Business executives have no better time than right now to reward, motivate and improve performance and realize better return on investment from their promotions and incentive budgets.

With profit margins in the Automotive industry increasingly under duress, business leaders are challenged to spend their reward dollars against programs that will deliver the best Return On Investment.

 Odenza Marketing multi-sector experience suggests using the following framework.

		Determine Your Objectives: What do you want to achieve? Motivating your sales force? Clear out the car lot? Hold onto customer loyalty? Get the deal closed earlier? Reinforce consumer brand loyalty? Etc. Placing your immediate promotion goals within the bigger strategic plan to achieve immediate as well as longer-term value. Look out for short and long term goals and where they apply.
		Focus and Communicate: Determine who ‘in’ your performance goal is impacted, NOT only the sales department, if your goal is to increase sales. Ensure that everyone who could affect the success of the strategy is informed. Employees who really understand the goal, will go the extra mile.
		Be clear about the budget: Evaluate the direct costs of the incentive/program as well as the indirect costs. How will it benefit the bottom line? Elements could be : # of participants, length of the program, cost of collateral materials, cost of incentives
		Describe the desired results clearly: Whether it be to increase sales, improve productivity of a particular organization function, close more deals, improve customer loyalty etc., if you are clear on today’s measurement and can be clear about your goals, then you can readily determine impact.
		Determine the Tools of measurement: Often the determination of success is left to a ‘feeling’ that it was a good promotion or left to simplistic sales volume measures. Remember that motivation is also state of mind – how to measure that? Perhaps a small survey, scoring the shift in perception among the participants, together with tangible type of measurements will give you a different point of view. When the things that need to be measured are clear, the measuring itself becomes easy!
		Choose your rewards with care: You need to be sure that the rewards themselves, as well as your chosen promotion, fit both what motivates the recipient and serves your business goals. Getting employee input ahead of time in designing a performance reward program could be vital to its success.