I Can't Dance to That!

Ken Juel got a quick education in the preferences of younger qualifiers when he joined TD Ameritrade in early 2006: The average age of a producer in the company's 600-person field force is only 29. “We hire a lot of kids just out of college,” explains Juel, who came to the company after 21 years with Mutual of Omaha, where the average producer was decidedly older and more traditional. Now he's got infants and girlfriends coming to conferences.

“I've had to rethink everything,” he says. “And it's been a good thing. I just did a program in Banff where the optional activities included white-water rafting and ATV tours. The average age of the TD Ameritrade attendee allows me to plan more aggressive activities.”

Of course, along with the cooler activities are some new challenges. “Now I have babies and two-year-olds I'm trying to accommodate,” he laughs. “We don't have the budget yet to build a full kids' program, so we just try to give them as much information as we can. For example, the concierge can arrange baby-sitting, [you can] bring the kids to breakfast because it's a buffet, that kind of thing.”

At MetLife in Boston, Lindsay Maloni, conference planner, finds qualifiers getting younger in certain areas. “More and more producers are younger on our life insurance side,” says Maloni, a Gen Y planner herself. “The early 30s age bracket is growing.” Those producers are filling spots in the company's second-tier incentive conferences alongside producers who have been at it for three decades. With all qualifiers becoming more well-traveled and adventuresome, MetLife has had to look offshore — Puerto Rico and the Caribbean — for the second-tier conferences, which traditionally were booked only domestically.

As for the hotels and resorts themselves, Maloni notes that at 800 attendees, her Tier Two group is too big for boutique hotels. Her priorities, after size, are service level and reputation. “We look for properties like Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons, and Fairmont that are classic and tasteful, not trendy.” Then again, she points out, “attendees do notice if a hotel feels outdated.”

Breakout sessions at the conferences target different ages and experience levels, and longtime agents are often tapped as presenters at workshops for newer agents. After the required morning business sessions, attendees choose afternoon activities from bus tours to bike tours: Maloni and the conference planning team ensure that there are options for all ages and ability levels.

But it may be that the toughest crowd-pleasing choice meeting planners have to make is the band. “That's a big one,” Maloni says. “We really have to look at set lists and listen to demos to get dance bands that play music for all the generations.”

Dan Young, CMP, LLIF feels her pain. “It's harder to hire a dance band. Usually we do rock and R&B but there is a challenge there,” says Young, director, event planning and field recognition at Thrivent Financial in Minneapolis. A successful choice for Young, whose qualifiers are 52 percent Baby Boomers, 34 percent Gen X, 9 percent Gen Y, and 5 percent older than the Boomers, has been Michael Cavanaugh: “He's a guy with a repertoire of hundreds of songs who can really read a crowd.”

Grant Snider of JPdL Destination Management sometimes advises booking a DJ when the crowd is diverse. “More and more it seems that a DJ is an easier way to go,” he says. “They've got everything. They can give you the full range from the Rat Pack to Beyoncé.” (But keep the volume down at evening functions regardless of the age range, Snider says. “Hey, I'm not hard of hearing or anything, but you can't interrupt the networking.”)

Forever Young

Then again, maybe age isn't about a number. For a recent board of directors program in Toronto, Snider was surprised at the high level of interest in a Centre Island cycling tour. “You can't safely assume what people in a given age range want,” he says. “For example, today's Baby Boomers are more active and health-conscious than previous generations.”

Cheryl Cran puts it this way: “Baby Boomers refuse to age.” And they don't want to — or can't afford to — leave the workforce. “Within two years,” she says, “retirement will be an antiquated notion.”

Thrivent's Dan Young notes, “A lot of people are younger by attitude. They're healthier than they used to be, they want to be involved in more physical activity.” As a result, he's offering more high-energy options to attendees, such as kayaking and rock climbing.

Watch out for making gender assumptions, too. Young says, “We have more men spending a day at the spa with their spouses, and cooking classes are popular thanks to the Food Network. A lot of women are choosing them, but some men are, too.”

During a program at the Four Seasons Hotel George V Paris this past spring, Janice Matoi planned a cooking class at the Hotel Ritz and found it more popular with the men than with the women. “It was surprising to me that the men enjoyed it most,” says Matoi, vice president, Transamerica Insurance & Investment Group, in Los Angeles. “They really raved about it.”

As attendees become more knowledgeable about food, even the buffet is getting more active, with the usual carving station expanding to several stations where dishes are made fresh by hotel chefs. Young held a program at the JW Marriott Starr Pass in Tucson, where chefs created “action stations” and prepared everything from barbecue to sushi to Mexican specialties. “They took it to a whole different level,” says Young. “People have higher food standards now. And they want to talk to the chef, to know how it's made.”

Text Me

Nowhere does the generation gap seem wider than in the area of technology. “Gen Y is a totally different beast. They want gadgets, pageantry, Wiis, TiVo,” says Mosley of Allstate. “We're in an era where your personal equipment is more sophisticated than your work equipment. Gen Y is total technology. So if you want to hit Gen Y you've got to spend more money to catch up to their personal tastes and what they think the norm is. They want results at the push of a button. They expect things immediately.”

The upside, Mosley says, is that they prefer electronic communication such as e-mail, text messages, and IMs, which are also cheaper and easier for planners. “When we take people on trips, we get their cell numbers in case of emergencies,” Mosley notes. “But eventually I can see sending mass text messages to attendees” — to remind them, for example, of the start time for an evening event. “And I can also see, somewhere down the road, when a room drop — departure notices, for example — is a text message.”

One of Mosley's latest meeting innovations spurred by technology is the “BlackBerry break,” something he heard about at an industry roundtable meeting. Label them BlackBerry breaks, the thinking goes, and attendees will turn off their gadgets during a presentation, since they know an e-mail and text-ing break is coming.

And you can forget presentation handouts. Younger producers would rather have a flash drive or a URL. At TD Ameritrade, says Ken Juel, the training department is looking into creating podcasts of training sessions and product updates, “so guys can listen on their iPods on the way to work.”

Incentive Conferences: It's All Good

Does the group travel experience motivate younger producers? “Absolutely!” says Kim DeVillers of Countrywide Financial, echoing the opinion of her planning peers. TD Ameritrade's Ken Juel says, “They're young. They don't have a lot of discretionary income. They've never had a chance to do these kinds of trips.”

MetLife's Maloni agrees. “Because they are first-time qualifiers, the excitement level is really high. They are thrilled to be there and appreciate the conference elements.”

Indeed, a recent LIMRA study looked at producer attitudes toward sales contests, finding that 75 percent of respondents saw them as motivating. Agreeing to the greatest degree that a sales contest is “an incentive” were the youngest respondents, those between 31 and 45, essentially Gen Xers.

For insurance and financial services companies, the key point is that if you do it right, once you get them to the conference, you'll keep them in the business. “We retain 97 percent of our conference-level producers,” says Young.

“Regardless of age,” concludes National Life of Vermont's Lynn Averill, “the expectation is always to go to a five-star resort. Fortunately, National Life recognizes that the quality of a property is critical to any success we expect to achieve.”

And Gen Y, in fact, may be just the generation to breathe new life into incentive conferences. “One cool thing about them is that they are very team-oriented,” says Cheryl Cran. “A lot of Baby Boomers are lone-wolfers. They need individual recognition. But Gen Y wants the team to succeed. They're group-oriented.”