As much of the world shifts towards a remote working environment, a few key issues are on top of most peoples’ minds:
- “How can I keep track of everyone’s contributions without micromanaging?”
- “How do I know everyone is performing?”
- “How can I keep a strong workplace culture?”
- “How can I motivate and inspire my remote workers?”
Sales gamification can help to track performance in real-time, motivate stronger performance and keep workplace culture fun an inspiring.
Having all of your sales reps working from home these days can be a huge benefit; however, it can also lead to a decrease in team cohesiveness and efficiency. Good sales reps are some of the most driven and goal-oriented people you may ever meet. They are a different breed and most of their actions are fueled by a desire for recognition and competition.
So, to keep the momentum moving forward while everyone shifts to remote work, we’ve added some tips here to help you leverage the power of gamification.
Run Sales competitions to keep teams motivated
One of the greatest features of SalesScreen is that you can set up fun and motivating sales competitions from anywhere. Sure, this may be a hard time for booking meetings or closing deals, but when the going gets tough, the tough get going… and there’s nobody tougher than hungry sales reps.
Whether you want to know whether the team in City A or City B brought in the most sales this month or which person sent the most offers or closed the most meetings, SalesScreen makes it easy. Plus, SalesScreen uses data straight from your CRM to display sales competitions in real-time, which means that it’s easy to measure and improve performance.
Running competitions is easy: set the start/end time, select the participants (or teams), choose the key metric you want to measure on, create a winner prize, and watch as your teams surpass their goals. You can even run multiple competitions at once!
With SalesScreen competitions, you can choose from a variety of themes and templates that ensure you keep your contests interesting and dynamic–and your employees engaged.
A few key tips for running sales competitions:
- Keep the competitions short and simple
- Have a clear objective
- Keep the momentum going
- Get the leadership involved
- Show results in real-time
- Provide meaningful rewards
Recognize performance and celebrate achievements from anywhere
SalesScreen gives recognition to your salespeople for the tasks they have completed. This works especially well for remote workers. Anytime someone makes a sale, their photo, value of the sale, details of the sale, and other information will be updated in real-time for everyone else to see, making it easy to keep the momentum going.
Additionally, the sales rep’s personal music and other customizations can play on the screen at the same time. So, whether the salesperson is working from the office or at home, it’s easy to track performance in real-time and celebrate appropriately from your home office, the dinner table, the couch, or wherever you’re working from.
Our customizable events allow you to create celebrations for the key sales milestones that matter most to you. Whether it’s exceeding your monthly budget, setting a new single sale record, sending 10 offers in a week, or setting lots of new meetings, SalesScreen will help you celebrate with music and fun themed layouts… which will be visible to all of your colleagues.
Coach remotely!
Now can be a perfect time to hone in on developing specific skills or just generally improving your overall sales game.
According to the Center for Sales Strategy:
- Companies with dynamic sales coaching programs achieve 28% higher win rates.
- Companies that provide quality coaching can reach 7% greater annual revenue growth.
- As much at 60% of sales reps say they're more likely to leave their job if their manager is a poor coach.
- Sales reps with 30 minutes or less of sales coaching per week receive win rates of 43%, and those that receive at least 2 hours of coaching per week, have a win rate of 56%.
- Sales coaching and mentoring is cited as the most important role that frontline managers play, according to 74% of leading companies.
- Companies with a formal coaching process see 91.2% of overall quota attainment, as compared to 84.7% quota attainment for companies with an informal coaching process.
- Forecast deals win rate for companies whose managers spent more time on coaching than selling is 8.2% higher, and overall revenue attainment is 5.2% higher.
So… how can you use SalesScreen to coach more effectively? By understanding your funnel, you’ll be better able to take action that improves performance across the board.
