The Operant Philosophy for Designing
Effective Contests

Operant believes that contests are highly effective tools for driving business development and, are therefore, strategic expenditures.

We build your contests based on the following principles.

• They should be used during good times and bad times due to their ability to drive results, focus attention and course correct problems.
• Build a contest that produces specific and desired business development results.
• Ensure that the contest is self-funding.
• Goals must be established for the contest. Contests are ideal ways to:


• Launch sales efforts for new products.
• Signify the importance of new strategy
• Entrench new policies, processes or systems.
• Make the contest rewards significant and memorable to generate bragging rights.
• Generate healthy competition by designing a fair contest where each individual or team has equal chance of winning at the outset, if superior effort is expended.


• Normalize baseline performance that offers advantage.
• Normalize dollar production by market.
• Adjust for team size.
• Develop a contest where 25% to 50% of the sales force wins some prize to produce desired cultural improvement on top of revenue or profit improvement.
• All contests should be professionally designed, merchandised and managed to engage career sales professionals.
• Use quality promotional items to launch the contest.
• Introduce the contest with clear communication and sufficient notice for teams to prepare for competition.
• Establish a neutral contest board for management and issue resolution.
• Facilitate management enthusiasm and participation.
• Provide very regular contest updates to continuously promote the contest.

By adhering to our philosophy we avoid building contests that lack strategic focus and:

• Seem unprofessional or juvenile.
• Die on the vine.
• Create unfair advantages that result in teams and individuals “giving up” and failure to produce results that cover costs of the contest.