Do you love to win, or hate to lose?
One of the key characteristics we see in sales reps is their inherent competitive drive. Just as professional athletes strive to win championships, so do sales reps strive to hit their quotas. Sales is a game that sales reps want to win, and this competitiveness should be harnessed as a critical aspect of sales management. Understanding this concept will help you as a sales leader create a competitive infrastructure that motivates your sales reps and helps them thrive.
What is Gamification?
Before we dive into the technical details, let’s first clarify what gamification really means. It is the use of “gaming principles” – including points or other incentives – to modify the behavior of your sales team. Gamification is typically used to organically create inspiration and motivation.
Is it effective?
To address any doubts beforehand, we have compiled a few statistics:
By 2015, 40% of Global 1000 organizations will use gamification as the primary mechanism to transform business operations.
– Gartner
Gamifcation validates how top-performing organizations take a ‘kinder, gentler’ path to managing sales teams, who then respond positively with better revenue, quota, and profitability results.
– The Aberdeen Group
Convinced yet?
4 Types of Gamification
Gamification is all about focusing a sales rep’s innate need for competition and harnessing it to achieve company-wide objectives. Here are the 4 best techniques to hone in those forces:
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A Grand Challenge – Otherwise known as a highly publicized competition. This should be reserved for a large and complex problem. For example, one of your competitor’s account has been sniffing around looking to make the jump – create a cash prize for the sales rep who is able to close the deal.
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Real-Time Feedback – This is more of an internal incentive to try to motivate reps to engage in sales training. Instead of stacking all your reps in a room like a pack of sardines and overwhelming them with an information overload, provide an interactive element. For example, real-time quizzes with prizes for the right answer will ensure your reps stay focused and are actually learning the material.
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Simulations – Do you recall those dreaded role-playing meetings where you or a Sales Manager had to sit down in a room and enact different sales scenarios with your reps? Instead, you can move them online and give them more of a game-type feel with points and rewards along the way. This is also an excellent way to track your sales rep’s responses and measure their performance.
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Quarterly Marathons – Think of this as more of a frequent flier program or rewards membership at a hotel. This is a game that should be deployed at the beginning of a quarter and kept track of using a visual display such as a Sales Leaderboard. This makes rewards, points, and progress visible to all of the other players and truly draws out their competitive nature.
If you want to motivate your sales reps to focus on the right objectives and drive up your bottom line, provide dynamic and motivating tools that make these processes as seamless as possible. You can use these games to achieve anything from making calls, to data entry, to paying attention in a training session – making them much more effective and motivating for everyone. Who wouldn’t take advantage of that?
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