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Best Sales Incentive Program Spartan Marketers vs. Spartan Advertisers
The Background: Best of MSU is by far one of the biggest promotions at The State News. It is an extensive promotion that aims at recognizing the best businesses around Michigan State, per the votes of students, faculty, alumni and local residents. Through numerous house ads, The State News prompts voting at the ballot on our website, statenews.com/bestof. Account executives begin selling packages to advertisers in January, to encourage students to vote for them during the last two weeks of February. This adds revenue to our daily papers during February as well. The votes are counted and winners revealed after Spring Break, during the first week of March. In April, the Best of MSU special section is published, highlighting all of the winners with ads as well as listings in our Welcome Week edition when school resumes in August. In addition, The State News recognizes winners with certificates to display in their business. Each year our managers encourage the staff to sell by creating an innovative, creative and competitive incentive program. For 2013, this program was called “Spartan Marketers vs. Spartan Advertisers�. The Idea: Early on in the spring semester, the advertising department realized they were split. There were a group of account executives with marketing majors who constantly gloated about their major, abilities and connection. They branded themselves the “Spartan Marketers� in the office and would propose that their work was superior to that of all other account executives and that they could sell advertising better than advertising majors could. The rest of the office, predominantly majoring in advertising, was insulted and provoked to say the least. Herein hatched the idea to create two teams in the office and pit them against each other in an extensive incentive program. The Competition: We decided to couple this incentive program with our Best of MSU promotion as both items intended to highlight the best in their categories: Best of MSU with local businesses and the incentive program with account executives. We created numerous categories for the account executives to compete within, all in regard to selling Best of MSU. Example categories included Most Face-to-Face Visits, Most Best of MSU Packages Sold and Most Sales Calls per Week. Each week the leaders in each category would be announced. Based off the board game Othello, we created a leaderboard in which a picture of the AE, as well as a color associating them with their team, would recognize them in that category as the leader. If a leader were ousted for a particular category, their picture would be replaced by the new front-runner.  www.statenews.com