[Office Hours] Best Practices for Gamification with an Ambition Solutions Architect

Best Practices for Gamification with an Ambition Solutions Architect

On the 3rd Thursday of each month, Ambition hosts Office Hours to discuss industry and product best practices, trends, and insights. On February 18th, Ambition’s Sr. Solutions Architect Ward Kennedy and Customer Success Manager Emma Hamilton led an Office Hours on sales gamification best practices going over the basics of gamification, why you should do it, and how you should do it. Let’s dive into some of the highlights from this session! 

What is Gamification? 

Ward believes that most data can be gamified—it’s not just about competitions and scorecards! Gamification is really just a different way of looking at your data and sorting it. Think of your data as records, where every record means something: an event, an action someone took, an opportunity going through various stages. What you’re trying to do through gamifying data is turn it into a scorable KPI. 

Why Gamify Your Data? 

We’ve seen with fitness programs like Orange Theory, Crossfit, and Peloton that gamifying workouts motivates people to keep pushing themselves. We want to gamify data for the same reason! People perform better when they’re having fun, when it’s a game, and when it holds them accountable. 

How do I Prep my Data for Gamification? 

“When you’re playing a game, someone is going to win and someone is going to lose,” Ward says. “In truth, there’s a lot of things that happen between first and last place. But you have to figure out how to rank that. Consider how your data represents the KPIs you’re looking to gamify.” 

When Ward works with Ambition customers, he asks them if they’re personally tracking the data that they want to gamify in Ambition. Having that data readily available in the first place is really important for gamifying it and measuring wins and failures. 

To prepare your data for gamification, you need to first determine what you’re scoring. Then you need to ask yourself some questions: 

• Who gets credit? There may be multiple people involved in a sale, so there are multiple options as to who gets credit—you have to pre-determine who that’s going to be. 

• When do they get that credit? Maybe one person created the opportunity, but there’s an owner who’s going to close that deal. You don’t want to give credit to the owner on the created date. You want to give them that credit on the close date—and that can start to get a little complicated. There always needs to be a date for the user with the appropriate role to get credit at the appropriate time. 

• And what are the scoring criteria? Figure out specific criteria for who gets the scores and when. Certain roles may get points at different times in the sales process. This can be a little complicated; you want to make sure that you’re precise with your data fields and data so that scoring is clear and precise. 

Ward always recommends that you gamify through individual records data rather than pre-aggregated reports. It allows you to get super granular with your rewards. To do this, make sure you have a record ID or create one. 

Gamification Pro Tips! 

• Use dates as tags for stage changes; when there are stages to a sale, you’ll be able to have dates to add credit for individual users. 

• Always know Who, When, and Why; for every single KPI you want to create ask yourself who gets credit, when they get credit, and why they get credit. 

• Records can change; in your integration process it’s important that you account for new and changed records, because things can always change. 

• Integration types are important; there’s a difference between daily totals and records—daily totals are a summary of the day's events, but records will represent all of the detailed reports on who calls were with, when they happened, etc. 

• Cadence is important; the rate at which you upload data is extremely important—the rate you upload affects the features you use. 

• What is your ETL (Extract Transform and Load) method; when you’re loading data into Ambition it has to be extracted, transformed, and loaded in some way, and thinking about that process very literally helps to figure out how it’s going to work in Ambition. 

Want all the Juicy Details? Watch the Full Office Hours video!

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