Josh Delisle, VP of Worldwide Sales at Internet Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) leader Dyn, considers his sales team one of the most inventive and fastest growing in the world. Because Dyn is among the best at powering and managing DNS and email delivery services for millions of clients internationally, Josh’s sales team grew at an amazing rate — from three reps to over sixty in just two years. Despite that growth rate, they didn’t miss a beat. But Josh knew they could do even better.
Josh is well aware that the very qualities that drive his reps and make them successful are the same characteristics that can make them hard to retrain, especially when they’ve had a record of doing well. So when he decided to push his team to be proactive in driving even more success, he knew he had to get creative.
To get his reps to think in a different way, Josh himself had to think differently. He started by researching an idea he’d heard of: gamification. Immediately, Josh identified with its concepts. He decided that testing a gamification add-on – like LevelEleven’s Compete – to motivate his reps made a lot of sense. Then when he realized that Compete works seamlessly with Salesforce, which Dyn had already adopted, Josh was sold.
In the fall of 2012, Dyn implemented Compete and quickly recognized many of its benefits, including:
A Noticeable Shift in Rep Behavior
Josh’s team had done very well using a reactive approach — acting quickly on hot inbound leads — but his reps needed a nudge to source new leads themselves. Gamification provided that push. Once the team saw Compete in action, especially the dashboard of sales activity and new business, they were inspired to new action. In fact, one sales competition quadrupled the team’s number of closes. The month before the competition, Dyn closed three upgrade deals; the month of the competition, they closed 13!
Managers also got excited. Because they were provided with the ability to review each rep’s progress daily, make their own proactive decisions and come up with stronger and more targeted competitions every month, they bought in 100%.
An Unexpected Boost in Company Culture
Although Dyn is headquartered in New Hampshire, its sales team is split between North America and Europe. LevelEleven’s dashboards showing team members and managers from around the world, along with the integration of Salesforce’s Chatter into the contest interface, allowed for something Josh never expected: global bonding. Since implementation, sales reps have gotten to know each other and are congratulating one another on their achievements routinely.
A Simple Installation
Because Dyn’s sales reps were already spending so much of their time on Salesforce, Compete’s seamless integration with the popular CRM meant a much lower barrier to adoption. Installation and implementation were straightforward and smooth.
So here’s what it all came down to: Dyn saw that using gamification to change rep behavior proved to be a solid solution for their company. Ultimately, gamification allowed them to advance their success and stay on top of the internet space. For more information on how this was done specifically, read the full story in Josh’s words…
