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If you’ve spent any amount of time following sales strategies and trends, you’ve likely come across the idea of sales gamification. And gamification tactics reach beyond the sales team now, with companies utilizing gamified onboarding, training, and productivity boosters to ramp up engagement and more. In fact, using gamification strategies in employee training has been shown to improve engagement by 60%. So what does this have to do with sales and how does sales gamification work? Let’s dive a little deeper to understand this strategy and learn how to use sales gamification to increase sales.
How Does Sales Gamification Work?
Sales gamification turns the process of selling into a game, making it more fun, motivating and competitive for your sales team. It not only boosts productivity and engagement, but also increases visibility and, in many cases, improves company culture. There are lots of ways to use sales gamification across your organization, but many companies find that setting goals and rewards is the simplest way to boost productivity and increase revenue.
Some sales gamification ideas include things like fantasy contests—fantasy football, anyone?—and leaderboards, and you can reward motivated players to drive meaningful behavioral change. It works in the same way many online games and social networks function, reinforcing behavior by recognition for each win, big or small. Whether it’s with a simple company-wide callout of a particular teammate’s initiative or a SPIFF incentive for the person who sells the most, each win motivates and drives your sales team forward.
Traditionally, sales gamification has been manually tallied in spreadsheets, and sales team competitors had no visibility into real-time standings. But now there are tools like Ambition that allow you to easily digitize your sales gamification. It’s a sales management cloud backed by Google, Harvard Business Review and AA-ISP. It’s also the #1 sales gamification and recognition platform rated by users on G2. Ambition works with Salesforce or your preferred CRM tool as well, so you can utilize your KPIs and broad company goals to drive your sales game and keep everyone on track.
How to Use Sales Gamification to Increase Sales
Gamification has been shown to boost conversions by up to 12% in some cases. Ambition's 2017 Salesforce KPI Report found that 90.4% of sales gamification initiatives are successful. 71% of the companies utilizing sales gamification said that they saw anywhere from 11% to 50% increases in measured sales performance. Utilizing a sales gamification software increases sales by boosting engagement, productivity and motivation within your company, driving the sales team forward. And sales softwares like Ambition allow you to create accountability with live performance data synced directly from your CRM tool so everyone can see in real-time how the team is doing.
This is of course helpful to keep the day-to-day games going in the office, ensuring everything is highly visible and top of mind. But this level of clarity and visibility is especially beneficial for remote teams, too. You can utilize integrations that allow for Slack notifications announcing goals and wins so that everyone has clear visibility and company-wide recognition. Keeping the team on the same page with goals and outcomes is step one in ensuring that you boost your sales with gamification strategies. There are lots of sales gamification ideas out there, but most work best when you have a clear way to view and share what’s going well.
When your CRM data powers productivity scoring and competitions, you can be sure that your reps are logging activities, objectives and notes. You’ll have visibility into calls and emails, meetings scheduled and you can view reps on a productivity quadrant to see who is converting activities into objectives and results. All of this helps your sales team on the same page—and it keeps the pages turning! That’s how you increase sales, by creating a laser focus on KPIs across your organization. It also makes it easy for open dialogue when KPIs aren’t met. Since everyone has visibility into team objectives, accomplishments and activities, everyone can clearly see and understand whether or not goals are being met and make rapid changes to improve operations when necessary.
Some Sales Gamification Ideas
Fantasy Football Style Sales Contests
Fantasy football style competitions are often a big hit amongst sales teams—but how does it work in sales gamification? With a tool like Ambition, your organization can draft teams and compete over a "season" consisting of weekly head-to-head matchups. At the end of the "regular season" the top four competitors compete in a two week "playoff" bracket, while the rest of the competitors participate in a consolation group. We recommend arranging reps and teams into brackets for the longer-term fantasy contests in addition to shorter blitzes and challenges you’re running. All of the fantasy or challenge scoring is fully customizable so that reps earn points and advance based on the activities and objectives you want them focused on.
Sales Poker Tournament
Ambition offers a template for a one-week-long, individual poker competition to keep activities & meetings set steady during the last week of the month . Reps collect cards as the competition goes on, and at the end of the week whoever has the best five-card hand out of their allotted cards wins. To get a card, reps must either hit a 100 daily activity score or set a sales meeting. There’s a two-card-per-day limit, with a limit of 10 cards for the week. Because this contest relies on luck of the draw, the playing field is leveled, and everyone equally increases output.
Rejection Bingo to Prepare for Objections
Another template that Ambition offers is for a Rejection Bingo game that allows your team to practicing putting themselves out there and honing their pitch. It utilizes a simple bingo board loaded with typical objections to your business. Every time a rep encounters an objection on the board, they mark it off on their bingo board. Make sure that each rep has a slightly different variation of rejection placements to make it less likely for a tie!
Tailor Sales Gamification to Your Team
The great thing about sales gamification is that you can tailor it to your company needs, sales goals and culture. Tools like Ambition are highly customizable, so you can implement your sales gamification strategy your way. However you utilize sales gamification, have fun with it! It’s worth trying a few different games, contests and initiatives, even if some of them don’t seem to work at first. Work it out with your team and take a look at Ambitions other templates for more sales gamification ideas! Ready to see more of what Ambition can do? Schedule a demo.
