Why incentivizing prospect meetings isn't bribery—it's smart business

IT buyers are inundated with meeting requests. Decision-makers and IT leaders at mid-to-large companies receive hundreds of outreach attempts from vendors vying for their attention. They sign up for whitepapers, and their data ends up across hundreds of databases. Inboxes littered with unsolicited, unpersonalized emails, and their phones constantly buzzing with sales reps selling something they don’t need. In a market that’s saturated with products and services, IT buyers would much rather reach out when they have a need than be perpetually annoyed with unknown vendors.

We’re living in an attention economy where people pay you with their attention; money has become secondary.

Cash incentives give you a foot in the door, not a seat at the table

Yes, on the surface, cash incentives can seem like bribes. But think about this: when you offer a prospect $50 or $100 to attend your demo, you're not bribing them to buy your product—you're acknowledging the value of their time, and more importantly, their attention. The opportunity cost they incur by choosing your meeting over countless other priorities.

There's a fundamental difference between:

1. Compensating someone fairly for their attention.
2. Attempting to influence their business decision through financial gain.

The first recognizes economic reality; the second crosses ethical boundaries.

A modest meeting incentive falls squarely in the first category. It simply gets your foot in the door, creating an opportunity to demonstrate your solution's value. No reasonable professional would make a significant business decision based on a small incentive alone. No prospect buys thousands of dollars' worth of enterprise software and consulting services because they received $100 for a meeting. The incentive gets their attention, and what happens after that depends on what you offer and what the buyer needs.

What is our qualification process?

Industry benchmarks from Gartner, Forrester, HubSpot, and InsideSales.com indicate that participation incentives can improve meeting attendance by 20-35% and increase follow-up engagement by 15-25%, without compromising lead quality when paired with strong qualification processes.

We offer our services as an agency and as a SaaS platform.

With the agency, our account managers are responsible for matching the right buyer to the vendor. Let’s see how this process works:

1. Screening and reachouts: Potential buyers fill out a survey with their requirements or our account managers reach out to their accounts to understand the buyer’s needs or investment plans.
2. Matchmaking: Based on the survey and the responses account managers receive from the reachouts, they get on calls to discuss the requirements in excruciating detail, diving deeper into important questions like:
   1. What pain points are they trying to solve?
   2. What software or service are they looking for?
   3. What is their budget?
   4. What are the kind of vendors they’re trying to avoid or connect with?
   5. Are they looking for products that can integrate with a specific tech stack?
   6. What certifications, compliances, SLAs, etc., are they looking for?
   7. What KPIs do they need to meet, what are their goals from the potential purchase, and what kind of ROI do they expect from it?
   8. What are their priorities and non-negotiables in terms of implementation, support, communication, turnaround, and ticket resolutions?
   9. What is the scale of the product they require in terms of no. of users, usage bandwidth, scalability, etc.?

Once they’ve identified all the information necessary, the account managers handpick and curate the right vendors, guaranteeing a near 100% match where the right requirements meet the right services offered. One of our vendors received 21 leads and 5 registered deals in 3 months.

The platform, on the other hand, is a DIY solution for buyers to explore options on their own. Using advanced algorithms, buyers get tailored matches to relevant vendors based on their requirements. If a buyer finds a vendor relevant to their needs, they can choose to connect with them.

In this entire process, our cash incentive is merely a gesture of good faith, almost like a virtual lunch to start a conversation at our expense. Generating $14.5 Billion is pipeline doesn’t happen from cash incentives; it happens because there’s value in what we do.

What you offer trumps everything else

Once you do have a foot in the door with an incentive-driven meeting, what happens next depends entirely on:

• How relevant your solution is to their specific challenges. Not everything is always a priority, so if you’re trying to sell storage solutions to someone looking to improve their disaster recovery tech stack, it will most probably not convert.
• The ROI your offering provides. IT buyers need to make business decisions as much as they need to make technical decisions. If your solution doesn’t enable them to prove a better ROI, it probably won’t be a good fit. This can also be influenced by budget, implementation costs, company size, etc.
• The quality of your team and implementation. A responsive, transparent team is half the problem solved. Having the right certifications, expertise, compliance policies, and customer support is more important than you think.
• Competitive differentiators and market positioning. Does your pricing justify the services you provide? No IT manager will convert without comparing your solution with your competitors and their own needs. Enterprise purchasing decisions don’t happen overnight.

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