Viva PFI

PFI around the world just landed in another location… Mexico. That’s right, PFI recently established a partnership in Mexico that will allow us to offer and fulfill awards within Mexico. The Mexican collection features 265 items with prices ranging from $20.00 to $2,500.00. If you have a client with participants in Mexico or need award fulfillment in Mexico, contact us at sales@spihq.com

The online Mexican catalog adds to PFI’s international award fulfillment capabilities, which already include fulfillment capabilities in Canada and Europe. In addition, PFI is currently working toward a strategic partnership that will enable us to offer merchandise fulfillment in Asia.

Contact PFI For Your 2004 Corporate Gift Needs

The holiday corporate gift-giving season is already here. Some companies have even finished the gift selection process. If you or your customers are still procrastinating or even trying to decide whether or not to put a corporate gift-giving program in place, PFI can help.

First, consider this statistic. A study completed last year by the Promotional Products Association International (PPAI) shows vendors and suppliers who gave out corporate gifts were twice as likely to increase their chances of being contacted by customers as those who didn't have a gift program. Good will aside, corporate gift programs are a solid business development strategy.

There is still time to plan and implement a corporate gift program and PFI has a simple, effective solution. We have an attractive holiday gift cover that can be bound on all of our individual plateau award collections. This means you have 13 gift levels at 13 price points. This translates into complete flexibility to implement a program that meets your budgetary requirements.

Plateau levels 1-8 are already bound and ready to use. Levels 9-13 can be bound at your request in whatever quantity you require. There is no easier way to introduce a corporate gift program than picking up the phone and giving us a call.

To order a Holiday Gift Collections contact sales at 1-800-292-7371 or e-mail us at
sales@spihq.com.


Stop By And See Us At the 2004 Motivation Show—Booth 2749

Once again, PFI will have a booth at the annual Motivation Show that will be held at the McCormick Center in Chicago, September 28th - 30th, 2004. Joy Smith, Mary Ann Comotto, Joyce Dale and Jim Kapcar will all be attending and welcome you to stop by and discuss your incentive needs.

You Can Save Time, Resources and Money by Partnering with PFI

If you are planning to add incentive program development and support services to your product mix, we can help you get your plans into action. With the largest collection of stock catalogs in the industry, a team of merchandise buyers to offer custom solutions, a customer service and support department second to none, you owe it to yourself and your clients to check out how a partnership with PFI is the perfect solution to delivering incentive programs to your marketplace.

Adding incentive program fulfillment to your company’s capabilities doesn’t need to cripple or even distract your organization. Partners For Incentives can help you with all facets of developing, presenting and implementing merchandise incentive award programs.


Presentation Planning
Case Studies
Budget Planning
Rules Development
Incentive Program Rationale
Online Awards/Fulfillment
Online Program Administration
Eight Stock Award Vehicles
Safety Program Planning
Suggestion Program Planning
Years Of Service Program Planning
Distribution Channel Incentives
Incentive Sales Training and Support
Total Customer Services
Administrative Management Support


Whether your challenges are sales and marketing oriented or employee performance issues, we are ready to partner with you to develop a solution for an efficient and effective incentive awards program. Be sure to stop by Booth 2749 to meet with us to discuss you specific needs.

Incentive Plan Idea-Race For Rewards

The following are rules for implementing a Race For Rewards Incentive event. This rules structure is designed to utilize plateau levels.

Here's What The Race Is About - Invite your targeted participants to be part of a Race For Rewards incentive event. Challenge them to meet defined minimum performance objectives and then move up a series of performance achievement levels that present them with greater and greater award opportunities. For each successive level, participants earn points that can be used to redeem thousands of valuable awards featured in the Race For Rewards offline or online catalogs. .

How Participants Earn Awards - Identify up to three products, services or events to focus on in the Race For Rewards program. Establish an overall benchmark objective and monthly goals participants must achieve in order to qualify for plateau awards.

Motivate Participants to Work Their Way To The Number One Position
Once participants exceed their benchmark monthly goals, their award earning opportunities really get into gear. Each month the top ten participants (over goal) earn the following awards:
 

Participants can earn the awards above for each product/service or event benchmark achieved or for achieving all of the benchmarks.

Option:  Instead of the top ten, you can expand the scope of the program and include more winners by designating a set number of winners at each of ten levels based on over-goal achievement.

Finish Line Bonus

Participants will automatically qualify for a Finish Line Bonus when they meet their overall incentive event criteria and achieve one of these top racecar finish line positions.

With this plateau reward structure you can use either the plateau award collection or the Mini Max Brochure.

 Discretionary Bonuses

Empower your manager/supervisor to help participants get into gear by enabling them to award "Bonus Points" to participants who perform above and beyond efforts such as:

• Top Sales for the week

• Most improved sales position

• Most new customers

Finish Line Top Driver Bonus

In any incentive program it is important to reward top achievement.  In Race For Rewards, here is what we recommend.

All award points could be deposited to personal Race For Rewards online bank account. To redeem Points for awards, click on the Race For Rewards Awards Catalog link. Choose your award(s) then add them to your shopping cart and then place your order.

Incentive Planning Tip

Simpler is Better -Remember K.I.S.S.
If you ranked the basic guidelines for building an incentive program in order of importance, this rule would be number one! Many programs have failed due to the shear weight and complexity of their structure. Here are a few easy tips for keeping things simple:

Limit Your Goals
Limit the number of goals to two or three primary objectives; more than this and you will lose your target audience.

Link Payout To Performance
You will maximize the motivational impact of the program the closer you link the award payout to the performance required. The greater the gap the more you reduce the motivational value of your rewards.

Invest In The Primary Goal
The greatest award earning opportunity should link directly to the primary goal of the program. This is a simple rule. Spend your incentive dollars where your goal is. Allocate at least 60-75% of your incentive budget to reward participants for achievement of the primary objective. Too often well-meant programs are not well spent in that too much of the budget is spread thin to cover too many goals.

Motivate the Middle
Most companies live with the reality of the 80/20 rule that states 80% of revenue is generated by 20% of the sales force. This 20% is typically entrepreneurial and extremely self-motivated. Incentive programs for this group are effective, however, only marginally so. Recognition and appeal to ego move this group more than incentives (see next tip-Recognize Top Performers). Of the remaining 80%, 20% are underachievers or lack the skills to make any serious sales impact. Again, incentives will have minimal to no impact on this group. That leaves the middle 60%. This is the group that successful incentive programs target. They are more motivated by the opportunities of success, specifically incentive rewards. This is the group that the core program should be built around and to which the majority of incentive dollars should be allocated.

Recognize Top Performers
Top performers are a company's bread-and-butter. It is important to acknowledge their effort and their success. Allocate 5-10% of an awards budget to promote top achievement and recognize top performance. Friendly competition for top awards at this level will serve to motivate this ego driven audience.

Incentive Programs Are Investments
How often are you asked, “What will this cost me?” As a result, we get trapped into referring to the incentive program and its fixed cost elements as costs. An incentive program is in fact an investment. You should avoid language that refers to an incentive as a cost.

Performance Improvement Programs Are Not Cure-alls
This is a very important rule of thumb. An incentive program will motivate a sales force to sell more, achieve personal goals or grow your market share, provided that other factors related to the product or sales environment are reasonable. An incentive program will not compensate for a product that is not competitively priced. It will not reverse declining product life cycle and it will not create customer demand where it does not exist. If any of these factors exist, there is a real and likely chance an incentive program will fail. Don't be afraid to challenge your clients' belief that an incentive program will solve all of their problems.




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