How Effective Is Sales Gamification?
March 2, 2020
If one thing is true about people who work in sales, it’s that they are competitive. Knowing that managers often organize sales contest to motivate their teams. But these days, it’s no longer enough. Sales reps are quickly losing motivation, and it’s becoming harder than ever to keep them engaged and productive. In this article, we’re going to show you why you should use sales gamification to boost your sales team’s performance.
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What Is Sales Gamification?
Sales gamification is quite an interesting concept. As the name suggests sales gamification is the process of applying game-design elements and features to sales.
These can include setting points for certain successful action, hosting regular competitions, and providing sales reps with ratings depending on their performance.
The main purpose behind sales gamification is help motivate the participating employees and give them more to achieve their goals.
Sales gamification first became a concept in 2008. since, then it’s quickly become one of the most widespread sales strategies out there. Some of the most well-known companies like FedEx, Nike, and Microsoft all implement some form of sales gamification to help improve their sales
How Does Gamification Help Sales Teams?
The definition of gamification states that it is “the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts.”
In practice, this often means that people (team members, potential customers, etc.) perform certain tasks and get points for them. The points accumulate, allowing them to reach new levels (tiers), earn badges, achievements, and ultimately exchange their points for rewards.
This in itself makes routine tasks more engaging.
For example, a sales rep may get tired of having to call 50 prospects every day, especially if they don’t have high success rates.
But when they perceive it as a game, their routine task becomes much more entertaining, leading to…
Higher Engagement Levels
First, let’s talk numbers:
- 95% of employees enjoy using gaming-inspired elements in their work (Source)
- 89% of employees say a gamified task at work makes them more competitive (Source)
- 72% of employees claim gamification inspires them to work harder (Source)
When your sales team is engaged, they’re more productive. And that brings a significant revenue boost for your company.
Previously, companies tried to increase job engagement by adding things like video games to break rooms. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work as well because the job itself still wasn’t engaging.
But with gamification, every task that needs to be completed becomes more interesting.
Higher Motivation Levels
Sales teams are normally very competitive. However, even top performers get stuck in a rut.
Additionally, not all reps respond to same types of motivation.
Some of your reps probably love competing against one another. Others just want to compete against themselves, and improve with each passing day.
Sales gamification allows you to motivate both types.
Because it plays into both extrinsic (the desire to be better in comparison) and intrinsic (the desire to improve your skills) motivation, gamification is a great solution for motivating sales teams.
If you use Spinify, a gamified sales dashboard, you’ll be able to set up engaging competitions between team members and teams, while also allowing reps to track their own progress and performance.
Healthy Competition with Sales Gamification
Since sales teams are competitive, it’s important to make sure that competition doesn’t affect your company culture. When left unchecked, competition can lead to workplace conflicts, and cause a lot of trouble.
Again, this is where gamification can help.
Since gamification shows reps exactly how they’re performing, and which behaviors are driving their performance, reps feel a sense of accountability, rather than jealousy. They know what they need to do to improve.
Spinify is really careful to only encourage healthy competition through gamification:
- Engaging contests
- Leaderboards that reward and reinforce behaviors, instead of only praising the results
- Real-time notifications (that can be displayed on office TVs)
- Visibility and transparency
Ultimately, Spinify’s approach to sales team gamification will help you reinforce positive behaviors, and create a company culture based on healthy – and only healthy – competition.
Increased Visibility
Data visibility is crucial to improving your sales team’s performance.
Since gamification relies on tracking points (and rewarding reps accordingly), it becomes much easier to understand revenue-generating behaviors.
For example, your top performers may seem mystical to the rest of your sales team. Since there’s no way of knowing what exactly they’re doing to achieve such results, the rest of the team can feel demotivated.
But with a sales dashboard like Spinify, you can set up a points system that rewards behaviors such as following up with clients, calling prospects, and much more.
You’ll be showing the rest of your team what they need to do to succeed.
At the same time, you’ll be able to easily track your KPIs and exceed your quota in no time!
Reach Sales Goals
One of the main reasons behind why so many organizations support sales gamification is that it’s a great help in achieving sales goals.
When you set goals for sales teams, it becomes easier for them to complete tasks and work towards achieving that goal. Gamification is a very intelligent tool that can give employees additional motivation to complete their tasks efficiently and help boost the overall sales.
Improve ROI
Sales is all about performance, and one of the best ways to get the most out of your sales team is to implement sales gamification.
By implementing sales gamification, you’ll see a significant increase in the sales performance. It helps improve the performance and competitiveness. You can also assign ratings to assess which members of the sales teams are performing to an optimal level and reward them accordingly.
Encourage Friendly Competition
A major reason behind why companies implement sales gamification is that it helps increase sales performance significantly. Sales managers can use the concept to hold sales contests and encourage friendly competition within the team.
Most people by their nature are highly competitive and gamification can help sales managers take advantage of the fact. A reward system in unison with gamification will help take your sales team to the next level.
It’ll also help you get more out of the sales reps that typically perform the least. No one wants to lag behind their colleagues in a competition.
What Are Common Sales Gamification Mechanics?
To implement sales gamification properly, sales managers need to properly understand the gamification tools and mechanics. Every company has the option of implementing their own gamification mechanics but let’s take a look at some of the more tried and tested ones out there.
Leaderboards
One of the most useful sales gamification tools is generating leaderboards. These leaderboards can help rank your team according to several different key metrics.
However, it’s important for sales manager to select those key metrics that don’t pit team members against one another.
Using gamification in this way is a great way to motivate employees. It can create a platform for sales teams to engage with each other and see the real time impact on their performance.
Points
All games need some form of scoring platform to ensure that it works effectively. You can assign different points for employees that complete tasks and challenges for the business.
It’s important that sales managers don’t create a platform that leads to friction between team members. Competitions can potentially become detrimental to the business if they cause friction between the sales reps.
That’s why picking the right metric to award points for is so important. One thing that sales managers should remember when selecting metrics is to pick the ones that encourages friendly competition.
Instead of assigning points for simple things such as task completion and time taken, organizations should take other performance factors into the equation. Doing so properly will eliminate any potential toxic competition!
Badges or Certificates
Aside from assigning points, sales manager can also set up a badge or certification system. The concept is that the employee who completes certain challenges or has a specific set of skills should receive a corresponding badge or certificate.
When these badges or certificates are available, it’ll give employees greater incentive to complete tasks. It’s such a small feature but it can significantly improve the business and sales performance.
What do you need to implement sales gamification?
The most essential feature that sales managers need to implement gamification is sales gamification software. These software are specifically designed to cover all of the requirements to implement gamification.
A typical sales gamification software will include a dashboard that lets you access all the different sections and leaderboards that you’d want to create.
Another advantage of implementing sales gamification software is that you don’t have to spend needless hours updating the rankings. Once you provide the sales gamification software with data access, it becomes easy for it to continuously update the scores accordingly.
A great example of sales gamification software is Spinify!
How Spinify Helps You Improve Your Sales Team’s Performance
Data visibility, higher motivation and engagement levels, exceeded quotas… Gamification really is effective for sales teams.
And with Spinify, a sales dashboard that integrates the best principles of gamification for sales teams, you’ll be good to go.
Our tool offers:
And so much more!
Onboarding your team is really easy, and Spinify brings more results than you could ever imagine.
Put those insights into practice.
Set your team up for success by improving their performance through gamification.
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