I don’t even like to call it a buzzword, because the idea of sales gamification is really grabbing hold. Where? See some examples of making it work are out there, like this, and this, and oh yeah that. So how do you know if you could benefit from using gamification within your own sales team? Will it really make an impact, or just drive a short-term spike? Below are 5 reasons your sales organization may benefit from gamification:
1. Your Salespeople Are Competitive Beasts
Gamification helps you tap into the competitive nature of your salespeople by creating competition around the behaviors you need to motivate. Salespeople are often checking out the company sales reports to see where they stand relative to quota, and relative to their peers. That’s one of the main reasons you created sales dashboards in the first place – to provide visibility and keep people motivated. By applying gamification concepts within Salesforce.com, you can build competitions around just about any behavior you want. Just pick the activity you want to drive, and create a competition around it. The data is in your CRM, now you can reward people for it.
2. There’s Always Some Key Initiative
There are always times throughout the year that you need to drive specific activity from the sales team. Your base compensation plan should keep people motivated to sell and hit their goals. However, there is always some other specific behavior you are trying to get your team focused on. Maybe it’s taking a new product to market, making a few extra phone calls this week, following up on trade show leads more quickly, or booking more meetings. Your comp plan is focused on closing, but you can use gamification to point people toward some specific activity you need to motivate.
3. Your Sales Pipeline Has Inaccurate Data
Do your salespeople keep their opportunities updated? This is one of the biggest struggles for sales managers – having a solid view of the sales pipeline. Salespeople tend to do one of two things: Put opportunities into the system and then never update them until the deal is won or lost, or put opportunities in at late stages only before the deal is about to close. Both scenarios result in an inaccurate view of your business that you can’t take action on. So apply a little gamification to it – every time someone updates the close date or sales stage, give them a point. Every point is an entry to win, or whoever has the most points at the end of the month wins.
4. You Want to Drive Collaboration
Today’s sales organizations are more separated than ever before with folks working from home offices, or huddled behind their desks living in social media. By creating competitions around a key initiative, you rally everyone together around some specific objective. Everyone on the team can see a real time leaderboard on where they stand and how others are doing. This motivates people to want to learn from their peers to see what they are doing differently, and gives you a reason to talk about it in team meetings and one-on-one sessions.
5. To Make Your CRM More Interesting
All CRM systems could use a little creative boost. Applying gamification ideas keeps people inside of Salesforce.com. Since the competition is all tracked based on data in Salesforce, the sales team becomes motivated to keep their data updated and can be regularly reviewing the leaderboards and status updates on the competition.
The benefits of gamification will be unique to the environment and goals of each company. Have you applied gamification ideas to your own sales organization? What have you seen work?
