Dreamforce 2014 is coming fast. Today, we wanted to take a look back at a great session from last year by Marci Neumeister, VP of Sales at Varsity Spirit, called “Improve Your Sales Processes and Performance with Gamification.”
Marci, as well as Varsity’s Salesforce administrator, Eric Schubert, describe how introducing gamification into their teams helped improve sales performance at Varsity and share lessons and best practices they learned in going through the process. Check it out:
Want a glimpse at what she says?
“And what’s key to note also is not just the improvement, but it was also the magnitude of how many more reps did do the activity. So, before the contest we maybe had a handful of reps. Once the contest went live, we had close to 95%, if not 100% engagement, where every single rep was actually doing the behavior we wanted them to do. So to that we were very excited and thought it was very successful.
So, outcomes and lessons learned. Here are just a few suggestions that I’d like to point out:
First and foremost is develop the contest aligned with your strategy of your company. I think that’s key, because if you’re paying money for this, you want to make sure that it justifies and there’s a return on investment. So we always looked at our objectives first.
Secondly, polling the reps. Before we even got started, through Chatter, I did a poll. And I basically asked the reps: “If we were to have some type of contest, what type of prizes would you like to be rewarded with?”
So they started early on, they didn’t even know it was coming, and I just started sprinkling it in throughout just to get them engaged and knowing…”Wait a second why do I have to tell Marci what I want for prizes?”
Once we went live, we probably did…I would say about 8-10 contests this year.
What we did was we also polled them periodically. I have some managers here today, and I would call them, and I would ask them to just spot check some of the reps, find out how was it going? What’s working? What’s not working? And that was really key for us to make adjustments on the fly.”
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