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Too many people are focusing attention on "gamifying" their company or their sales team. Instead of sales managers helping to make their organization more productive and successful, they are all too often getting caught up in gamification as a buzzword. While gamification and well-designed competitions can improve employee CRM engagement, gamification does not replace an effective sales push or strategy. Think of gamification as more of a tool to help get the job done - a very effective one when used in a thoughtful manner - but a tool nonetheless. It’s not about gamification, it’s about the execution of your gamification strategy.
So what does this all mean in the real world? Three companies across diverse industries have found their gamification programs to be successful in driving three separate initiatives, including a critical product launch, CRM adoption and specific sales process improvement. Check out their stories:
Last year the Detroit Pistons used a competition to rally its sales team around a critical product launch: selling single game suites. Sales managers incorporated real-time leaderboards with ongoing updates on competition standings to keep this key product top of mind amongst reps. As a result, the Pistons achieved half of its entire year’s sales goal for the key product in only 6 weeks. With something as simple as deploying a gamification app, teams went above and beyond the goal: Competitions resulted in $500,000 in sales.
ePrize, a leader in digital engagement, used competitions last summer to support sales of a new product and increase the adoption of their CRM platform. The company was having difficulty getting reps to sell a mobile product recently brought to market and wanted a new and different way to inspire the sales department. Once contests were up and running via a gamification app, the ePrize sales team increased sales of that new product by 230%.
A new client of ours in the healthcare industry is rolling out a new sales process that they believe will make a profound impact on their sales growth. Announcing an inaugural sales process, which includes entering data in a new way into Salesforce and keeping that data up-to-date, isn't something that gets salespeople particularly excited. To make it more interesting, they are adding a gamification element to this new process to create a more inventive competition out of it. Complete with leaderboards in Salesforce on large screen monitors and mobile phones, the sales team will have real-time access to what motivates them - competition and recognition. And those leaderboards are all populated based on salespeople's execution against the new process.
In the end, it all
comes down to the strategies you use when deploying a gamification system
within your company. There is no template for success and no blanket program
that works for all companies, or even all teams within a company. For the most
effective results and the greatest impact on your day-to-day functions,
gamification should be leveraged in a way that complements the execution of
your key initiatives, not as a general technological replacement for that
strategy.
Bob Marsh is the CEO and Founder of Detroit-based startup LevelEleven. He has spent 18 years in sales and sales management, and played a key role in establishing ePrize as the dominant player in digital engagement solutions. In 2012, Bob launched LevelEleven, a company gamifying CRM with high-impact competitions, and introduced its flagship product, Compete, which has since seen incredible adoption. Within the first six months LevelEleven secured over 70 clients - including Comcast, Delta Airlines, the Detroit Pistons, and OpenTable. Bob is a thought-leader in the sales management and enterprise gamification space. A native Michigander, Bob is passionate about revitalizing Detroit and nurturing the startup ecosystem that has developed in the city.
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