What Is Sales Gamification?

Need to give your sales team a boost? You may want to consider implementing sales gamification. Put simply, sales gamification is the process of turning sales tasks into a game. 

Sales management and business owners are always looking for new ways to motivate their sales teams and help them reach their goals. Sales gamification can engage your sales reps and get them more excited to hit their KPIs. When implemented well, your team will actually enjoy some of the tasks they might typically dread. In this article, we’ll be outlining how sales gamification works and how you can implement it in your business. Read on to learn more.

How Do I Use Gamification to Increase Sales?

Sales gamification is a form of positive reinforcement. Everyone likes to be rewarded for a job well done. Your sales team is no different. When you implement gamification and the rewards that come along with it, you’re going to get more motivated and engaged sales reps. 

Typically, when a sales rep performs tasks necessary to the sales process, they might just be going through the motions. To them, there’s no immediate tangible benefit to the task they’re performing. Of course, these tasks may eventually lead to a sale, which leads to commissions and better performance for the team overall, but moment to moment it can be hard to maintain an ongoing sense of motivation.

Sales gamification provides a solution to this motivation problem. When a sales rep gets a real, tangible reward for a task, they’re going to be happier performing that task. This is sales gamification at its core, but how do you implement it for your team?

Example Sales Gamification Ideas

In order to give you a jumping off point, we’ve compiled some sales gamification ideas for you to implement for your own sales team. Some of these may be perfect for your team, while others might not be a good fit. It’s crucial that you talk to your team about your ideas. Find out what matters to them and what kind of rewards or benefits they would like to see. By gauging their interests, you can build a more personalized and custom sales gamification strategy that motivates your reps.

Here are a few ideas to start the conversation:

Create an Engaging Sales Leaderboard

A sales leaderboard is a classic (but effective) gamification technique. Sales reps are usually competitive by nature. They want to perform well, sell the most, and bring value to the company along with value to their paycheck. A sales leaderboard puts those values to good use. When your sales team can see the top performers, it motivates them to do better or to keep their spot. You can reward participants by giving them bonuses or prizes for being at a certain position at the end of a given timespan.

Remember, your sales leaderboard doesn’t necessarily have to rely on pure numbers, as that’s not always the most valuable metric. You can have different leaderboards for different KPIs. This helps encourage more members of your team, as they’re rewarded for excelling in the skills they perform best. This also helps demonstrate which KPIs are most important to your sales strategy.

Achievement Unlocked: Points & Badges

Video games are a multi billion-dollar industry. Mobile games and multiplayer games make up a significant portion of that industry. The reason these games are able to draw in and maintain so many players is they have mastered the art of gamification achievements. Players continue to come back to these games because they’re fun to play, but often the gameplay loop isn’t enough to keep them hooked. Thus, elements like points, badges, and achievements are implemented to keep players coming back for more. These points and achievements act as bragging rights, but they also give players a sense of accomplishment.

The same principles can be applied to your sales process. With the right software tools, you can reward your sales reps with points, achievements, and badges for meeting certain sales goals and KPIs. The great thing about awarding achievements is that you make them as general or as specific as you like. For instance, there can be an achievement for closing over five sales in a week. There can be an achievement for cold calling 20 leads in a day. The possibilities are endless and you can customize them to motivate your team to reach their goals faster.  

Campaigns, Challenges & SPIFFs

As mentioned in the last tip, this is another thing that many video games do well. You can build out specialized campaigns, challenges, and sales sprints to motivate your team for specific scenarios. These types of challenges can also be commonly found in workout apps to motivate users. The basic premise is to build a campaign or challenge with a time limit on it. Your sales reps need to fulfill certain parameters and meet certain goals in order to complete the challenges.

An example would be building a campaign for sales reps to complete in Q2. Reps that are able to complete the challenge get a bonus at the end of the quarter. The challenge then lays out certain goals they have to reach before the quarter ends. As they achieve these goals, they get notifications or their meters fill to indicate they’ve achieved the parameter. This can keep sales reps motivated over long periods of time and give them clear indicators to work towards.  

Give Rewards for Great Sales Performance

Gamification is nothing without rewards. It’s nice to see visual indicators of progress, but that can only go so far when it comes to motivating your team. When sales reps are performing exceptionally well in your gamification strategy, make sure they’re rewarded accordingly. 

This gives all of your team something to work for and it makes them feel satisfied and accomplished when they reap the rewards of their hard work. This also ensures that they continue to see gamification as a valuable motivation tool and encourages them to continue participating in pursuit of that next reward down the line.

Win Together: Celebrate Success as a Team

It’s important to note that gamification doesn’t always have to rely on individual performance. Gamification is just as useful on a team level. In fact, making sure to implement team-based gamification should be a priority. It encourages teamwork, strategy sharing, best practice development, and leads to better sales performance overall. It also makes for a more tight knit group.

Of course, individual performance shouldn’t be put on the backburner. It’s good to find a happy medium that rewards individual performance, but also rewards the group as a whole when the entire team wins. This also helps motivate reps that aren’t always reaching the top of the leaderboards, but who are still contributing to the team. Top reps will also see the benefit of team gamification, because they’ll be rewarded additionally to their individual rewards. 

Flockjay Has the Tools to Motivate Sales Teams

If you’re looking to motivate your sales teams and give them the tools they need to succeed, make sure to include Flockjay in your sales software stack. Flockjay is a platform for sales professionals to advance their career through the power of learning with others. Learn more about sales gamification with Flockjay and discover how we can help your sales team succeed.