The Art Of Incentivizing Your Sales Team
One of the most important aspects that contribute towards ensuring that your sales team continues to perform at a high level is their motivation. If the sales team starts to lose motivation, it’s pretty easy for their performance to drop. While a sales team is new, it’s fairly easy to incentivize them and ensure that the employees perform at a high level. However, in older groups, trying to change their behavior and motivate them can be challenging.
That’s where strategies like gamification come into the equation and completely change the incentives you can provide your employees. Gamification is quickly taking the business world by storm, and it’s no longer just your standard buzzword. Here’s everything you need to know about how gamification can help incentivize your sales team
What Does Gamification Look Like?
Gamification is a strategy that involves applying certain game design elements to business operations to increase productivity. These design elements are all ones that prove incredibly effective at motivating players to remain engaged with actual games.
While some types of gamification have been around for some time now, the digitization of the whole system makes things so efficient. By incorporating a gamification strategy in your sales team, you’ll be able to bring your incentives program to the very forefront of what’s currently possible.
The most basic gamification system will generally incorporate a points system, a leaderboard, and rewards. Normally, the system controller can set points for specific tasks. Employing this system helps ensure that you can provide incentives to all employees, not just the ones that are the top performers.
A leaderboard is also a common game design mechanic that helps with engagement and provides a social element to gamification. Lastly, the rewards system can be integrated with points to ensure transparency in who earns what reward.
How Does Gamification Transform The Art Of Incentivizing Your Sales Team?
Implementing gamification will completely transform how you can incentivize your sales team. By completely digitalizing all the rewards, organizations present a new way to ensure that their employees remain engaged and perform at a high level.
Here are the main reasons why gamification transforms the art of incentivizing your sales team
All Kinds of Rewards
One of the key aspects that sets gamification apart from other incentives programs is that it offers the ability to provide a variety of different rewards. As a result, the belief that money is the only thing that can motivate people is an outdated concept.
A lot of modern research indicates that aside from money, a sense of accomplishment also plays a significant role in incentivizing people. Gamification can play that role perfectly by allowing your employees to track their own performance and see how they rank against their peers.
On top of that, another popular game mechanic that translates well when it comes to motivating your sales team is achievement badges. Developers came up with achievement badges to keep players motivated and continuously better themselves at the game.
Users can display these achievement badges on their profiles through a gamification dashboard. These badges will also let organizations identify which employees are good at performing what particular task.
Setting Clear Goals
One of the fundamental mechanics vital to the functioning of a sales team is setting clear goals. If there aren’t any clear goals, setting incentives and adequately rewarding the team members can prove exceedingly challenging.
That’s where gamification comes in to make things much easier for organizations. Instead of manually keeping up with organizational goals, gamification will allow them to set and track goals at a moment’s notice.
The tracking will also be completely transparent. Also, the system will display exactly how much each employee contributes to the goal. You can also use the gamification dashboard to set goals for individual employees. To further incentivize them, you can even set up personalized rewards.
By smartly using the gamification software, you achieve the perfect balance between incentivizing your employees and ensuring that they reach their goals.
Align Incentives with Progress
One of the best ways that gamification completely transforms your incentives plan is by giving organizations the ability to incentivize employee progress. By effectively lining up incentives with the level of tasks that you think the employee should be performing.
Ideally, you should assign a low number of points to relatively easy tasks and assign high points to tasks that are difficult to perform. You can also effectively track the employee’s progress through the gamification dashboard. If you feel like the employee’s progress is slowing down, you can change the incentives to point them in the direction.
Gamification essentially gives you a much higher level of control.
Healthy Competition
A healthy sense of competition is at the heart of all the greatest sports teams. Without adequate levels of competition, a team won’t be able to grow correctly. Conversely, suppose an organization isn’t careful. In that case, it could potentially end up creating a toxic environment that makes it difficult for employees to progress.
However, incorporating game design elements makes it much easier to maintain a healthy sense of competition. For example, you can set up a leaderboard and assign rewards for the top employees on that leaderboard. There are plenty of ways that you can foster a sense of competition.
Through the social element of gamification, it’ll also help create a sense of teamwork and collaboration. So while individuals will be looking to improve their own performance, they’ll also be working towards organizational goals.
What’s The Idea Behind Gamification?
Gamification runs based on the principle of operant conditioning. According to this principle, the consequence of a specific action determines the likelihood of the action being repeated. If an action has a bad consequence, the individual is less likely to repeat the task. On the other hand, a positive reaction will reinforce a behavior.
In simple terms, positive reinforcement will play a key role in ensuring that team member effectively improves their performance consistently. For example, when a sales rep receives a reward for performing a successful task, they’re more likely to perform the task again.
This can significantly help improve employees’ motivation while performing more menial tasks. Consistently rewarding them for the correct behavior will ensure that they don’t lose their focus and continue to perform at a high level. The better they perform, the more rewards they’ll be able to earn. It’s a pretty simple but effective model.
How To Successfully Implement Gamification In An Organization
While gamification is a very viable and successful strategy, it can be challenging for some organizations to integrate the system properly. Here are some helpful tips to help you effectively employ gamification in your organization.
Communicate Properly
Suppose you don’t communicate the idea behind the gamification dashboard. In that case, it can be challenging for your sales team members to get up to speed with the new operating procedures. Therefore, it’s important to clearly communicate what you want from the team members.
Understand Their Needs
Gamification that doesn’t cover the needs of your sales reps isn’t going to be very successful. So before you finalize the system and the rewards, it’s a good idea to get the opinion of your employees. That way, you’ll cater to the strategy to fit their needs best.
Set Clear Goals
Even with a gamification dashboard, if the goals aren’t clear and measurable, it can become difficult to use the concept properly. That’s why it’s essential to set clear and achievable goals so your sales team can stay on target.
Conclusion
Modern organizations should be looking to master the art of incentivizing their sales team to get the best possible results. One of the most effective strategies in this regard is gamification. You can completely transform your incentives plan by employing simple game design mechanics and digitalizing the rewards!
References:
15 sales incentives that actually work
Put those insights into practice.
Set your team up for success by improving their performance through gamification.
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