Integrating gamification into your sales challenges
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The sales challenge is a gamification technique that predates the coining of the term gamification in 2002 by Nick Pelling. Simple, rudimentary competitions that foster competition among the sales people – the employees whose actions create revenue for a business and contribute directly to the bottom line.
Close your eyes and think about that for a moment. What image does that conjure in your head? Probably a load of men in suits and ties with dated haircuts, ruthlessly pulling out every dirty sales trick in the book to beat their rivals, conning little old ladies out of their life savings, duping the dupable and hoodwinking the hoodwink-able, and to what end? Some money? A voucher? A couple of extra vacation days? Maybe a trip? What about the rest of your sales force? Maybe your sales were boosted for that week, or that month, or that quarter, but how does that roll on? You’ve got one ruthless maverick and a bunch of losers.
This is not to say however, that a gamified sales challenge isn’t a great way to foster healthy competition and boost team spirit (and as a result, sales), it just needs to be implemented in the right way to achieve the best results throughout your team. The modern approach to gamification is far more sophisticated and nuanced than early corporate attempts, and through applying key gamification features in the right way, you can create effective, inclusive sales challenges that will bring the best out of all of your sales people, not just the select few high performers.
What is the purpose of sales challenges?
The aim of a gamified sales challenge is obviously to stimulate the sales force and encourage teams to focus on specific marketing and sales objectives, and to encourage the right behaviours in your employees to achieve them.
Sales challenges are an initiative usually implemented during periods of high activity, coupled with new marketing offers, or during a traditionally slow period to boost sales. It can also be about launching a new product or service, with the overall aim of achieving better sales figures across a team.
Sales challenges are usually based on a reward system, and are organised over a set period of time. Through positive competition, these challenges can boost employee productivity and encourage teams to contribute to the company’s larger goals. By creating an environment where everybody is competing against one another, you can bring out the best in your employees, which contributes to the overall business performing at a far higher level.
Things to avoid with sales challenges
The introduction of a sales challenge, when implemented effectively, can create an environment where employees feel appreciated and valued for their work, and their feeling of belonging to the company is reinforced. However, there can be obvious pitfalls to avoid, as alluded to earlier.
You want to avoid creating an environment so competitive it becomes hostile. If the reward is too great for example, it might encourage irresponsible selling practices. Any potential rewards should be attractive enough to encourage employees to participate, but not so attractive as to encourage bad behaviour.
Similarly, sales challenges should be created in such a way that any player can feel like they might be able to win. If an employee feels like they can’t be competitive, and they have no chance of winning, the sales challenge has failed in its goal of boosting employee performance across the team. One way to mitigate this would be to have smaller prizes or incentives staggered at certain scales of achievement. For example, sell X amount of units, earn this prize, sell Z amount of units, earn a better prize, but with the big prize still available to fire up the top performers. It’s important here to consider the timeframe of your sales challenge too. If it runs for a long period of time, like a quarter, there’s the possibility of a couple of employees running away with it and it turning into a 2-horse race, which could demotivate the rest of your employees.
Gamifying your sales challenge
To boost the commitment and involvement of their employees, companies are increasingly implementing gamification strategies across various business functions. Gamification is defined as the integration of game elements and mechanisms from video games into non-game environments. The mechanics of gamification are a natural part of the implementation of any business challenge, be it a sales challenge, or a learning and training challenge. There are rewards or prizes, representations of progress and improvement, and elements of competition and social interaction.
For example, in the workplace, you can set up a points system attributed to sales, and from those points create and display a ranking table that will reward the best performing participants at the end of the event.
These games and challenges, accompanied by a leaderboard, create a framework of healthy competition between employees, which can, when effectively and appropriately implemented, strengthen social ties and weld teams together behind a common goal. The rankings and points systems also help to establish a common thread throughout the sales challenge.
Effective gamified sales challenges need to be easily accessed
Each employee can record his or her sales in real time via very simple actions available directly from their smartphone, possibly on a gamified app, or through internal software. For each action or sale that the employee records, a progress bar will fill up little by little, or their accumulated points will increase, which will raise their rank on the leaderboard.
The key objective of gamification in the context of a sales challenge is to raise the performance of every employee, not just the highest performing ones, who would probably perform highly with or without the possibility of winning a prize. An effective modern sales challenge needs to offer all players or participants the opportunity to win to be effective. A feature you could build into your app, or your internal software, would be to give any employee the chance to participate in a digital instant win competition when they reach a certain amount of points, or a certain value of sales within the defined time period, for example, a Wheel of Fortune or a Slot Machine.
These games could be easily customised on the Drimify games creation platform to feature your graphic design, your copy, and your prizes, and because they’re online and can be accessed by any modern device, these are just as effective in offices as they are in engaging remote workers in the sales challenge.
Gamify your sales challenge with the gamification experts
A gamified sales challenge allows you to unite all your employees in the spirit of competition through leaderboards at the level of each shop, each department, and even within each country if you are internationally represented. It also helps the brand to improve its overall sales through increased employee productivity.
Games and challenges are excellent for generating enthusiasm and productivity within your teams. As well as using gamification for sales competitions, you can use games to boost your internal marketing and training activities.
Creating gamified experiences is easy when you use a games creation platform like Drimify. You can customise tried-and-tested games in minutes with no coding knowledge and no experience, and if needed, can take advantage of our add-on agency services to get the DrimTeam expertise, for as much or as little help as you might need to bring your gamification projects to life.
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