How to Motivate your Salespeople with Gamification?

How to Motivate your Salespeople with Gamification? The motivation of your salespeople is weakening? Do you have a product that sells poorly or a sector that is under performing? You are launching a new product and want to be sure of its success? So put some play into your process.

What is Gamification?

Have you ever heard about gamification? This is not a new idea, far from it. Our parents, our grandparents used it: who did not fly with his spoon to eat soup? Expand the concept, apply it in the company on internal training programs or challenges and you get gamification.

It happens that the springs of the game, the competition, the amusement, the recognition, the collective or the individual, have no equal to arouse a new enthusiasm for usual things. These are the same springs that are at work in sport.

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In short, in French we create fun activities; in English we “gamify” the experience of employees, especially on two points: the development of performance and the acquisition of skills.

But this is not reserved for startups or Web 2.0 specialists since even large serious groups make use of it. So how do these companies use gamification and why?

The Utility of Corporate Gamification

Here is the example of 4 implementations of the gamification.

1. Cisco, for example, wanted to improve the social networking skills of its sales force. The company therefore set up a system of levels of play through which the salespersons could progress to obtain the title of “Master” of social networks. This approach has met with great success by seeing hundreds of employees reaching the final level and thus developing the skills desired by management.

2. Engine Yard, a cloud services company, had difficulty using its online knowledge platform by its employees. Thanks to a gaming system based on the allocation of badges and missions, this knowledge platform saw an increase of 40% of its use.

3. SAP also used the gamification to train its sales teams. For this the company developed a kind of application-game named “Road Warrior”. This application simulates a conversation with a customer and puts the salesman in a sales situation. The virtual client then asks more or less specific questions about a product. With every good answer, the commercial earns points and goes up in the ranking. With this mechanization of gamification, SAP has intelligently been able to train in a fun way its salesmen on a new line of products very complex.

4. Sales force management used a “Mario Kart” approach to motivate its sales teams. Each salesman received three balloons and, as in the game, had the opportunity to steal or drill the balloons of others if he signed a contract for a certain amount. The instigator of this challenge tells us that he was born a great craze and mechanisms of collaboration unexpected.

The benefits of Gamification

To sum up, the two main advantages of gamification are:

• Increased employee involvement
• Developing their skills

Finally, it seems to me that it was Nietzsche who said that “every man hides within himself a child who wants to play.” Well maybe in every business hides a commercial who wants to play. To learn more about gamification, download our free white paper “Revolutionizing Workplace Engagement with Gamification”:

Boost Your Sales with Gamification

• Continuous training is now a necessity for sales teams in order to meet the double requirements of a very sophisticated consumer and an ever-changing market.
• To meet these needs, companies are implementing Learning Management Systems or e-learning applications / software / platforms to give their teams the resources to train themselves. Only the adoption of these LMSs by employees is the first obstacle faced by these companies.

We have already spoken of the problem of adoption and the main factors of employee engagement with software: quality of training content, interactivity of experience or gamification, and the mobile aspect (All the more effective in forming a geographically dispersed sales force). And indeed, gamification can dramatically increase the motivation of your salespeople to train and adopt your company’s digital learning. Here are some examples and good practices that prove it.

Inspired by Video Games

Here is an image of the game Guild Wars (more than 7 million players in 2015) which presents a pattern almost common to all online games: the skill tree. This is to unlock the first skill, to unlock two more and so on.

The Khan Academy is a smart learning platform that has set up this system to teach various subjects to its users. Here is an example of a competency tree adapted to the teaching of mathematics.

The Khan Academy now has several million learners thanks to this Gamifying skill acquisition system. In addition, a skills tree is perfectly suitable for training salespeople on a new product for example. This makes it possible to visualize precisely its progress and to have an immediate gratification when completing a module with access to the next module.

Inspired by the “Sports and Health” Applications:

We have already made the comparison between commercial performance and sports performance: notably with the famous concept of “commercial coach “. We are convinced that in order to meet the current challenges of sales, field managers and their teams must regain a greater autonomy. To do this, we must give them the right performance indicators: do you manage their results or their activities? An athletic coach will not tell his athlete: “course faster”, but “lengthen your stride” or “do so many exercises a day”. And it is the sum of each activity that leads to the desired result: a good race performance, a good sales performance.

It is precisely this idea that has been based on running applications like Fit-bit or Running Heroes: daily monitoring of sports activity, precise technology to analyze strengths and weaknesses and then work on them. These applications also combine health data: number of calories expended, quality of sleep – all factors that play in sports performance.

But where these applications have truly succeeded, it is thanks to the subtle rewards mechanics that they put in place to motivate you to run or practice. The first thing is to be able to follow each step of its progression: it is already the best possible gratification to see, from one day to the other, the improvement of its performance.

And to motivate the most reluctant, there is a whole range of inter activities to explore: to challenge his friends; share his performances on social networks (who do not do today after running a half marathon for example? And progress through a badge system that rewards your results.

Running Heroes offers for example a simple and effective gamification mechanics: by running you get points that you can then convert to buy rewards or donate to associations. In the same spirit, Delivering offers lunch in partner restaurants to runners who will have traveled more than 2km on foot to get there.

What gaming mechanics to train your salespeople?

The Software Advice site published a study on the best gamification mechanics to motivate employees to use the LMS of their company.

The mechanics most appreciated by employees are, without much surprise, the translation of their efforts into physical rewards: but these rewards do not necessarily have to be monetary, they may be symbolic, such as granting a temporary privilege to that which gets the best scores from one week to the next.

It is becoming more and more common today to integrate these lucid springs with the digital training programs of organizations – it is an efficient and inexpensive way to motivate and challenge salespeople to train regularly. However, these gamification mechanics are not restricted to training alone: it is also a good way to boost commercial performance as a whole.

The Fit bit of Commercial Performance

Is there a Fit bit for commercial performance? Of course, a CRM records data, provides tables and delivers results; But it is purely analytical. What the CRM does not provide (or at least not yet enough), however, is a clear and engaging visualization of the indicators and the results. However, it is a big part of the success of these running applications: clear and precise visualization of the progress and the relevant indicators that help us to determine our axes of improvement.

The numbers themselves are not motivating, while gamification makes exercise and stress exciting. The mobile application makes it possible to follow the commercial or the sportsman on a daily basis since it is on his telephone: it is a digital coach in the pocket. Incentive is a mobile motivation and commercial coaching application that measures indicators adapted to improve your performance and deliver a daily and personalized follow-up.