Online Incentives

One of this year’s most innovative incentive programs is taking place on the Internet, where dealer reps selling Ricoh color copiers are logging their sales, accumulating incentive dollars and ordering reward merchandise from a variety of high-end catalogs. Four hundred reps around the country are participating in the Color League program, developed to boost sales of Ricoh’s new line of Aficio Color copiers. The copiers print from computer commands, so running an incentive program on the Internet makes perfect sense. “We wanted a promotion that shows the technology of the products,” says Marketing Program Manager Carl Morante. “The copiers work with computers, so what better way to promote them than by using the Net?”

X-Ceed Performance Group, a New York incentive marketing firm, developed the program for Ricoh by designing the Web site and programming it to perform a variety of incentive-based functions. Every participating salesperson is given a double pass word to enter the site. Once inside, they record their sales, accumulate Aficio dollars and enter a shopping zone to redeem their dollars for merchandise from 25 catalogs, including American Airlines, Bloomingdale’s and Victoria’s Secret. In addition to the 25 catalogs, there are hot links to other destination sites associated with travel prizes. Once salespeople decide on the prizes they want, they can order them online. The orders are processed by X-Ceed, which cuts purchase orders and arranges for the gifts or gift certificates to be sent to the salespeople.

To get the program going, X-Ceed sent America Online program disks to every Ricoh dealer, so they could get access to the Internet if they didn’t have it already. Once arranged, it is easy for salespeople to participate via the Internet. After entering the site with their passwords, they see a personalized sales record. They don’t see anyone else’s sales, but they do see a list of the top 10 salespeople, which motivates them to sell more. “People didn’t know where they stood before, but now they do, which creates a lot of interest,” Morante reports. Indeed, a contest was built into the top 10 list, with the top 10 salespeople winning a trip to a trade show in New York.

Salespeople can also participate in a chat line on the site that has become a key part of the program and a national forum for Ricoh salespeople. “People come on and get a dialogue going about the best way to show the product,” says Colleen Holahan, an X-Ceed account executive, explaining that they talk about the best kind of paper to use when demoing the copiers and other similar topics.

While the salespeople log their sales, order their gifts and chat with peers, the company is busy compiling a database of sales information. Every time salespeople record a sale, they report the company and industry they sold to, who they competed with for the sale, what product it replaced and how they got the lead. The database is a gold mine of information that will be used to plan future sales and marketing initiatives, Morante says.

The program site was designed with a sports theme, “because sports is good for competition,” Morante says. Hockey graphics adorned the site when it was first created and salespeople scored a power play when they sold a copier. When the hockey season ended, baseball graphics were installed.

With a sports theme and a variety of valuable prizes, the Color League program sounds great, but not much different from traditional incentive programs that aren’t held online. “The application of incentives will never change, what changes is the communication,” Holahan says. First fax machines and later advances in telephone technology changed incentive programs and many other areas of commerce, she explains. Now it is the Internet’s turn.

And the Internet offers many advantages to traditional incentive programs. For one thing, it’s much faster. Instead of sending brochures describing the program before it started, all the details were available online and salespeople could learn about it instantaneously. When salespeople sell a copier, they can record their sale, get their reward money and order their prizes immediately. When the company wanted to change the site from a hockey to baseball theme, that happened instantly, too. And if a company providing merchandise for the program changes its catalog, new products can be scanned in right away. Whenever any change in the program is made, “we can e-mail to every user, and receive feedback immediately,” Holahan says.

And with all the reporting functions built into the system, the program works well for the company, too, enabling it to record detailed information about every sale that can be used to create a valuable database and boost future marketing efforts.

What the Internet does is automate the incentive program, allowing it to be run faster and more efficiently, with much less paperwork. And through the top 10 list and chat line, it heightens competition among participants and draws them closer. What makes the Internet incentive program different “isn’t the rewards,” Holahan says, “it’s the communication. It’s a way to get closer to our participants than ever before.”

Besides Ricoh, X-Ceed has created an online incentive program for a major telecommunications company, but would provide no details. They may be the only two companies that are running incentive programs online, though based on the success of the programs they could be the wave of the future. Morante says 99 percent of the comments have been favorable, so the salespeople are happy. And Ricoh will be happy if the launch of the Aficio color copiers is a success. No information is available on that yet, but Morante says Ricoh already plans to expand the online program to its lines of black-and-white copiers.

How can your company develop an online incentive program? Not very easily, Holahan says, because “it takes a lot of technical expertise.” Countless hours must be spent designing a site and programming a server to run the program and process the information. Companies cannot likely do it on their own, she notes. But they can call X-Ceed or other companies that have the technical know-how to create and execute an online incentive program. It’s a big, bold step, but a step in tune with these online times.