Inchcape selects Capital Incentives & Motivation for short sharp incentive!

Background
Inchcape UK is a complete automotives solutions provider with a range of integrated businesses serving motorists and corporate customers.  These include vehicle logistics, preparation and storage, fleet management, contract hire and leasing and vehicle retailing.

Objectives
Overall, Inchcape Retail wanted a short, focussed incentive programme to clear used vehicle stock from sites across the UK.

Specifically, the incentive programme had to:

- recognise and reward all participants for achievement versus target.

- create a fair competition for franchises despite varying dealer numbers.

- ensure a level playing field for Land Rover, Jaguar and Volvo dealers.

- deliver a powerful sales boost to equal 60% of April 2003 used retail figures.

- restrict expenditure to £15k or less.

The target audience was Inchcape Retail’s distribution network of dealerships and franchises retailing Land Rovers, Jaguar and Volvo products.

Solution
Inchcape Retail selected Capital Incentives & Motivation to provide a short web-based incentive campaign that made the best use of the limited expenditure to motivate individuals and teams and deliver a powerful boost to sales figures.

Operation
Capital Incentives devised the 10-Day Premier Automotive Group (PAG) Challenge, which included a sales executive competition, dealership competition and a franchise competition.

A bespoke website was devised to support the incentive and the participants and each dealership was assigned a target, unique ID and password for the website.

The dealership and franchise leagues were represented by a race track on the website, where the finish line denoted 100% achievement of target.

The website facilitated the running of the scheme, thereby reducing administration and time costs.  It provided access to the calculation of performances against target, including information on league data, sales data and the rewards on offer.

Rewards
The two rewards on offer were Capital Bonds and Capital Experiences, which offer recipients a varied selection of individual and group activities on land, sea and air from rally driving and powerboat racing to wine tasting.

The top six sales executives received Capital Experience ‘Activity Cheques’ with values ranging from £300 for first place to £50 for sixth place.

In the dealership league, winners were awarded Capital Bonds with the first prize being £750 worth of Capital Bonds.

The winning franchise was awarded £1000 in Capital Bonds to share equally among the dealerships.

In addition, six per cent of the reward budget was allocated to ‘spot prizes’ designed to vary the reward offering and maintain momentum.  Every day for the duration of the campaign two £25 spot prizes were awarded to encourage immediate data entry, thereby ensuring that the website accurately reflected the performance of participants.

Furthermore, an additional £100 was issued to any sales executive exceeding their personal target, which countered any negative impact resulting from the achievement of target outside the top six in the league.

Results
The incentive outlay of £13,900 produced an outstanding return with a 73% improvement in PAG Division sales performance.

Retail turnover increased by 69% on the business average, while gross profit increased by 74% on the business average.  Furthermore, 43% of sales executives achieved 100% of their personal target.

Overall, the incentive budget constituted 0.6% of total sales and 6.25% of generated profit.