Sales Challenge: The Clayton Homes Example

Case Study: From “Gamification” to “Teamification”

How did Clayton Homes transform its sales team’s work into an imaginary sports competition to boost performance?

Thanks to the technological and digital revolution, the performance of each individual within a sales organization can now be measured, analyzed, and reported. The evaluation of each salesperson is therefore increasingly based on productivity, collaboration, and creativity.

There are many challenges designed for sales teams, aiming to motivate and stimulate salespeople to boost performance. This case study focuses on the imaginary sports challenge implemented at Clayton Homes and its many positive effects on the company.

From Analysis to Action

Setting up a Transparency Model

Clayton Homes, an American housing provider, decided to revamp its sales organization by optimizing analysis and performance-boosting techniques through the creation of an internal competition. Drawing inspiration from professional athlete evaluation techniques, David Schwall, Sales Director at Clayton Homes, first established a model of transparency within the company, via the Salesforce platform and the integration of CRMs, to better analyze salesperson performance.

Transforming Sales Work into a Sports Competition

Next, Schwall partnered with a platform whose main objective was to transform the sales team’s work into an imaginary sports competition. Divided into teams or “Leagues”, each led by a manager, salespeople are ranked by a scoring system that considers, for example, the number of calls made to leads and the number of appointments secured after calls. Each week, the different sales teams competed neck and neck to then be selected to face off in the final.

The Sales Challenge in 2019

Sales Performance Results

The superficiality of this type of challenge can prove counterproductive, as it reduces the sustainability of positive effects generated on productivity, creativity, and collaboration.

However, the challenge’s results on sales productivity exceeded all expectations: sales teams increased their call volume by 18% and doubled the number of appointments secured. Furthermore, this sales challenge had other exceptional consequences:

Mitigating the Costs of Transparency

The adoption of increased transparency regarding individual performance occurred without notable resistance thanks to the “gamification” of results based on a sports theme. Employees were accustomed to having access to high-level athletes’ scores during competitions (e.g., Olympic Games and Champions League), and this same transparency applied to their work environment did not shock them much. Moreover, the teams managed to remain fair play, and cheating was not tolerated. However, the challenge was primarily perceived as personal. Indeed, salespeople were competing with themselves and striving at all costs to surpass their own limits.

Unprecedented Engagement

Salespeople were competing with themselves and striving at all costs to surpass their own limits, with an engagement sometimes exceeding expectations: some employees spent part of their free time on the platform to “play”.

Strengthening Teamwork or “Teamification”

Thanks to the competition, salespeople better integrated the benefits of teamwork and developed habits such as sharing best practices, mutual coaching, and celebrating collective successes while maintaining their autonomy of action. Moreover, this sense of commitment to a team has the advantage of significantly reducing the number of ‘free riders’, empowering salespeople, and raising their awareness of mutual aid.

A particularity of the competition at Clayton Homes is that, although the scores of the top performers were made public to highlight their achievements within the company, those of the lowest performers were only visible to their team. This encouraged members of the same team to support each other, to become unified, and to ban the practice of ‘public shaming’.

Conclusion

The company’s real change was not the “gamification” of daily tasks, but the resulting “teamification”. More than an organizational change, it was a social and cultural transformation that took place and significantly contributed to increased productivity, creativity, and collaboration. Indeed, stimulating salespeople’s intrinsic motivation made the positive effects of the challenge sustainable.