How to Motivate your Sales Team with Gamification?

Is your sales team’s motivation flagging? Do you have a product that isn’t selling well or an underperforming sector? Are you launching a new product and want to ensure its success? Then inject some play into your processes. Gamification is an increasingly popular method to boost the motivation of sales teams and improve their performance.

Gamification

Perhaps you’ve already heard of gamification? It’s not a new idea, far from it. Our parents, our grandparents used it: who hasn’t pretended their spoon was an airplane to eat soup? Expand the concept, apply it within the company to training programs or internal challenges, and you get gamification.
It turns out that the drivers of play—competition, fun, recognition, collective or individual achievement—are unparalleled in generating new enthusiasm for everyday things. These are, moreover, the same drivers at work in sports.

In short, in French, we create playful activities; in English, we “gamify” the employee experience, particularly focusing on two areas: performance development and skill acquisition.

But it’s not reserved for startups or Web 2.0 specialists, as even large, serious corporations use it. So how do these companies use gamification, and why?

The Utility of Gamification in Business

Here are 4 examples of gamification in practice.

Cisco, for example, wanted to improve the “social media” skills of its sales force. The company therefore implemented a game-level system through which sales reps could progress until they obtained the title of “Master” of social media. This approach was highly successful, with hundreds of employees reaching the highest level and thus developing the skills desired by management.

Engine Yard, a Cloud services company, had difficulty getting its employees to use its online knowledge platform. Thanks to a gamification system based on awarding badges and missions, this knowledge platform saw a 40% increase in its usage.

SAP also used gamification to train its sales teams. For this, the company developed a kind of game-application called “RoadWarrior”. This application simulates a conversation with a client and puts the sales rep in a sales situation. The virtual client then asks more or less specific questions about a product. With each correct answer, the sales rep earns points and moves up the ranking. With this gamification mechanic, SAP was intelligently able to playfully train its sales reps on a new, very complex product line.

Salesforce‘s management, for its part, used a “Mario Kart” approach to motivate its sales teams. Each sales rep received three balloons and, as in the game, had the option to steal or pop others’ balloons if they signed a contract of a certain amount. The initiator of this challenge recounts that he saw a great enthusiasm emerge and unexpected collaboration mechanics.

The Benefits of Gamification

To summarize, the two main advantages of gamification are:

• Increased Employee Engagement
• Skill Development

Finally, it seems to me that it was Nietzsche who said that ‘every man hides within him a child who wants to play’. Well, perhaps in every company there’s a sales rep who wants to play.

To learn more about gamification, download our free White Paper ‘Revolutionize Workplace Engagement with Gamification’: Engaging and Retaining Your Sales Force

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