How Effective Is Gamification in Sales Teams?

If one thing is true about people who work in sales, it’s that they are competitive.

Knowing that, sales managers often organize competitions to motivate their teams. But these days, it’s no longer enough. 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 gamification to boost your sales team’s performance.

Press play!

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.

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

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.