Gallup poll found out that: ‘$550 billion is the year on year loss to companies due to disengaged employees in 2014”
Inside Sales Gamification is an amazing strategy to engage, influence and motivate inside sales professionals. Gamification derives its power from gaming, psychology, customer loyalty management and behavioral economics.
What is Inside Sales Gamification?
Inside Sales Gamification, applies elements of game design thinking to inside sales management. It applies elements of game mechanics and game dynamics (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play, rewards, charity, gifts) to make sales chores fun. Gamification combines the inner organization competition with the art of storytelling. Predictive analytics powered behavioral psychology delivers better sales performance tracking and sales process compliance in a gamified inside sales world.
Gamification Prerequisites
- List out your business objectives.
- Clearly state behaviors would you want to inculcate in the sales team.
- This helps businesses to be clear about positive behavioral patterns.
- Know the player i.e inside sales team who you are designing it for.
- Then design activity loops based on Game dynamics and mechanics
Before going into the psychology of nudging expected behaviors. We will see how gamification actually work, lets say for sake of simplicity Gamification has 2 pillars:
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Game Mechanics:
The below are the components of Game Mechanics:
Firstly, setting points for specific task completions based on relevance and urgency.
Secondly, setting game levels based on number of tasks completed. Formulating ground rules for level promotions and demotions.
Thirdly, creating a competitive ethos where people can brag about themselves and challenge others. This includes setting up leader-boards, trophy cabinets, badge counters etc. motivate people to achieve recognition.
Finally creating virtual spaces where players can interact, help and recognize other players. Game mechanics facilitates exchange of virtual gifts thus, making work co-operation and collaboration fun and fulfilling. Similarly, virtual certifications and citations keep the stakeholder engaged.
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Game Dynamics:
The below are the components of Game Dynamics:
Primarily, Game Dynamics makes it clear to the world as to which player has completed a task. And such a player is due for a reward. These rewards may include level-ups, virtual goods, and physical gifts.
Secondly, it makes clear how unique is an achievement: i.e. (completion of daily target, task item or compliance action etc.) using leader-boards. This elevates the status of participant. For example picking an inside sales King/Queen, invariably people selected were working diligently to finish most important tasks in time. Thereby achieving larger inside sales targets and individual goals.
Thirdly, it makes rewarding top performers easy. Rewards given after a completion of positive action, reinforces that behavior. On a personal level the rewarded individual gets a hit of dopamine, making it easy for leadership prompt similar action repeatedly. Thus a reward compulsion loop takes shape in the organization.
Finally, it also creates a new avenue for top performers to exchange tricks of success to their teams. Thereby, boosting their status in an organization.Thus, inside sales Gamification creates a value add to organizations, when these gamified environment prompt positive behaviors to inside sales professionals.
Obviously, that is why Gamification has become a contagious strategy in inside sales now. Almost 40% of Fortune 1000 companies are expected to gamify their inside sales by 2016. Companies like SAP, Comcast, PayPal, and Stanley Black & Decker are tapping Gamification to inspire sales teams
What can your organization achieve with inside sales Gamification?
#1. Streamlined sales process:
Gamification encourages people to collaborate in the best interest of the team. Gamified contest and spirit of competition brings spike in team communication, cooperation and collaboration. This can easily bring better sales ROI given that the leadership fosters healthy competition and collaboration. Thus, raising accountability of sales teams when enforceable procedures are adopted to achieve targets created. It also provides recognition to sales teams when sales success stories get glorified by point tallies, leader boards, team awards etc.
#2. Generating solid pipeline:
Solid sales pipeline generation needs qualitative and quantitative improvements in the way an inside sales team performs.
- Qualitative aspects such as time taken to follow up, on call engagement etc. can be tracked and improved.
- Quantitative aspects like number of calls made, number of interaction and average time on a call, meeting per hundred calls etc.
Management can drive sales by introducing an inside sales to new areas to target, new criteria to select qualified prospects and more. However, motivation is most often the missing link which impedes sales team from achieving exemplary results.
Though inside sales professionals work is most of the time robotic and unsatisfying, it doesn’t necessarily have to be so. Gamification makes sales people to adhere to task based work flows by making work with fame, fortune and fun. It nudges inside sales people to complete tasks by incorporating highly immersive game like environment into day to day inside sales activities. This creates fun and competitive atmosphere conducive to get more customer interaction, thus increasing the chance of more meetings in the pipe.
For Example:
“Kelly Services, used level eleven and streamlined their inside sales team to focus primarily on face-to-face meetings, thus creating $5.8 million increment in their revenues.”
#3. Great return on time invested by the sales reps:
A motivated and focused sales force brings in great ROI. To focus the efforts of the sales team you need to:
- Identify vital signs, i.e. set of routines a sales team is required to complete to reach high performance.
- Later on the organization should publicize these accepted behaviors make it visible around organization.
Sales people should be empowered with personalized analytics, historical trends. So, when performance goes below par, teams and individuals can take counter measure to sort issues. Peer 2 Peer comparisons around inside sales performance makes things much more fun and competitive. Gradually this motivates individuals to put in their best efforts at work.
#4. Open mentorship and skill development:
After Gamification of organizational culture of an inside sales team changes drastically. This is evident in the below example.
Badgeville is a SaaS solution that allow companies to setup any custom learning goals such as leveling up a key industry skill like project management. And even adding custom task based goals like filling petty expense report or time logged report etc.
Professionals in Accenture got motivated by the intrinsic rewards like volunteering badge or e-certificates which Badgeville displayed in their profiles. Yammer integration inside the solution allowed these employees to share their achievements in their company profile.
