Happy June! It’s officially the last month of Q2 for most organizations and it’s time to spark some serious activity. A great way to do so is with the use of contests and sales gamification.
Gamification is the application of point-scoring, contests, and competition for activities that are logged in a CRM such as Salesforce. These activities can include actions such as dials, live-connects, or in-person meetings. The point of gamification is to motivate your team and put emphasis on the most important sales behaviors that will drive deals through the pipeline and increase team performance. It can make monotonous work more fun and helps lead teams to success.
The Science Behind Sales Contests
There are three primary motivators when it comes to salespeople: Competition, recognition, and compensation. Comp plans take care of the compensation part, but what about the other two? This is where sales contests come in. Gamification is all about motivation. This feeling of drive and ambition is fueled by dopamine being released in the brain as you work towards a rewarded goal. Competition and recognition add excitement to a reps day and push them towards peak performance.
Rules of Sales Contests
- Start with your metrics
The best way to start spinning up a contest is to start with the basics, your metrics. What behaviors are you looking to spark? Start with the outcomes you’re looking for and work backward. Do you want more meaningful conversation to move the needle forward? Try setting live connects as a metric as the more live connects that are made, the more likely these meaningful conversations are happening. The behaviors you’re looking for translates to your metrics.
- Keep it simple
While creating contests, make sure that you don’t have too many overcomplicated rules, keep it simple and understandable If not, your team won’t be engaged and interested. For example, give points out for every live connect, whoever has the most at the end of the week wins. Simple goals and contests are just as effective in gaining engagement and increasing motivation, maybe even more so, than complicated contests with tricky rules.
- Involve your team
This adds additional accountability for your team because they’re a part of deciding on goals. This goes back to the planning at the start of the year, agreeing on goals as a team, and communicating them out. If your team knows you set a goal of X amount of dollars, then they will understand that they need live connects (your metric you’re measuring for your contest) to get points.
This can also take the form of letting them choose the prize for the winner. Have your team decide what they would like to win instead of guessing yourself. Knowing there is a desirable prize at the end of the contest makes reps more likely and willing to participate.
- Make it public
Make your competition front and center in the office with LevelEleven Leaderboards containing real-time performance data from your team. Share these leaderboards on the big screen using Channel11 to harness the power of positive competition with sales gamification. This includes the ability to program splashes to show victories and spread energy and motivation around the office!
- Reward Quickly
This is another especially important part of contests that can be overlooked quickly. After the momentum of the contest ends, don’t forget to give the winner(s) the prize! If you don’t give out the prize, reps won’t be as motivated the next time you run a contest. For example, use the weekly sales meeting to give out rewards, adding to the recognition factor even more while also making sure the prize is provided.
Example: If you call them, they will buy.
Idea: Based on the line from the movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come”
Goal of Contest: This is a contest about talk time or calls in general. It can be based around total number of calls or the amount of time on calls, but the goal is to get people calling.
Possible Prizes: A month of meal delivery services for the winner.
The quarter is coming to an end and it’s important to keep your team on track towards goals.
Contests are a great way to do this, LevelEleven can help.
