Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Aran Flanagan · Prezzee · August 2026
One product, three different budgets. Reward and recognition sits with people teams, loyalty and acquisition sits with marketing, incentives sit with sales operations, and the three are approved by people who rarely meet. This map covers the US side of that: where each budget sits, who signs, and roughly how many companies there are in each band. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Large employers, 1,000 people and up
The band where recognition is a funded line with a named owner, a stated calendar and an existing platform, so this is a switch market with long cycles and large volumes. Procurement is in the room from the first meeting, which suits a vendor that can answer on control and reporting.
Who signs: VP of total rewards, head of employee experience, chief people officer, benefits director.
11,000 to 11,500
US employers at 1,000 people or more
Mid-market employers, 250 to 999 people
The largest group on this page and the least worked. Big enough to spend real money on recognition and service awards, small enough that one conversation with the HR director settles it, and rarely carrying a dedicated platform because nobody has ever shown them one.
Who signs: HR director, people operations lead, and the finance lead or chief executive on anything new.
27,000 to 28,000
US employers in this workforce band
Consumer brands and online sellers
The marketing budget rather than the people budget. Acquisition offers, referral rewards, survey and research incentives, win-back campaigns. Faster decisions, smaller first orders, and a buyer who measures the reward as a line in a campaign rather than as a benefit.
Who signs: VP of loyalty or customer relationship marketing, head of lifecycle marketing, ecommerce director.
1,400 to 1,600
US employers registered as electronic shopping and mail order sellers, before the wider retail base
Finance and insurance at scale
The sector that buys reward value at volume for research participation, claims goodwill and service recovery, and that buys on audit trail and control as much as on the catalog. Long approval chains, and unusually sticky once a program is running.
Who signs: head of customer experience, claims operations director, marketing operations lead, procurement.
4,000 to 5,000
US finance and insurance employers at 250 people or more
Manufacturers and distributors
Channel and dealer incentives, safety milestones and shift-based recognition, which is a different buyer again and a category that still runs heavily on paper and plastic. Least likely of any segment here to have been approached by a digital reward platform.
Who signs: channel marketing manager, VP of sales operations, distributor program lead, plant HR manager.
6,000 to 6,500
US manufacturing employers at 250 people or more
Program partners and resellers
Incentive houses, benefits brokers, research panel operators and loyalty agencies sit in front of every segment above. Not a countable market, a named partner list, and one that extends reach without extending prospecting.
Who signs: account director, head of partnerships, program manager.
No clean public register
described rather than counted; resells into the segments above rather than forming a segment of its own

Where the openings are

1
Three budgets, three doors. In this category a single channel tends to keep returning to the people team, because that is usually where the first customers came from. Marketing and sales operations sit inside the same companies, hold their own money and are almost never contacted. That is the same account list worked once instead of three times.
2
The buying moment is calendar-locked. Year-end recognition, benefits enrollment, quarterly sales contests, holiday promotions. A channel that warms up in the fourth quarter arrives after the budget is set. Being in front of the buyer a quarter early is a scheduling problem rather than a positioning one, and it is solvable.
3
The mid-market is the underworked band, and it is the largest. Roughly 27,000 to 28,000 US employers between 250 and 999 people, with real recognition spending and usually no dedicated platform. They are also the least likely to attend the conferences where these platforms get seen, so reach has to be manufactured.
4
Partners resell, they do not prospect. A reseller layer covers the accounts it already holds and no others. Named-role outbound covers the ones it does not, and the overlap between the two is smaller than it looks from inside a partner program.
Built from public registries, counts banded deliberately. The source is public federal registry data covering US employers that file a benefit plan, current to the 2024 filing year. Workforce bands use plan participants as a headcount proxy, so they indicate scale rather than an exact staff count. Owner-only and very small employers are not published. Sector codes are self-reported.
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