You probably weren’t aware of it, but every time you made a leaderboard for your sales team, awarded the top performers or drew a star on it for a top performer, gave some non-financial incentives, you were actually using something very similar to gamification.

Sales reps are easily demotivated by bad results and they need constant encouragement, which can manifest itself through real-time gamification.

It is important to always motivate your sales reps to do more or to have your best players compete against each other because it drives your performance and sets the bar a bit higher. This type of approach obviously worked but if you add the tech to the equation you can make the most out of your sales team. Sales are all about results and competitiveness, so gamification seems like a perfect fit for them.

Technology has brought change in all industries and departments and sales are no different. Gamification means integrating your work with real-time data that gives your management clear results on how your reps are performing. Most advanced sales solutions today, including Intelisale, already have gamification implemented within their CRM and digital catalogs that feed the data about closed sales to the entire system automatically creating leaderboards.

In 2015 Inc website named sales gamification one of the hottest industries in the business. Still, most sales organizations are reluctant to implement these new technologies either because they are afraid they won’t deliver or that too much time will be wasted in the process. But while you’re debating on whether or not gamification is the right solution for you, the biggest players are already using it and reaping benefits.

Top Performers Already Use Gamification

Many Fortune 500 companies are already using this method to increase motivation in their sales reps and drive productivity.

Gallup’s State of the American Workplace reports that 70% of people label themselves as disengaged or actively disengaged at work. According to Gallop Poll, companies in the US are losing billions every year due to disengaged employees. This can be prevented or at least minimized with gamification. That same Gallop Poll stated that companies with engaged employees bring in an average 147 percent more earnings per share. You can invest in your own gamification software or save the money and just implement those already made to fit your business objectives.

For example, Microsoft purchased FantasySalesTeam to motivate their sales teams and with that enabled its team leaders to draft their own team and compete against others within the company.

SAP has been using gamification heavily since 2006, awarding users with points for blogging, answering questions on forums or submitting whitepapers. In case of SAP, these metrics are usually calculated as a part of the KPIs when the time comes for employee performance reviews.

Increasing Cooperation And Competition Within An Organization

It is not uncommon that B2B sales professionals work independently, especially in field sales. Being on your their can often cause the sales reps to feel disconnected to the organization, not to have a common goal in mind, but only their own, and less aware of others’ performance.

The most valuable part of gamification as a part of a sales solutions is its power to encourage cooperation.

Other than that, gamification promotes competition among individual sales reps as well as transparency in the sales department, recognizing the top performers in your team, and ultimately, promoting good behavior and correcting bad one. Low performing sales reps will, owing to gamification, reach out to your top performing ones for coaching and improvement. As a consequence, this will shorten the learning curves of your sales reps and save your organization’s time and money in the process.

Not only does it increase competitiveness, but it also encourages proactive sales culture. Since most sales organizations are usually reactive to the market and trends, gamification can motivate people to achieve more and become more proactive in their day to day work.

Don’t Implement Your Gamification Blindly

Warton study showed that while gamification works wonders for some, for others it can have a completely opposite effect.

First of all, not everyone is ready to be included in gamification, especially top performers. Asking them to spend their time on coaching can be a great disturbance. Make a clear evaluation or even go through some interviews with your top performers to understand if they are willing to participate.

Second of all, don’t make the rewards in your gamification same for everyone and keep the commission uncapped. It will again drive your top performers to sell more.

Lastly, make sure you always have multiple winners in order to motivate your low performing people. If there are always same people winning the awards the less successful ones will become even more demotivated.

Intelisale omnichannel sales solution offers gamification as a part of their Cross-Platform Sales App and Web Management Portal, enabling you to have instant rewards and clear overview of your sales rep’s performance.