Sun Incentive Program Takes SITE Crystal Award

<B> Sun Incentive Program Takes SITE Crystal Award</B>

By Chris Davis

An exotic and ambitious incentive program that brought qualifying employees and their spouses to Austria helped the former SunSoft, an affiliate of Sun Microsystems of Palo Alto, Calif., exceed its sales goals and earned its organizer a 1998 Crystal Award from the Society of Incentive Travel Executives.

Ironically, the award-winning program no longer exists in that incarnation. Sun Microsystems brought SunSoft, then a separate operating company, back into its fold last July, forming the Solaris Software division.

Though the particulars of the award-winning program have changed, Soni Strang, who managed the program as events marketing manager for Solaris Software, said she's still proud of her Crystal Award. Strang received the award at SITE's annual conference in Acapulco last month, winning first place in the "Four Nights or Less" category.

"The Crystal Award meant a great deal to me, and everybody who went on the trip agreed that it was the best they'd ever been to," she said.

The SunSoft incentive program culminated in a four-night trip to Vienna in October 1997. SunSoft employees who met 100 percent of their sales goals were included on the trip, and each was allowed to bring a spouse or other guest.

Since 53 percent of eligible SunSoft employees met their goal, the program certainly led to increased sales, Strang said, although the exact impact is difficult to quantify.

"It's always so difficult to figure that out, not only because of the difficulty of tracking the results but also because we sell our products through third parties as well," Strang said. "But the incentive travel program definitely had a positive impact. People really do want to be recognized and participate in these programs. It's important to them, it's a tradition, it's definitely an impetus to make their goals, which Sun sets very high."

The program, dubbed "Great Performances," included more than 350 attendees and cost over $1 million, Strang said. She noted that the company relied on the help of the Carlson Marketing Group for logistical support.

The first issue, of course, was finding a venue--and the search for a great incentive destination is never easy. But in the case of an international company like SunSoft, which has many employees based in Europe, it was even more difficult, Strang noted, since a destination like Paris or Rome would not hold the same allure for the European winners as it might for those from North America.

In selecting a city for such a program, "we look at the infrastructure, we look at security issues, because our risk management people always want to make sure we're not putting anyone at risk," Strang said. "We have to have five-star resort properties, and when you are dealing with such a large group, there also has to be parity. We need to make sure everybody has equal accommodations, and that is a big challenge."

Strang also considered the available ground transportation to particular cities, including traffic patterns and proximity to an airport. One of her main goals, though, was to find an area with different or unusual entertainment venues.

To give an incentive trip that once-in-a-lifetime feeling, "we try to stay away from hotel ballrooms," Strang said. "We try to make sure people are going to experience the local culture: food, entertainment, different venues. That's the thing people look for."

The latter qualities were part of Vienna's allure, Strang said.

"We knew that we wanted to go to a European destination, because every alternate year we go to Europe," she said. "But Monte Carlo didn't have the infrastructure, plus we have an office there, so people wouldn't be very excited about that. And we didn't want to go to Barcelona because one of the other Sun incentive groups was already planning to go there."

Vienna, though, offered a sound infrastructure, varied venues and an abundance of cultural opportunities. Strang made the final choice after a site inspection that allowed her to envision her own group in the Viennese setting.

The trip itself featured tours of the Vienna Woods, the Danube Valley, a chartered train--complete with casino and disco cars--to Salzburg and a black-tie gala at the Haufsburg Palace. The gala, where employees received their formal recognition, featured musical performances by the Vienna Boys Choir and a rock band that the company imported from California.

"We brought in a 15-piece band from California because we couldn't find anybody there to play rock and roll," she said. "We realized 50 percent of the audience--the spouses and guests--didn't work for Sun and didn't care about sales achievements and the history of Sun. So we had to make it entertaining."

Sun has since merged the SunSoft incentive program, as well as annual programs from its Java and Sun Microelectronics divisions, into a single incentive program managed under Cathy Schuman-Brown, who is the manager of the Sunrise program.

"I was able to show Sun that by having three different incentive programs running in three different spaces, we were spending additional funds that weren't needed, and posing a lot of additional bandwidth for our executives rotating from three different clubs at three different times," Schuman-Brown said. "We could same money and bandwidth and still produce a very successful, high-quality event."

It's unclear how much money the combined program, which contains daily business meetings as well as an incentive reward, will save Sun, Schuman-Brown said, because the initial combined program hasn't yet been completed. She declined to identify the date and location of this year's program.

But she did say the combined program will include about 4,000 people--2,000 Sun employees and their guests--and, this year, will be split into two segments that will visit the same destination at different times. The split will enable Sunrise planners to do a better job managing logistics.