Sales Gamification: Boost Engagement among your Millennial Sales Reps

Whether you prefer to call them “Millennials” or “Generation Y”, these individuals born in the 1980s and 1990s will make up a significant portion of the workforce by 2025. This means that even if they don’t yet represent the majority of your sales team, they undoubtedly will soon.

However, you may have noticed that “traditional” motivation methods have less impact on your sales reps from this generation. Fortunately for you, there is a new technique that can massively motivate your “Y” sales reps: sales gamification.

Gamification involves applying game-based motivational techniques to non-game contexts, such as work.

Let’s look at why and how gamifying your sales processes can generate new levels of interest and competition among your Millennials.

Gamification and Feedback

First, your Generation Y employees need constant feedback, for the simple reason that they have always had it; it’s part of their upbringing.

All the electronic resources, games, online dashboards, and the amount of social media existing today have programmed this generation to expect immediate responses, whether positive or negative, after every action they take.

Implementing a sales gamification system will allow them to receive this immediate feedback. Whether it’s a reward based on the points they earned for making a sale, a badge for achieving a higher skill level, or an alarm that informs the entire team that the goal has been met.

Gamification and Motivation

Generation Y sales reps are often considered lazy, and indeed, it may sometimes seem that they need a good boost of re-motivation. But it’s important to understand what motivates them today. Traditional material rewards like bonuses, commissions, or prizes no longer have the same impact on this generation.

Instead, “Y” sales reps place more importance on intrinsic rewards, such as personal development, continuous learning, or social success. Gamifying your sales processes will allow you to “celebrate” every achievement, such as leveling up in the game, correctly answering a quiz about a new product, and will also allow your sales reps to enjoy public recognition among their peers for a job well done.

Fortunately, sales stimulation tools, such as sales animation platforms, allow you to easily implement gamification systems, create transparency, and empower your Y sales reps.

Discover Incenteev’s gamification solution to boost your teams’ performance!

These sophisticated, yet very easy-to-use platforms generate, in addition to fun, excitement and enthusiasm from your sales reps. They will be able to access, in real-time, all the metrics that interest them: their objectives, their number of sales, their ranking compared to their peers. All of this will allow you, as well as your teams, to know where they stand and where they need to improve. These platforms, combined with a gamification process, will also support more traditional strategies, such as those that leverage the competitive spirit of sales forces. Everyone knows that sales reps have a strong competitive spirit, and Generation Y sales reps have an even keener sense of competition.

Why not integrate this competitive spirit into a game environment?

It’s up to you, sales managers, to adopt sales and motivation strategies that adapt to your future sales majority.

So we’ll give you just one piece of advice: let the games begin!

Discover Incenteev’s gamification solution to boost your teams’ performance!

Other articles that might interest you:

• Four Sales Tips to Effectively Train your New Salespeople
• Network Incentive: Reward Efforts Too, not just the Top Performers!
• Boost employee engagement with gamification
• Gamification: how Companies Use it to Motivate Their Employees?
• Generation Y at work: summary of the conference held on May 25, 2015