Caution with Big Team Rewards for Winning a Deal

Last week I was talking to an entrepreneur who shared with me that they have a big goal they’re striving to hit by the end of the year, and if they achieve it, they’ll have an amazing company-wide reward. It reminded me of my failed experiment trying a similar thing. Back in 2006 we had this name-brand prospect that was going through a big RFP process. On the RFP it listed several required features that we didn’t have but were on our roadmap. You know where this is heading — I worked hard to rally the team to crank out these features and told the entire company that everyone would go on a cool cruise if we won this deal.

After two months of furious work, and incremental clarification questions for the RFP, we were told that we didn’t make it to the final round of vendor selection. Ouch, not even a finalist. I had expended a ton of personal capital and now we had lost the deal (even earlier than expected). Without the deal we weren’t in the position to go on the cruise. Morale was down. I wasn’t going to make this mistake again.

Going forward, we decided to implement quarterly celebrations so that we’d regularly celebrate our progress as a team, regardless of specific deals. There are still times when it’s important to push extra hard, but they should be relegated to things that are more controllable, like a new product release for the largest tradeshow of the year. Big team rewards make sense, but ensure there’s some level of control with achievability.

What else? What are some other thoughts on big team rewards for winning a deal?