7 Tips To Boost Your Sales Gamification

The perennial problem that looms around the sales process is of the reps losing their motivation in an overtly competitive environment. To come out of this glitch, companies have been trying to create a game-like environment among the sales reps by offering them incentives and other goodies.

The leaderboard can motivate the individuals with messages like:

“Jack is all set to close his 8th sale. Is anyone coming close?”
“Who wanna stay on top of the leader board? The winner takes it all”

[bctt tweet=”Sales gamification is a modified version of a sales contest – with or without a prize. ” username=”@agilecrm”]The key of gamification is to know how and when to roll it out to the sales team to address business objectives and align their focus on more sales closes. All this can be monitored in real time using tools like CRM.

Gamification is not just a process to extract sales. It’s all about simulating a game like behavior among your sales reps. It can revamp team building in organizations and increase the symbiosis of your staff. Gamification can also help you cut down on training costs, as this practice imparts the necessary skills and behaviors in your employees.

With most of the companies reporting their initiatives to be successful with gamification, it proves to be a good way to increase the productivity of your sales team.

On the flip side, lots of people do not support sales gamification as they feel it may send negative vibes in the organizational culture.

7 tips to boost your sales gamification:

1) Identify your key metric

To start with, choose a behavioral trait of your employees that can yield productivity. You might have a fairly good idea of it, or else, the automation tool helps you get there.

Whenever your sales reps go for meetings, their strike rate varies according to their potential and behavioral traits. In this scenario, figure out what’s adding to a successful closure and plug in those insights into the CRM to gamify the process for you. That works like a charm and aligns your focus on the behavior that gets you a good deal.

2) Add worth to the rewards

Every motivation has to be tagged to an incentive. If you want your sales staff to be focused on outcomes, tie them to a bit of self-interest that even demands some dedication at work. When people are using the new gamified process, the winner has to take the cake. Even if it’s a small reward ranging from a free lunch to a bigger one such as a vacation, it won’t stop motivating the sales rep.

Although these sales perks, incentives and rewards are really nothing new in corporate sales strategy to grow revenue and increase client acquisitions, they have been a cool bait to keep things in motion. In today’s world, sales gamification is built into your sales enablement strategy and is important when working with a decentralized sales force. Here the key take-away is to reward the behavior.

3) Set up leaderboards

Sales reps always try for one-upmanship. They have to breathe in a competitive space to get the ball rolling. At times, they may lose track of who else is performing better than them, and for a manager, it can be difficult to know the sales activity and the achiever’s stats at one glance. The idea is not to create a star culture but to give recognition to an individual for their efforts.

To sweeten the process, a leader-board in the CRM gives out the metrics of who stands on the top and who is moving up the ladder quite quickly. This also suggests rewards for achievers. As competition is rife in sales, this process works in tandem with the sales efforts and keeps them high-flying, always.

4) Include levels in the sales game

Create levels within the game. Ensure that the staff reaches to the next level only when they accumulate certain number of points. These points are reflective of the number of deals closed or the revenue generated by them. This will add the necessary fun element to the competition.
Motivate them all through the phases to get them going and crossing many levels. This goes down well with gaming aficionados who want to pin down all the levels to emerge a winner. They continue further and pass on the motivational juice to others who want to emulate their strategies to reach the top spot on the leaderboard.

5) Bestow a badge of honour

Pass the badge to your sales team when they hit a target. This may sound silly, but these badges will soon become intangible assets and stand as a hallmark of your reputation. Allow them to pass on this to others in the team. If a person ‘X’ reaches to the next level, then he can pass his medal to ‘Y’ who steps into the former’s shoes.
Also involve the other employees to appreciate your sales reps. A badge is a mark of honor and pride that they carry along with them.

6) Create company-wide competitions

Companies use competitions as a tool for motivating their sales teams. The competitive scenarios built within the gamification architecture are bringing good numbers for them. Sales teams even take the competitions to next level with their active participation. In the ambit of gamification, you can also include other teams and assign them targets related to their work. They will like this approach as it’s attached to a prize.

To illustrate, the lead generation process can be gamified with the number of leads generated by everyone in the team. The recruitment process can be gamified with the HR team getting the right candidates to fill a post in the shortest possible time. All this done through a gamified solution supports greater participation rates.

7) Model large companies

Larger companies can approach consultancies that help to design a customized game as per your needs. For small and medium businesses, there are affordable solutions in the form of all-in-one CRMs like Agile CRM, gamification software such as Playlyfe, Bunchball and Badgeville that give smaller businesses the same advantages as firms that can afford to hire consultants. Workplace recognition tool Wooboard provides scalable solutions and decreases expenses for SMBs, for instance.

Sales Gamification acts as a motivation for the sales reps to give their best. The contest and real-time leaderboards to track their performance work well to fine tune the employee’s performance. At its essence, transforming the sales process into a “game” keeps your cash register ringing.