The power of contests
Tennis grand slam season is upon us as we head into the European and North American summer. We’ve got the French Open already here, Wimbledon next, and then off to New York for the US Open.
But what can tournament prize money tell us about the nature and structure of contests, and how to best use rewards to incentivize greater output?
As we investigate, we’ll take a look at how this applies to modern partner programs.
French Open 2026
Right now, French Open qualifiers are in progress and the 1st round of the main singles tournament kicks off on Sunday 24 May, 2026. The major drawcards are of course the men’s and women’s singles tournaments.
The total prize pool across men’s and women’s is €45,160,000. That makes up a whopping 73% of the total prize money on offer for the entirety of the event (which also has men’s and women’s doubles, mixed doubles, and wheelchair tournaments, plus the qualifying rounds that come before).
What do you get for winning the main prize, the men’s or women’s singles title?
€2.8 million.
Not to mention what generally comes as the champion of a tennis major… Sponsorship deals… Appearance fees… Decades of brand value.
But if the prize money was shared equally across all competitors, the picture would look very different. Instead of a major prize for the champion (and prizes of increasing value as you progress through the tournament)… You’d have an equal payout of about €176,400 for each contender, whether they strike out in the first round, or lift the trophy at the end.
That’s of course nothing to sneeze at, but in the context of a major global professional sporting prize, it isn’t much. In the case of professional tennis, top players would spend more than this on their team for the year (not to mention travel and accommodation expenses).
Poor incentives can lead to a big cost
You can’t have a true major tennis tournament without the best players. And in the modern era, the prestige of the trophy alone is not enough, especially when you consider the sheer amount of revenue the tournament (and the sport overall) generates.
Without the pull of real prize money for the winners, the French Open wouldn’t be able to compete with the other major tennis tournaments. The top players would be far less likely to turn out for the event.
And before long, the tournament would lose a great deal of its prestige… and potentially fall away all together over enough time.
Partner programs faced with the same problems
This is a pattern that shows up across many partner programs. Over time, there’s a lull that sets in. Partners settle into their tier, and the energy plateaus.
When you have a channel program, this is the exact place you don’t want to be. Unenthusiastic partners who aren’t incentivized to reach beyond where they currently stand because they’re not being rewarded in the right way.
The equivalent of a French Open champion if all they earned was the same as the first round loser.
A way forward with contests
Research on contest design points the other way. Three principles keep showing up, and the lessons from each can be applied to contests run within modern partner programs.
Tournament Theory
Tournament Theory (Lazear and Rosen, 1981) looks at compensation schemes within workforces that follow the person’s rank instead of output (i.e. how one performs relative to others). A higher salary for a higher position can incentivize people to work harder to try and earn a promotion to reach that level.
When applied to contests (like a professional tennis tournament), you see it with tiered prizes for different achievements. First round losers at the French Open take home €87,000, and it increases incrementally to 750K to make the semis, 1.4M to finish the runner up and 2.8M to take home the trophy.
What we see here is that spreading prizes of different tiers out more can bring out more effort from the field.
Segment the field
There was also an interesting study recently published in the Journal of Marketing Research (Bommaraju et al, 2025), examining multi-segment and single-segment sales contests. It looked at the single-segment sales contest (where the salesperson is going up against all other salespeople in the one pool) against mult-segment contests (in which the salespeople are split up into uniform segments that only compete with their segment).
What the study found was that peer-bracket segments beat both unsegmented contests, and no contest at all. Having a segmented field will boost performance across the board, as there is a greater perceived chance of winning.
In a single-segment contest, participants are less likely to think they can win the competition, and therefore many will not put in an increased effort to win. Conversely, when there’s a multi-segment contest, more participants think they can win their bracket, boosting their motivation and effort, leading to greater productivity.
Aspirational prizes
A key element of Prospect Theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) relates to how people weight probabilities of differing types. In particular, people will place a higher probability of success on something that comes with a large reward.
This helps explain the phenomenon of lotteries, where people are enticed by a massive potential prize, despite having a very low chance of winning (and therefore hold a negative expected outcome).
Having an aspirational prize at the top will bring greater pull than spreading that dollar value evenly across the field.
What this means for the channel
Here’s what we predict is in store in the current partner ecosystem.
Concentrated, time-bound partner contests will become a much larger part of the channel playbook over the next 18 months. Of course, rebates and MDF will still play their fundamental role as program anchors.
But we believe contests will sit on top.
And we’ve already seen some great examples of this at work in the field:
AWS Game On: Accelerate Demand with AWS
Just launched, AWS Game On is a 2026 contest where partners can earn points to move up the ladder, and win prizes as they go. That includes the biggest prize on offer: tickets to re:Invent 2026 (the conference for AWS that acts as their premier event for the year).
Logitech Channel Champs
Over 9 months, Logitech partners compete for the chance to win one of 75 trips to Athens. Those partners are split up over peer brackets during the contest.
HubSport Performance-Based Impact Awards
The HubSpot Solutions Partner Impact Awards is a year-long regional competition, broken into Asia Pacific, EMEA, Latin America and North America. Partners compete based on revenue retention metrics (with the highest revenue retention for each region declared a winner). Plus, there are other categories, including Partner of the Year and Rookie of the Year (both linked to highest MRR from eligible deals).
Why the shift?
There are two key factors that we see at play here:
Faster cycle time
Incentive cycle time is becoming a competitive variable. If you have major developments in AI every quarter, or new SKUs landing every six weeks, it’s harder to see annual plans being able to keep up. With that in mind, we can expect a need for faster contests that last less time (and most importantly, can get set up quickly).
Vendors who will be able to set up a contest in days (rather than months) will get first pick of partner attention.
Reactivity rising in value
Relative to scale, reactivity is rising in value… and it’s with contests that you can spot it. The biggest partners still carry customer access that nobody else can replicate. But the agile partners who can absorb a new product, geo, or AI motion in weeks are becoming disproportionately valuable.
It’s not always clear to vendors who those agile partners are. But when you run a well-designed contest, you allow those partners to self-identify by behavior, instead of tier.
Partner contests with Unifyr
Lately, we’ve been hard at work enhancing our contest capabilities, with promising results.
If you’d like to find out more about what we’re doing in this space, and see what our platform can do for your partner program, you can book a demo here.