How to motivate your sales team with gamification

Sales gamification is a time-tested strategy for motivating your sales team and increasing both individual and team performance. By instituting a gamification regime, you’ll be able to inspire both new and veteran sales associates to contribute their best efforts towards your sales objectives and other key performance indicators, such as call-handling time and customer satisfaction. But what exactly is sales gamification?

In this brief article, we will go over what sales gamification is and how you can use it to motivate your team, and we will look at some of the best sales incentives that you can offer team members to get the greatest return on your investment.

Gamification to motivate your sales team

Gamification in sales refers to the process of incentivizing individual and team-based performance. In other words, it’s a way of turning sales into a game. The team members who perform the best can win bonus cash or prizes, so your sales associates will be motivated to want to succeed to win those rewards. It’s a strategy that works and works well, but only when done correctly.

Offering low-value sales incentives will not result in increased productivity and can, in fact, decrease your team’s motivation as they may feel that you do not value their contributions. On the other hand, offering cash prizes or other rewards that are perceived as being valuable can encourage your sales team members to work harder, be more productive, and ultimately earn your company more money.

Let’s look at some sales incentives that work really well.

The best sales incentives that really work

The following sales incentives have been proven to increase sales teams’ performance, so if you want your team to achieve the best results, consider offering one of the following sales incentives as a prize for completing objectives, exceeding quotas, and making sales.

1. Monetary awards

First and foremost, the most common and most obvious sales incentive is additional money. By offering a cash bonus, you will be able to inspire every member of your team. You can offer a one-time lump sum cash award, which can range from anywhere between $50 to $1000 or more depending on the value of the objective that they accomplished. So, if they earned your business $500 in profit, a $50 bonus might be perfect. Whereas, if they earned your company $50,000, then $50 would be an insult, so pick an amount that’s fair and will motivate your team to want to earn the bonus pay.

2. Electronics

Electronics are also a fantastic motivator. Consider offering a monthly prize of a new TV, computer, tablet, or smart home device. Electronics are generally perceived as being very valuable when in reality, they seldom cost a lot of money. If your team members know that the person with the most sales this month is going home with a new 4K TV, they will definitely try their hardest to win the big prize.

3. Concert tickets

Tickets to a concert or sporting event can also be fantastic sales incentives. The benefit of offering tickets as a prize is that you are offering something unique; the opportunity to witness something that will only happen once. This can make people who are interested in that even work particularly hard with the hopes of winning. The downside to offering tickets as a sales incentive is that not everyone on your team will be interested in the prize, which means that you will possibly motivate some people to work harder but not everyone.

4. Gift cards

Gift cards are one of the best universal gifts that almost everybody will want to win. Gift cards allow people to pick out their own prizes, and so most people will try their very best to make the most sales and win the prize. Another benefit of using gift cards as a sales incentive is that the value of the cards is flexible.

So, you can offer a $10 gift card for each sale made, or for making two or three sales in a night and so on, or you can offer $100, $250, or even $500 gift cards to get an even better return in terms of productivity and team engagement. Just make sure to choose gift cards that everyone will want.

5. Digital goods

Digital goods and services can also work well as sales incentives. Digital goods can include anything from streaming services subscriptions to audiobooks or e-book downloads. These days almost everyone relies on the internet for at least some of their entertainment, and so by offering digital goods, your sales incentives will appeal to most people encouraging your team members to strive to over-achieve and produce great results.

6. Educational incentives

A one-time cash bonus or a nice prize can serve to motivate your team really well, but these are short-term, one-time gains, a much better and longer-term sales incentive would be an educational incentive such as paying for a course, program, or additional training so that the team member can develop themselves both personally and professionally which will have a lasting impact on their quality of life and earning potential over time.

Summary

If you want to motivate your sales team to put forth their best effort each and every day, then turn your sales environment into a friendly competition with sales gamification. By rewarding your star sales associates with valuable prizes such as cash, electronics, tickets, gift cards, digital goods, and services, or educational incentives, you will see a dramatic improvement in your team’s performance, morale, productivity, happiness, and commitment.