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As we help our clients become more strategic with their buying, they are recognizing recurring initiatives within their companies that require promotional merchandise. These recurring initiatives demand significantly more consideration than a typical processed transaction when producing just a product. It’s no longer just products, but the forecasting of quantities, the packaging, the messaging, the handling of data, the cadence, the distribution, and the customer service that go into creating a program holistically. Despite the additional planning necessary to get a program up and running, we recommend our clients streamline their recurring efforts into a program whenever they can. In turn this will elevate your engagement.
Programs keep things uniform! When dealing with enterprise business, you often find buying being fragmented between departments and business units, which leaves opportunity for an eclectic take on a company-wide initiative. As an example, if you have three different departments buying 5 years of service awards, department A might purchase a clock, department B might purchase a trophy, and department C might buy a crystal cube. Each of these items could be within the same budget, but each of these items communicate a very different message.
For the sake of maximizing budget and perception of value, we recommend strategically buying through programs. The nature of our business is bulk buying, so when you are able to proactively purchase, you maximize your cost savings opportunities. This can look like grouping purchases together for larger quantity discounts, or having enough time to source products overseas. The more you can forecast, the more creative you can get and the more money you can save. With more cost savings, you can allocate more budget to curating a more impactful program experience.
We determine SLAs (service level agreements) with our program clients. This is where we outline the metrics and standards we commit to preforming for the duration of the program. We define the cadence at which we receive data, communicate to our team, and get a shipment out the door and into the hands of your recipients. Without a defined metric you will lose consistency between the recipients’ experiences. This avoids potential turmoil. If Recipient A gets their new hire kit the Friday before their start date, and Recipient B gets theirs 2 weeks after. We want to avoid our clients having a Recipient B seeing Recipient A post their new hire kit, and wonder why they haven’t received the same warm welcome and now feel like an afterthought….???
With all of that being said, we are seeing significant trends toward more program business from our enterprise clients. If there is a need for uniformity, cost savings, and timeliness in a recurring initiative, we recommend you schedule a consultation call. Our dedicated client teams will seek to fully understand your vision and goals, and will collaboratively build out a program with you!
