, or considering a travel experience or major event, we’re happy to talk through your goals and share tailored recommendations.

Contact us today if you are curious about one of our services.

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