HONoring a
Lifetime of Results
INCENTIVE’S 3RD ANNUAL MOTIVATION MASTERS AWARDS
By Vincent Alonzo
There were lots of great entries for Incentive’s third annual Motivation Masters competition. The programs,
which took place between Jan. 1,
2010 and March 31, 2011, covered the range of disciplines from
internal sales and channel partner incentives to engagement and
employee recognition programs.
But the one that stood out was a
channel sales program by HON,
a leading office furniture manufacturer located in Muscatine, IA.
Its program, which took the
Grand Motivation Master award,
not only produced great results,
but it orchestrated a sea change
in the way HON, a subsidiary of
HNI Corp., motivated its channel partners while creating a new
motivational solution, which is
currently patent-pending.
Until HON partnered with
Maritz in 2010, it ran, for 15
years, a channel sales program
for its network of dealer sales
representatives (DSRs) that
employed a fairly arcane “do
this, get that” strategy. Together
with Maritz, HON abandoned
that one-size-fits-all formula and
started a program that saw each
participant in a unique selling situ-
ation. While expanding the num-
ber of participants, the program
improved HON’s brand recogni-
tion and loyalty among the DSRs
and made them less susceptible to
offers from competitors.
Reps for Life
Stan A. Askren, HNI’s chairman
and CEO, likened HON’s pro-
gram to airline loyalty programs
and posited to the team: “Fre-
quent-flyer programs turn flyers
into customers for life. How do we
get a DSR for life to HON?”
With this in mind, Maritz and
HON collaborated on a solution
for developing true loyalty, and
the result was Maritz’s patent-
pending DSR for Life process.
DSR for Life analyzes channel
partners based on their Net Pres-
ent Value and expected future
contribution, known as their Life-
time Value (LTV).
The Results
The combination of a tier structure, targeted marketing commu-
