How Startups Can Use Gamification To Boost Sales

If you have played Monopoly, you would know that success is one of the biggest motivators to keep moving forward. Every player starts with equal resources, but it is a combination of intuition, the ability to assess outcomes, and the willingness to take calculated risks that ultimately help you reach a spot where you can thrive when your competitors start struggling. 

It’s Human Behaviour To Compete & Be Rewarded For Performance 

Sales is by no means an easy profession. It’s as much a science as it is an art. However, the reason why a few salespeople outperform the rest is that they do things correctly by following best practices and consistently striving regardless of the results of each effort. This directly results in higher sales conversions.

However, frequent rejection by potential leads can test the motivation of anyone. 

Aside from that, studies show that gamification is an excellent retention tool. For eBay, Walgreens, and many other brands, gamification strategies have increased employee engagement and loyalty by up to 30%. 

Gamifying sales processes is an idea that arose from a better understanding of human psychology and motivational factors. It can turn routine and repetitive sales tasks like building pipelines, making calls, setting up client meetings, documenting engagement outcomes, ensuring compliance, and closing deals into a rewarding experience for digital natives entering the workforce. 

How? By deploying technology to build elements that create a game-like scenario for sales teams.  

Incorporating Gamification Into The Sales Process

Here are some elements to include in your sales CRM to energise the entire process and allow your sales teams to enjoy the spirit of competition and gaming while selling.

Contests

Introduce contests that recognise the top performer each month and reward them with incentives and bonuses. This will also motivate the others to pick up the pace. 

Try grouping sales reps and agents into teams and introduce collective goals they can work towards together.  

Challenges 

Consider quick challenges that can be integrated into daily work schedules. The biggest deal of the day or week, the most consistent player of the day, or even the best compliance score are some aspects that can be converted into challenges for the team. 

Leaderboards

Topping the charts is an entirely different feeling altogether. 

Real-time leaderboards with interesting graphics that dynamically keep changing as each day goes can be a great motivator. No matter where an employee is on the leaderboard, they will definitely strive to climb up. 

Progress Points

Create an activity playbook to encourage your team to follow consistent, repeatable, and measurable next steps. Encourage your teams to follow it, assign points for each activity, and keep score.  

Awarding them with badges at every milestone can encourage a competitive spirit and nudge them towards higher scores.

Optimising Gamification Outcomes For Sales

The key to deploying gamification methods to boost sales performance is to identify and use the right technology. Conventional sales CRMs usually don’t have sales gamification options. Sales leaders should look for new-age technologies and platforms that integrate with their existing CRM and engage their sales teams.  

Moreover, it’s important to ensure that gamification strategies are used to influence the right business metrics. For instance, sales representatives may spend significantly higher time chasing leads that don’t yield any, or adequate results to achieve their targets. 

In the process, they may miss out on other leads with greater potential.  The use of technology to overcome such challenges is also critical, particularly for BFSI businesses. 

Conclusion

If done right, gamification of sales can definitely improve customer engagement, generate new leads, motivate sales teams, improve compliance, increase the speed of output, and lead to an overall rise in revenue generation. 

Sales agents can make their results consistent and efficient by integrating gamification with a smart sales intelligence platform that can analyse best behaviours and provide sales agents with playbooks on how to mimic the activities of their organisations’ top performers. Similarly, by utilising a platform to assist in tracking the right metrics, providing the right nudges, and providing visibility, organisations can truly master the game of sales!