Tip #1: Know your sales process
Lead Acquisition First, find out where your leads are coming from and which methods are the most fruitful. Look at:
- Where your ad spend is going
- Who your current customers are (e.g. industry/market/role/company size)
- Buying or creating your own lead lists
Find out what you’re doing to get business, use the 80/20 rule and pump more time/effort into what works best. Then, use coaching to set up standard operations in regard to acquisition. Understanding how your leads enter your sales funnel helps you define who you’re speaking to once they get there.
Lead Qualification Once people get in your funnel, you start the qualification process. If your reps are well trained, they’ll be able to save a significant amount of time and energy. For this, conversations are key. The best way to gauge the interest of leads in your funnel is to speak with them. Email is ok, but the phone is really where things happen. Reps should want to have 3–5 good conversations everyday. Chances are that those suspects aren’t going to want to talk, but if they do, ask them some qualifying questions to really prod them through. Bonus Resource: Here’s a massive list of 42 qualifying questions from the folks at Close.io.
Closing Go through SalesScreen and review your data. Who’s making calls but not closing deals? Who’s not making enough calls? Who’s not booking meetings? Some people may need technical help and others may just need a little motivation. 1-on-1 conversations will go a loooong way in helping you to understand how your people are performing and what leads to success. Everyone needs a little help and the job of a sales manager is to figure out where they need the help and how to provide it. We’ve got you covered for the first part.
Tip #2: Understand Your Ideal Sales Team
If you’ve been in business and on the internet for more than five minutes, you’ve heard the term “buyer persona”. A great practice of finding out who your ideal clients are and marketing and developing a sales funnel for that specific group/person.
The cool thing about knowing your sales process is the ability it gives you to construct an ideal sales rep profile. This helps your coaching in three ways.
1. Gives You a Goal: Your current team may not fit the bill of your profile. But that’s what coaching is for, right? Assess your current team and match them up to the profile. Doing this will give you a list of areas to work on and will likely help prioritize them.
2. Helps Hire Better: There’s a lot of turnover in sales. But hiring well can lower that as well as make it easier for you or your managers to coach reps. If you’re looking for someone who fits into your company culture (aside from the stereotypical sales attributes), it’s less of a guessing game.
3. You Don’t Waste Time: Coaching isn’t about wasting time on someone who doesn’t belong on your team. If you have an ideal profile and (after due process) someone isn’t going to make it into that picture — you’ll know it’s not necessarily your fault. It’ll save time and heartache.
Tip #3: Learn How to Coach
Coaching is personalized. Each person is different and may be motivated differently. So you’ll want to do the following for each.
- Measure: Your sales process is going to give you a ton of metrics to track. Leads coming in, sales qualified appointments (SQA's), contracts won/lost. You can't coach anyone without an understanding of where they are and where they need to be.
- Motivate: There are some reps that are financially motivated. They just want higher dollar amounts. Others are self-motivated and try to beat their own numbers. But most do want those things, but will need help.
- Automate: Coaching is likely not your only responsibility in the organization. Keeping tabs on even a small remote team can be gruesome. Using tools and software to automatically alert you (and your team) to new accomplishments or potential problems can create a more consistent coaching environment.
Use the Mobile App!
The SalesScreen app is available for both Android and iOS, which means that you can log sales activity, track progress, view sales forecasts, and get updated information and alerts immediately regardless of your working location.
Perhaps you’re working from home and just closed a big sale but of course you want everyone else to know about it? Simply open the app, log your update, and everyone will receive the information in real-time while your personalized slide appears on screens throughout the office. Or, if you have a CRM integration, the record will be updated automatically.
If you’re using SalesScreen mobile app for remote work, be sure to turn your notifications ON so you can keep track of what’s happening!
Ensure you are using gamification the right way
Gamification is a great way for making everyday tasks more interesting, challenging, and rewarding. Done properly it can significantly help you to improve the engagement and motivation of your remote workforce by bringing everyone together around common goals.
Here are a few quick tips to ensure that your gamification strategy will be successful:
- Clearly define the goals (KPIs or other metrics)
- Measure progress toward those goals
- Recognize achievements when the goal is reached
- Provide meaningful rewards for achieving the goal
