How Gamification Encourages Sales
When we’re infants, our parents try to make mealtimes fun so that we eat without a fuss. When we’re students, our professors set up quizzes and extracurricular activities to help us achieve our goals creatively and in a lighthearted manner. Similarly, when brands want to boost their sales, they try to change how their salespeople function to accomplish higher sales without enforcing harsh measures on their behavior, routine, or finances.
For this purpose, companies often target the behavioral makeup of their sales professionals. They attempt to understand the motivating and discouraging factors that drove salespeople to work harder. This way, brands can ensure they alter the behavioral clockwork of their teams so that instead of feeling forced into boosting sales, salespeople independently aspire to boost their performance.
Put another way, brands try to dissect their teams’ behavioral dynamics, focus on areas that need improvement, and witness remarkable changes in their sales!
What is Gamification?
Gamification is a concept that deals with connecting everyday work with game-like strategies, completely with rewards, scores, leaderboards, and bonuses. Gamification helps eliminate boredom by making those tedious routine tasks more fun for everyone.
Just like the games you play on your smartphones and in VR rooms, gamification in sales changes your environment to make it competitive, reward-based, and stimulating in general. To get a clearer idea of how gamification works in sales, here’s a step-by-step breakdown!
Behavioral Gamification Encourages Sales
Behavioral gamification in sales goes through three processes. Scaling these three processes independently allows brands to create a defined gamification strategy. These steps include:
The Planning
The first part is about narrowing down the immense scope of gamification to smaller focus areas with SMART goals. These are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Sensitive. In our case, we take sales boosts to be the primary outcome of gamification. However, there’s more to the planning of gamification in sales behavior. Some elements are:
Problem Identification
As a brand owner or an independent problem-solver, what do you feel is the problem with the sales in your subject area? This answer can differ in breadth and depth because sales itself is a diverse field. For some, it’s poor design. For others, it’s time management. Still, others may think their reach might be affected due to a lack of email responses.
Since sales go through a complex formulation, the process of problem identification may also occur at multiple steps, including finances, creativity, promotion, management, resource analysis, and so on. Besides, problem identification links one problem to its cause and other issues within your sales framework.
Solution Identification
Once you’ve identified your problem, you have to figure out their possible solutions. If you have a poor design and creative team, your solution would be to get a better team, redesign your brand logo, or invest in the current squad to get resources for better designing. Sometimes, the solutions to your sales problems may lie across a broad area of sales, which will require you to think creatively while connecting different issues and solutions.
Strategic Planning
This is the final part of the planning phase, where you have to plan gamification strategies to eliminate problems and introduce solutions that clear the blockages in your sales pipelines. Gamifying your problem and solution linkage is the crux of gamification, and it’s the sole distinguishing factor that sets gamification apart from other problem-solving methods.
So, let’s say your problem revolves around one of your under-hyped products. You know what potential your product holds, you know you’ve done a spot-on job in marketing, and you’ve picked just the right points of sale. However, your audience has perhaps overlooked your brand because you launched it during an inflated economy or when your rival product had a discount offer going on. In all, the product failed to make an impression on your audience.
The behavioral sales gamification you apply here pertains to your audience’s preferential change. If you want to convert your audience’s mind towards your product and want to convince them to purchase it, what will you do?
Quite often, brand owners adopt the techniques of gift prizes, lucky draws, scratch coupons, and other reward-based incentives against the purchase. It’s like Willy Wonka’s golden ticket, but a little less grand! This kind of behavior can motivate your target customer to purchase more to win the prize, hence improving your sales!
The Implementation
Once you have an idea of how you can use behavioral gamification to increase your sales through resource management, audience motivation, or any other channel, it’s time to get down to planning it to the T.
Although gamification sounds like an emancipatory, freestyle approach to improving sales, it requires quite a lot of brainpower and trial-and-error before you can establish some certainty regarding your progress. This is because gamification is somewhat unbridled and unpredictable in that it has a boundless scope, which, when applied to a diverse customer segment, can often yield surprising results.
We can divide the implementation into further parts, which include:
Resource Planning
Wherever you plan to implement sales gamification, you’ll require resources. This will include time, skill sets, tools, technology, space, communication networks, financial backing, and so on. You’ll have to prepare a resource map to see how different elements may come together for your gamification.
Designing and Structuring
Once you have resources, you have to start onboarding your teams regarding the design and structure of your project. This will include what changes you’d like to see, how you’ll use gamified setups to bring about those changes, and how you will merge various resources into a unified concept.
For instance, if you’re improving supermarket sales, and you plan to assign your salespeople different targets, you’ll need a combination of resources, such as focal persons, monitoring devices, and CRMs to ensure a smooth behavioral transition into a motivated, gamified spirit.
Initial Testing
Even when you’re confident about your gamified sales strategy, it’ll be a tremendous risk to take on. So before you launch your gamification in full swing, you may test it out at certain sales spots to check for errors and improvements. For instance, if you have a promotional offer for females, you may set it up at certain stores that females frequently visit.
But if you feel like your selection of stores is slightly off, you may amend your plans to include other places besides traditional mall stores in your gamification strategy, such as vendors or online boutiques. If your design works better in those environments, you can hit full throttle and launch your campaign!
The Results
Once your behavioral gamification has kicked off, you may wait some time till the results in your sales start coming in. While the initial stats, such as the number of sales, day, time, product, etc., are some obvious indicators, it’s best if you also look out for some less obvious, but more insightful hands of how successful your gamification has been.
Customer feedback, for instance, is one way of making your sales gamification more interactive, hence more insightful. When you launch a new pizza flavor, you may ask your audience to post pictures of their slices using hashtags and a few words of what they like about the new flavor. You could keep rewards, such as free coupons for the week, cash backs over upcoming purchases, and so on.
On the one hand, the number of hashtags will tell you how many pizzas you sold. On the other hand, the thoughts your customers share may allow you to improvise the new flavor as per the popular preference.
Conclusion
Gamification brings excitement to your sales. As fun and daring and uncertain, gamification helps you make your brand unique and interactive. It also allows you to build a more stable brand identity in the long run without investing heavily in extensive marketing campaigns or brand relaunches!
References
Put those insights into practice.
Set your team up for success by improving their performance through gamification.
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