The Harvard Business Review recently published an article titled “Motivating Salespeople: What Really Works” which takes a look at how bonuses, prizes, multi-tiered competitions and targets are proven to be extremely valuable in helping to deliver different levels and kinds of attention to sales reps. The result was significantly increased ROI by simply understanding what motivates different people. So, we wanted to take a deeper look at how gamification can be used to achieve this and prove its effectiveness as a tool that every modern sales leader should have in their toolbox.
What is Sales Enablement?
Any modern sales leader is likely familiar with the Pareto Principle, also known as the “80/20 rule”, which basically states that 80% of your sales come from the top 20% of your sales reps. The big question is… how can you motivate the laggards and core performers to become high flying stars too?
The goal of sales enablement software is to improve sales execution, getting everyone to operate together smoothly to achieve or surpass your business goals. While there are many different types of sales enablement software, including: CRMs, BI, analytics, project management, feedback, training, management systems and more, we focus on one very clear and particular type: gamification.
What is Sales Gamification?
“Gamification is the application of game elements (e.g. point scoring, competition, clearly defined goals, etc)in non-game contexts, to drive a desired behavior, such as engaging and motivating salespeople to surpass their goals.' — SalesScreen in-house definition.
In essence, gamification makes up a very fun and interesting part of the overall sales enablement pie. By using features such as ranks, leaderboards, sales contests, event celebrations, wall of fame, badges and other tools, gamification helps managers to motivate performance on clearly defined business objectives.
By combining your data-driven systems such as CRM with a fun and unique way to display the data and recognize reps by creating rally points around key performance, gamification is an incredible tool to build cohesion, team spirit and friendly competition.
How Can Gamification Turn Your Core Performers into Stars?
Your core performers usually make up the majority of your sales teams and represent the greatest opportunity for growth. They are the ones who probably have incredible untapped potential but for whatever reason are not maximizing their efforts. Perhaps this is because they see work as a means to an end… in other words, they work the 9–5 so they can go home and be with their wife and kids. No problem there, we completely understand. But, what if you could make sales so fun that giving 100% didn’t really feel like extra effort?
Too many people approach daily work with the mindset that it is cumbersome, boring and only limitedly rewarding. We use gamification to change that. We believe that sales should be fun and rewarding every day.
We know from experience that if you can increase the motivation levels in your core performers by even just 5% you can see incredible growth results. Our goal is to provide the type of fun, incremental changes necessary to drive long-lasting changes in the underlying behaviors of your core performers.
- We start by making your sales data transparent and intuitive, which creates a baseline that allows everyone to understand their performance and projections. Through the use of live KPI displays, leaderboards and more, we ensure that your sales reps are consistently aware of their performance metrics and what they can do to improve.
- Next, we create unique rewards and motivators around the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are most important to achieving your business goals. Through a variety of recognition features, event celebrations and unlockable rewards, we make it fun and rewarding to drive incremental increases on clearly defined objectives.
- Lastly, we kick it up a notch by stimulating the competitive instincts in your sales reps. Salespeople are competitive by nature and by displaying performance across TV screens in real-time, we make it easy to see who is putting out and who is holding back. By ensuring that the sales contests are always fun, unique and rewarding, we make sales fun again and help motivate your core performers into running with the big dogs.
Salespeople represent a very diverse group and each person will be motivated differently. It is essential to understand what motivates and drives each of your reps and then use that to tailor programs and rewards to their particular personalities. Gamification is a great way to bring everyone together around common goals and can help drive the incremental changes that have lasting impact.
Instead of wondering why some of your salespeople are performing while others aren’t, use data-driven gamification to make all of the sales information intuitive, transparent and easily accessible. When true performers see someone else struggling, they will be more than happy to help provide mentorship and collaboration. Having a system that fosters collaboration, teamwork and live updates makes that easier than ever before.
Most importantly, make it fun! When employees enjoy their work and are motivated to surpass their sales targets, the positive energy spills over to the rest of the company and trickles on into your clients. Motivation can be hard to build but it is contagious once it gets flowing. So, bring something into your offices that will help everyone to become more social, collaborative and teamwork oriented… the result will be more core performers unleashing their full potential and performing like stars.
