Promotional Distributor Michelle Vedros on Why Incentives
Promotional distributors continue to play a growing role in the incentive, rewards, recognition, and gifting business. This 30-minute Enterprise Engagement Alliance YouTube show continues a series of interviews with promotional distributors active in the incentive, rewards, and recognition field.Click here to subscribe to RRN weekly, and here for an RRN media kit.
Crown Marketing, Mathews, LA was born in the wake of hurricane Katrina, after which a group of distributors in New Orleans broke up their business into separate territories. Michelle Vedros, owner of Crown Marketing, took up the southern tier running through America’s oil patch from Houma, LA to Houston. On the show, she is joined with Roger Thomas, Vice President, Partners for Incentives, Cleveland.
Click here to watch or listen to the show.
According to Vedros, who has decades of experience in the industry, expanding to incentives and recognition is a natural extension of her work selling uniforms and promotional products to the nation’s energy industry. Her introduction to the safety field began with one client for whom she manually administered a program including thousands of people. This in turn led her to the services of Partners for Incentives, which provides an enterprise engagement technology platform to manage programs for sales and non-sales employees, customers, distribution and supply chain partners, and other stakeholders.
In the show, Vedros highlights the benefits having a complete technology platform that helps manage safety programs efficiently, freeing her up to spend more time servicing clients and expanding her business. Also important to her is the company’s ability to work with clients on program design and measurement. Based on the need for dependability and trustworthiness, she says she appreciates the ability to entrust PFI with working with clients to design, implement, fulfill, and track outcomes, not to mention all the administrative and billing support.
To Vedros, another big potential is for cross-selling opportunities. Once clients see what she can do to help in one area of their organizations, it opens the door to opportunities to help out with other areas employee engagement, sales incentives, channel reward programs, etc. She says she expects her partnership with PFI to be a key growth part of her business. Almost every type of organization can benefit from incentives, recognition, loyalty, safety and other engagement programs, she notes.
Answering a question about the traditional profit margin issue raised by distributors entering the incentive and recognition business, which offers lower margins than promotional products, Vedros says it’s not a question of percentages but of her time. Her company can make much more money on lower margins if she is spending much less of her time to support the service. Just as important to her is the fact that most programs run year after year if properly managed, so that she’s not always out looking for new business to replace old programs.
Thomas says his role at PFI is to stand behind the distributors to give them the tools and support they need at every step of the way and to be there when new opportunities arise. He believes that program design, implementation, support and the ability to provide detailed analytics for clients are the key elements required for success.
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