Driving Adoption With Incentives

I am often asked what motivates a team to adopt a new product. While there are a lot of answers to this question, I  believe it boils down to what motivates people. For some it’s as simple as money, and for others it is the opportunity for networking or recognition, but no matter who you have on your team, understanding what motivates them will set you up for greater results.

Here at Showpad we have an entire book of ideas around what motivates people to drive adoption, from email campaigns to Champion Programs, and we aim to make sure there is a fit for every customer. My favorite chapter in our Adoption Game Plan is about contests and incentives. Personally, when I hear about a contest, my adrenaline kicks in and I am ready to take out my competition. Whether it is a game of flag football or seeing who can get to the car the fastest, I am all in. Now throw in the chance to win money, dinner with my CEO, or being recognized by my peers as a top performer and nothing will stop me from trying to win.

Let’s talk about the two most impactful contests we see implemented at Showpad.

The Golden Asset

A Showpad spin on Willy Wonka’s golden ticket! For this incentive we encourage a customer to create a “golden asset” that is hidden for a set period of time (no longer then a week), and has instructions on it that will drive their teams behavior in the direction they want. Often we suggest this contest when a  new feature is being released and there is a huge value for the customer to adopt.

Recently, I worked with one of my customers to implement this contest quarterly. The behavior they wanted to drive was for their reps to adopt Showpad’s new way of sharing and collaborating, Shared Spaces. To accomplish this, their “golden asset” instructed the reps to do the following:

1. Create a beautifully Branded Shared Space
2. Add the “golden ticket” asset and one of their own pieces of content
3. Invite their Showpad admin and their CSM at Showpad to their Shared Space

The first 10 reps who did this successfully received a $10 gift card to Starbucks or Amazon (their choice).

With this particular incentive program, when implemented quarterly we see customers have an increase of adoption by 15% to 20% over the course of the year.

The Big Splash

Perhaps my all time favorite way to kick off a new Showpad deployment or reinvigorate a customer who has been with us for a few years is with this incentive. With the big splash you are putting together a one time incentive that drives the key value you want to see out of Showpad. One customer in particular comes to mind when I think of this contest.

After their soft launch they identified that what really mattered to them, which was having their sales team share assets using Showpad.  During the planning of the hard launch it was decided that they wanted to incentivize this behavior by giving away an Apple watch to the sales rep who had the most external sales, the sales manager with the team with the most shares, AND the marketer whose content was shared the most.

This ended up driving 3 key behaviors for them:

1. The sales team was actively going to Showpad first to find their content and share it
2. The sales managers were directing their team to Showpad instead of to their DAM or marketing partner
3. The marketer was sending the rep to Showpad with instructions on how to find the content they needed instead of just sending them an attachment.

Over the course of the month long incentive they saw impressive results. So much sharing was happening in fact that I received a note from our Engineering team letting me know they thought something may have gone wrong with that account. It turns out that they just had super hungry reps who decided to share 4,000% over what they had done the month previously, and managed to maintain that level of sharing even after that incentive had finalized.

To learn about another strategy used to increase adoption, read here.