What is Sales Gamification?

6 minutes read

We all love games. Be it indoor or outdoor, famous or not so famous, each one of us have our favorite game that fills us with excitement.

You can leverage this fuss around the games to drive good business results by introducing games in your workplace. Games at work help in,

Engaging your remote teams with their work
Making their work fun and exciting for them
And enhancing their productivity

In this blog, we will discuss,

What is gamification?
How does it apply in sales?
Why should you use gamification in your sales
What elements does sales gamification include?
How to gamify sales to inspire and motivate your sales employees?

What is Gamification?

By definition, gamification is the process of inserting game-like mechanics in any non-game environment to engage and motivate people to achieve goals.

It involves applying game-design elements and game principles to make difficult tasks palatable.

It motivates the players to take any action by leveraging their inherent desires for status, achievement, socialization, competition, and rewards.

What is sales gamification?

Sales gamification is applying game mechanics to sales in order to increase competition, enforce motivation, and positive behavior amongst sales teams.

In practice, this often means that salespeople perform certain tasks and get points for them. These points accumulate to allow them to,

Reach new levels (tiers)
Earn badges/ certificates
And ultimately get rewards for their accomplishments

This makes routine tasks more engaging.

For instance, a sales rep may get tired of having to call 50 prospects every day, especially if they don’t have high success rates. But if he gets to earn points for each call and then get a grand prize for having a highest total score (for calling 50 or more prospects) then it would ignite a drive within him to complete that task.

Why should gamification be used in sales?

Here are various reasons why you should be using gamification in your sales:

Helps in increasing employee engagement

Let’s look at some numbers first:

95% of employees enjoy using game-inspired elements in their work
89% of employees say a gamified task at work makes them more competitive
72% of employees claim gamification inspires them to work harder

These stats clearly indicate that gamification,

Makes the employees engaged in every task they take up
Encourages them to successfully complete their tasks
And boosts their productivity at work

Gives notable excitement and motivation to sales employees

Gamification works around the idea of recognizing, appreciating, and rewarding good performance. When our brain receives these positive words, it secretes a chemical called dopamine. This chemical is responsible for,

Making us excited and happy
Improving our mood, movement, memory, and focus

This way gamification helps your employees to stay excited and motivated and makes their job much more enjoyable.

Ensures on-time completion of targets

Gamification creates a competitive environment where employees are given tasks with deadlines. This enables them to strictly adhere to those deadlines because if a sales rep doesn’t complete a task on-time then there is a chance that his opponent will overtake him in the competition.

Creates a positive and innovative environment

The motivating, free and enjoyable environment that gamification creates in the workspace allows your people to think outside the box and come up with creative and innovative ideas for solving various problems

Ensures Healthy Competition

Sales teams are competitive by nature. But it’s important to make sure that this competitive spirit doesn’t affect your company’s culture. When left unchecked, competition can lead to workplace conflicts, and cause a lot of trouble.

Again, gamification helps to effectively avoid these conflicts.

Since gamification shows the reps exactly how they’re performing, and which behaviors are driving their performance, reps feel a sense of accountability, rather than jealousy. They will know what they need to do to improve.

The Gamification Mechanics

Here are five game mechanics that are typically used in sales gamification:

Points:

Points are the scores allotted to each individual or team against their accomplishments in a sales competition. For example, you can award,

10 points for each opportunity created
100 points for each converted opportunity

These points can be tallied up to make an individual or team’s score for a month/ quarter or year. Then you can reward the ones with the highest score.

SmartWinnr’s Leaderboard showing points

Rewards:

Rewards can be monetary or non-monetary. Players earn rewards after one or a series of performances. Alternatively, players can get rewards in exchange for points.

Rewards can be either physical (goodies, gifts, ticket to an event, movie etc) or virtual products and services (Amazon gift cards, subscriptions to food or health care apps) or monetary (cash bonus).

SmartWinnr’s Rewards Portal

Certificates/ Badges:

Players can also be rewarded with certificates, virtual badges, medals, and trophies. These serve as a proof that a player has achieved a specific goal and provide instant gratification to them. Players can earn and accumulate multiple certificates/badges once they reach several levels.

Screenshot of badges

Scoreboards/Leaderboards:

Scorecards or leaderboards are used to display results from the competition. They show which players are leading the competition and which ones are not. They help sales reps and managers greatly to visualize individual as well as team performances.

Screenshot of leaderboard

Levels:

Having various levels within the game motivates your sales reps to aim and achieve higher. When a player achieves a certain goal or completes a certain number of tasks, he can move on to a new level within the game. Each level increases in difficulty and imposes new challenges on the players. The purpose of having levels is to keep players engaged after they master the previous level.

A step-by-step guide to gamify your sales

Here is a step-wise process of gamifying your sales:

Step-1: Determine an objective that you want to achieve through the contest. For example, the objective could be to increase the sales of product X.

Step-2: Select the KPIs that you want to measure in this sales contest. Example: Number of units of the product X sold by each individual

Step-3: You can conduct an individual sales contest or divide your contest participants into teams. As an alternative, you can also create challenge pairs by pitting person vs person or team vs team.

Step-4: As the contest progresses, establish a live-leaderboard and visualize the performance of the players at individual or team level.

Step-5: Declare the team or individuals who come at the top of the leaderboard as winners and reward them with exciting prizes.

Use SmartWinnr to gamify your sales: SmartWinnr’s AI-powered gamification platform enables you to run fully automated sales contests for your remote sales reps. You can use one single platform to set up KPIs of your choice, create teams and visualize the competition results on a live-leaderboard.

Curious to learn to learn more about SmartWinnr’s contests? Schedule a meeting with us!