To help sales managers create a successful travel incentive program, Bob Vitagliano, executive vice president and CEO of the Society of Incentive Travel Executives (SITE) and former Western regional manager for Dittman Incentive Marketing Corporation, offers these five simple rules of the road. With his help, you can create an incentive program that sets your salespeople’s dreams on fire.

1. Isolate Your Objectives

According to Vitagliano, executives often decide on a destination without determining what they want the contest to accomplish.

“Too often,” he explains, “people come to me and say, ‘We want to go to Australia this year,’ and that’s all the thought they’ve given to the issue. But that’s the wrong way to approach a travel incentive. ‘Where are we going?’ should be secondary to ‘What are our objectives?’ and ‘What can we do that is motivational but still cost effective?'”

Although almost every company uses incentives to increase overall sales, there are ways to use incentives to target more specific results.

“In addition to increasing overall sales,” Vitagliano says, “companies may want to focus on other specific objectives, including increased market share, promoting new items or, conversely, clearing warehouses of merchandise that is about to become obsolete. Incentives provide a simple, effective way to target those items you want salespeople to sell. Then every month or so you can adjust the program to your business needs by placing greater incentive value for X and Y items.”

2. Benchmark Your Success

According to Vitagliano, after deciding to run an incentive program, managers must have ways to determine the program’s success. “Ideally,” he says, “you will run just one incentive at a time. That way there is no confusion between incentives. Past experience should tell you approximately how much business you would do without the incentive. Any growth in sales over that can be attributed to the incentive, taking into consideration any other mitigating factors. If, for example, your main competitor either went out of business or drastically slashed prices, then you will have to factor those effects into judging your incentive program’s success. Basically, you should set benchmarks for what would happen if you took no action, monitor it closely and attribute anything over that to the incentive program. If you run two or more incentives at a time, one contest may get in the way of the other and you won’t know which incentives worked and which didn’t.”

3. Find The Right Destination

Recently, in an effort to save tightly budgeted corporate funds, companies have been offering trips to less expensive but nonetheless interesting or exotic destinations. “As long as I’ve been in the business,” Vitagliano says, “Hawaii has been at the top of the list. As a result of the economy, however, to save on airfare people nowadays are looking for locations closer to home, especially places where the dollar is still strong. Mexico and the Caribbean are popular, but Canada has really come on lately, especially with U.S.-based companies. An East Coast company can send its salespeople to a very international city like Montreal and save the cost of sending people to Europe. For Midwestern or West Coast companies the same is true of Toronto, Vancouver or Edmonton.”

4. Keep Your Salespeople In Mind

It is important to remember that a particular destination is only motivational if your salespeople want to go there. For this reason Vitagliano advises managers to get input from their audiences before setting anything in stone.

“Of course,” he says, “you want to find places that are going to turn your salespeople on. If your people are interested in travelling to a family-oriented location, then Las Vegas might not be the ideal choice for an incentive destination. But it’s more important to consider your objectives for the trip first. If you’re looking to develop a sense of camaraderie and teamwork among salespeople and managers, then having lots of kids along may be counterproductive. If they bring their kids along, instead of everyone getting together on the golf course, scuba diving or wherever, each family unit may go off separately, which is not what you want. On the other hand, if you want your salespeople to know that your company cares for the whole family unit, a trip for the whole group to Walt Disney World may be ideal.”

5. Stay Focused

Even if you’ve chosen the ideal location for your incentive trip, over the course of a year or however long the contest runs, salespeople may lose focus and stop being motivated by the distant prospect of going on a trip. To maintain peak interest levels throughout, companies use a variety of reminders and motivational tricks of the trade. Vitagliano recommends delivering some kind of reminder into your salespeople’s hands once every two weeks.

“A reminder can be anything,” he explains, “from a flyer to some three-dimensional item such as a bag of sand. Depending on your budget and facilities, we often recommend sending out a promotional video. The video can show various scenes of the location including the hotel where they’ll be staying, shots of the beach or local scenery, et cetera, combined with a reminder of the rules. Then at the end the vice president of sales can come on and say, ‘We’re anxious to have you all along this year and here’s what it’s going to take to get there.’ Then they get a little more information.

“An even better video idea, if you’ve done a trip before,” Vitagliano says, “is to run actual footage of that previous trip showing what a great time everyone had. That can become a souvenir for them to hold onto forever which will motivate them every time they watch it for years to come.”

Although all these factors may seem like a lot to think about for a simple trip incentive, a little preparation can provide a tremendous payoff on the bottom line. In the end it’s important to remember that you are rewarding top performance for an extended period of time. If your salespeople see you putting in the extra effort to make sure they are satisfied, they may be that much more inclined to hit the heights you’ve set for them.

For more information write Bob Vitagliano, SITE, 21 West 38th St., 10th Floor, New York, NY 10018-5584, or call 212/575-0910.