What happens when the same incentive program has to work in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela at the same time, with different currencies, different customs regulations, and a salesperson in each country expecting the prize to arrive when you said it would? That is exactly what we had to solve for BlackBerry between 2008 and 2010, and the answer had nothing to do with the glamour of the final trip. It had to do with the invisible logistics nobody sees, but that decide whether the program works or falls apart.
The Problem Was Not the Prize, It Was That It Never Arrived
In 2007, BlackBerry had a first experience with a North American incentive company that distributed prizes out of Miami. The result: customs problems and delays that meant many salespeople on Telefónica and Movistar’s commercial teams across Latin America either never received what they had earned, or received it months later. For a brand that sells connectivity and speed, a prize that takes three months to clear customs sends a contradictory message.
By 2008, BlackBerry opened a bid among full-service incentive companies in South America. AV Business & Communication won it, and that is how we started running the program for 1,100 members of the sales force spread across 13 countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Panama, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico.
One Program, Thirteen Countries, a Thousand Ways for Something to Go Wrong
The program ran from September to November each year, with monthly prizes (laptops, Nintendo Wii consoles, Visa gift cards worth between USD 300 and USD 1,000 depending on the year) and a final trip for the top salespeople from each country. The real operation behind that meant coordinating prize fulfillment across 13 different markets, each with its own customs process, its own exchange rate and its own logistics network.
That is where you learn the central lesson of any multi-country program: it is not enough to design a good incentive, you need trusted local partners in every market. We coordinated all regional distribution together with our network of partners in each country, because a prize managed centrally and remotely, as had happened in 2007, is a prize that arrives late or does not arrive at all.
Communication Also Has to Cross the Border
In 2007-2009 the program had a soccer theme, the “Movistar Blackberry Cup.” In 2010, after consulting participants from previous editions, we relaunched it as “Competencia de Altura” (“High Altitude Competition”), matching the destination of the final trip: Buenos Aires and Bariloche.
Communication included a dedicated website with monthly rankings by country, weekly email teasers, trivia about BlackBerry products with monthly raffles, and a photo book of Bariloche and Patagonia distributed to all 1,100 participants, with a Portuguese version for Brazil. We also used the Chalk platform for secure multimedia communication via BlackBerry, which made sense: the same device they were selling was the channel through which they found out how they were doing in the competition.
The Curveball That Was Not in Any Budget
The final trip, in March 2011, took the 16 top salespeople from the 2010 cycle to Buenos Aires and three days at the Hotel Llao Llao in Bariloche, with quad biking, rafting and a barbecue at a Patagonian ranch. A tango show was planned in Buenos Aires, but a failure in the airport’s security system canceled every flight that day. We reorganized lodging and the activity on the fly, without the group noticing that anything had gone wrong.
That is the part of the job no client ever sees in a commercial proposal, but it is exactly what sustains trust in the end: the ability to solve problems live when the original plan falls apart.
The Results
The main countries in the program increased their BlackBerry device sales by up to 30% while the program was running. Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and El Salvador exceeded their quantitative targets by between 5% and 25%. The program’s total budget was USD 195,000, split between the incentive trip for 18 travelers (USD 90,000), communication and production (USD 30,000), management fees (USD 15,000), logistics and distribution (USD 15,000), and monthly and special prizes (USD 45,000).
We presented this case as a case study for SITE, the Society for Incentive Travel Excellence, an organization I chaired globally in 2012, the only Latin American to do so in its history. I do not mention that as a credential, but because it is exactly the kind of program that teaches you what no manual can: that in a multi-country incentive, trust is built prize by prize delivered on time, not destination by destination chosen.
If your company has a sales force or distribution channel in more than one country and you are considering a regional incentive program, at AV Business & Communication we can help you design it starting from the logistics up, not the other way around.
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