3 Ways Gamification Can Benefit Your Sales Team
Many companies struggle to keep employees engaged, motivated, and aligned with corporate goals. And that’s especially true with both sales teams and Millennials, who make up the up the majority of today’s workforce and who are the least engaged cohort in the workplace (28.9%) according to Gallup.
Companies have used financial incentives like sales performance incentive funds (SPIFs), to motivate employees. Although financial incentives may have short-term gains, they do little in terms of long-term performance improvements, according to Mike Brooks of OpenView Partners. So how are businesses solving this problem and finding new, effective ways to motivate and engage their sales teams? Gamification.
Sales gamification is hot right now, but many companies don’t know what it is or how it can benefit their businesses. Gamification is the application of gameplay elements to employee activities in order to drive higher engagement levels. Typically, companies will use gamification to help train or motivate their teams to perform better, though it can be used in many ways including onboarding, marketing, and more. According to Gartner, businesses that have been successful in using gamification to engage employees have seen 250 percent higher growth than their peers.
Sales gamification works because it triggers an employee’s motivators. It keeps them active and engaged, like if they were playing a game or participating in a competition. By infusing a game-like experience into everyday tasks, companies can drive new levels of performance and results across all their teams.
Here are three primary benefits companies realize when they use sales gamification:
1. Behavior Change
There are always employees who are stuck in the status quo or who aren’t following the right processes and procedures. Gamification helps get your teams be more engaged and involved in their tasks and activities. Whether you want your salespeople to take action on opportunities, complete a particular step in a workflow, or avoid common sales mistakes, businesses can use gamification to directly influence the right behaviors and create a much more organized, productive, and efficient team.
2. High Engagement
The highest performing teams and individuals are the ones who continuously strive to win. By applying a game-like approach to day-to-day activities, your employees are instantly motivated to improve their performance, and can clearly understand their goals and what they need to do to win.
3. Stronger Teams
In today’s mobile and connected world, more and more people are working remotely. It’s becoming more difficult to develop team collaboration and tap into competitive spirits when co-workers are geographically separated. Sales gamification allows businesses to create a more engaging workplace (physical or virtual) where employees become more emotionally invested in their individual and team performance. This helps your teams build relationships faster, which can help to create a more engaged workforce and reduce turnover.
Gamification is changing the way companies operate in today’s modern business world. When you make sales team performance radically transparent with a game-like experience, teams become more competitive and rally around performance.