#5. Sales data completeness:
Improving in data completeness in various systems like CRM, marketing automation is essential. If inside sales people are given incentives to fill up all relevant fields in a CRM like meeting notes, follow up tasks, lead status, follow ups done etc. work of data team and inside sales team become easier.
Case Study:
Jerimiah Corporation, a 3PL company from USA had this problem. The inside sales teams were faced with a data incompleteness issue. Mary Atkinson who handled the CRM department had the bright idea of trying Gamification to solve this. Mary wanted her inside sales team across USA to fill up fields such as latest phone numbers, email ids, contact status or on call notes, comments etc. But the problem was they didn’t know how to design the contest and what prizes to give away. So to find out, Mary ran a sample competition. After seeing favorable results the CRM department got management approval to run the gamified contest in the east, west and Middle American sales offices.
The winners of this contest were the western division. On an average every sales rep or sales assistant western division had completed the accepted actions 85% of the time. This pan organization compliance bought about full leadership participation wherein the inside sales VP had a special interest in winning the competition. So, regularly the inside sales heads were asked to see if data team and inside sales reps are fulfilling requirements of the contest.
Gamification helped Jerimiah to improve data completeness by a 55% before Gamification and 45% records were completed. Number of completion increased to about 70%, this shows the power of gamified contests.
Though value of reward didn’t really matter in this context. Data shows the leadership, boost in team and individual status promoted larger employee compliance and collaboration.
# 6. Increasing number of follow ups:
Improving number of on call follow-ups was a must. On an average an inside sales interaction takes 6 follow-ups so sales leaders need to motivate their team constantly.
Case Study:
Zillow a mobile and web real estate market used Hoopla to motivate inside sales teams to improve on number of calls and follow-ups. The best performing employees showcased on real-time animated leader-boards on big screens TV inside Zillow campus. Performance tracking was based around specific actions like number of calls, that is (main or follow up calls made) and surveys filled in etc. Thus, Hoopla used time tested game mechanics and real-time feedback to increase employee engagement by 3 times.
#7. Employee social media participation:
Many inside sales professionals with LinkedIn accounts don’t really think of improving their profiles. In a world where social selling is becoming a great influencer of Sales ROI, companies are trying to gamify social media participation of employees.
Case Study:
Social Benchmark Index (SBI) a sales and marketing consultancy used Level Eleven Compete to boost Social selling capabilities of its client’s team.
Areas of improvement include:
Social selling knowledge:
SBI wanted its employees to answer 3 daily emailed questions on social selling. Each right answer carried 1 point.
Completeness of social profiles:
SBI created a checklist of items to be followed to attract client’s such as:
- Completeness of profiles,
- Showing value add that each employee of SBI had contributed in their earlier profiles,
- Uploading professional head-shot as a LinkedIn profile picture.
Quality and quantity of Connections:
Managerial staff were awarded 2 points for every connection and 3 point for individual contributors.
Number of appointments:
Each sales person was awarded 30 points for each appointment.
Result of Gamification:
- Participation: About 50 % of the team got at least one fresh appointment. Whole team contributed enthusiastically by growing their networks.
- Profile Quality: Around 75% of the sales team highly optimized their profiles to high quality levels.
- Network Growth: Around 50% growth of sales team’s network that is from 5,900 to over 8,700 qualified connections.
- Appointments: The Sales team generated 29 new appointments in a span of 60 days after the launch of Gamified sales process. And 1 of which turned out to be a $100k deal.
#8. Feedback Improvement:
Improving the quality of inside sales rep’s feedback on customer questions.
Case Study:
Xerox has always be a technology pioneer in print services. This leadership is solely due to its focus on continuous sales support and coaching given to its sales teams. But Xerox training department realized that about 85% sales and support training was forgotten in 3 weeks. This natural “forgetting curve” reduced the quality of support rendered by Xerox. To increase this inside sales information recall, Xerox conducted an inside sales and support recall survey.
Qsteam Gamification platform highly adaptable and scalable solution improved product support information recall in this case. Real time leader-boards and scoring gave Xerox about 92% engagement and bottom up user adoption. This in turn improved the sales and support training information recall cumulatively improving process quality.
This article presents to you the inner working of gamification. As marketer you would be wondering about how to execute and measure your gamification initiatives .
Now that you have read the article, I’d love to point some ‘Next Steps’ :
How to select a gamification platform?
How to create a gamification strategy?
How to track the success of your gamification efforts?
Bonus Facts!!
What incremental improvements does Sales Gamification bring?
The below are some incremental process improvements a top down Gamification effort could bring.
- Increasing the distribution of updated marketing content to prospects.
- Faster responses for customer support question from prospects in demo stage
- Faster transfer of deals in opportunity face
- Faster closure of deals.
What are windfall benefits of the Sales Gamification to you?
Finally, your organization will also benefit in various other avenues like voluntary employee learning efforts, data quality, cultural improvements etc. Gamification can bring a paradigm shift in mentorship. High performers will be willing to share their tricks with others in the team or organization. When managers or high performers identify themselves as coaches, they start to help their peers or teams.
Analytics inside the Gamification software supports deep drill downs of each inside sale reps performance. So, mangers can easily see an inside sales reps problem areas. Given below is Ambition’s Gamification platform impact on Clayton-Homes sales mentorship.
“Managers started seeing themselves as coaches, offering people guidance on what they could each do to help the team’s performance. Because scores were calculated based on a set of metrics and not just one, managers could spot where individuals were strong or weak and provide mentoring.” HBR
