How Gamification Will Impact Your Sales Initiatives

If you are like most of corporate America, your year is ending soon. You have started planning for next year. Part of that may include reviewing the success of some of your initiatives. Perhaps you:

• Rolled out a new sales process
• Changed your sales compensation plan
• Improved your new hire onboarding

Taking stock of this year’s initiatives begs the question: What was the impact?

This article will give you the best practices to implement impactful sales initiatives. To assist you further, sign-up for SBI’s Sales & Marketing Research Review here. At no cost, an expert from SBI will present the full research findings. You will have access to guides, templates and tools to help your sales efforts. Included in this is the Sales Gamification Overview.

The Challenge with Determining Impact

As the CEO, the impact question might be difficult to answer. You are busy driving the strategy of your organization. When you invest in your sales force, you’d like it as money well spent. When you ask your leaders, their responses can leave you feeling uncertain. Here’s why.

Most sales initiatives have 3 steps:

1. Concept – determine what will get done and why
2. Design – create the contents and processes
3. Launch – train the team

There is a key step missing: Impact.

Launches are almost always one-time events. Your sales team is brought into a room and hooked up to the proverbial fire hose. Information overload ensues. Your sales managers check the “launch” box. Your sales reps leave excited. Within a month, the team is distracted by something else. Your investment is at risk of failure.

There’s something you can do differently next year.

Gamify Your Sales Initiatives

Sales Gamification is a type of sales compensation, known as a sales contest. It is meant to modify the behavior of your sales team.

Gamification is not a new concept. Google the term and you can read for hours on end. Its application to improve ROI on sales initiatives is increasing, however. The reason for this is because CEO’s want an impactful return on sales investments.

Gamification allows your sales leaders to retain the attention of an increasingly distracted sales team.

4 Game Types

To learn more about sales gamification, register for our annual research session to get the Sales Gamification Overview. There are 3 phases to successful gamification. Today’s post provides you with “Game Types,” a component of phase 2 (see red box).

There are 4 primary game types you can deploy to impact your sales initiatives. Selecting the right one is important to ensure success.

1. Grand Challenge– These are highly publicized competitions usually awarding cash prizes. They are designed to solve a complex problem. An example of this would be a “competitive replacement contest.” You might put a bounty on a certain competitor’s accounts, who are very hard to displace.
   1. Use For – competitive replacements, new product launches
   2. Rapid Feedback Systems– These are gamified initiatives whereby feedback-such as scoring- shapes behavior in real time. An example of this would be adding real time quizzes to sales training. You’re scoring these quizzes and stack ranking the team based on their performance.
      1. Use For – sales training events, field adoption checkpoints
   3. Simulation– Principally designed for educational purposes, these games allow for the exploration of new scenarios. Think of this as moving the old-school role play online. Your reps are given scenarios and measured based on their responses.
      1. Use For – new process launches, such as: sales process, social selling, lead management
   4. Status Marathon– These games use status ladders and rewards. Think of frequent flier programs in the airline industry. The “game” is deployed over time and you’re keeping track of each rep’s status.
      1. Use For – quarterly/annual sales contests, new logos opened, new products sold

What to Do Now

Through gamification, you can impact the results of your sales initiatives. Your sales leaders can attract and retain the focus of your reps. You will remove the “flavor of the week” theme many sales initiatives have. This will, in turn, protect your investments.

To learn more about how to make an impact on your next sales project, register for our research session here.

We will cover things like:

• How to get your sales team engaged
• Driving field adoption
• Celebrating quick wins

If you’re going to spend on sales initiatives next year, consider including gamification.