Member Article

Why CRM Gamification Drives Sales?

If you look for it, you’ll notice a subtle influence in the office as a result of Mario Bros. I’m not talking about video game figurines that might sit next to your desktop workstation, but rather the effect that growing up with video games has had on the current workforce. Businesses can take advantage of this trend with CRM gamification.

Millennials now make up the single largest group of workers, according the most recent U.S. Census data, and they are the generation that truly came of age with video games. This matters because, on a subtle level, they have introduced game mechanics into how they think and work.

Smart businesses are recognizing that many employees both like and think of work in terms of game mechanics, and they are introducing game elements into businesses processes as a way to engage employees. This has become known as gamification, what Gartner research has pegged as one of the hottest trends for 2017.

One area where gamification makes the most sense is sales. Motivating sales staff can be challenging, and the job has many ups and downs on a weekly basis as sales are won and lost. By adding a game element to the sales process, businesses can energize sales teams and create an environment that privileges competition and raises sales output—while keeping things fun.

Agile CRM has been an early proponent of sales gamification, and we’ve baked it into our CRM from almost the beginning. Let’s look at why you should be using this aspect of our CRM software.

CRM Gamification Promotes Results

Want to engage a sales agent? Give him something, preferably money or recognition. Gamification does just that, not just tying output to rewards but making it fun and competitive at the same time.

The way you gamify sales is by tracking it in real-time, setting goals, and scoring the leaders. With Agile CRM, we make this possible through leaderboards, email reports and real-time alerts that enable you to track and highlight how sales staff are doing against each other and also against pre-defined goals such as deals, calls and revenue.

As a positive motivator, CRM gamification works because everybody wants to be the best and “win.” When sales staff know in real-time how they stack up against other sales agents, there’s greater incentive to push on with greater effort. Just one more call, just one more sale to be in top.

Professional sales people are naturally competitive, so they adapt quickly and well to the game environment—and respond well to their position in game metrics. Tie your sales leaderboard to pay or recognition incentives, and this natural inclination toward winning kicks into overdrive for most good sales agent.

When you begin to display your sales leaderboard, the first thing that employees will notice is that they have a clear picture of who is doing the best in their group. When viewed through the proper lens, you can use this motivation to push your team to take on the sales tactics of the most successful members of the team. Gamification not only motivates, it gets sales staff learning from each other.

Negative Motivation Through Gamification

We’ve covered the positive side, but in many cases the use of rewards as a negative motivational tool can be just as strong for employees. Most people strongly dislike losing something that they already feel like they have gotten, what is known as loss aversion. You can use that in tandem with gamification to the advantage of your business.

Offering prizes to employees that span multiple months or quarters can be a strong motivator to employees. For example, if you notice that employees tend to exhibit a lot of volatility from month to month in their numbers, you could consider offering a prize that rewards employees for hitting a consistent sales metric for three months in a row.

For example, let’s say that your employees are able to reach a goal of $100,000 in monthly sales about half the time, and they average $50,000 in sales the other half—about $75,000 in sales each month on average. Offering them a lucrative prize for reaching $90,000 in sales for three months in a row after one of their strong sales months can push them to reach that bar for the next two months, too.

The real magic of this type of goal setting is that the employee already feels like they have the chance to reach this goal by working hard for the next two months, so they have the motivation of not losing something that they have already “earned” in their minds.

While the term “negative motivation” may sound bad, your employees will love having the benefit of an additional bonus to aim for, even if it means working that much harder for it.

Improved Information and Reporting

Gamification software delivers much better quality information, too. You can adjust your metrics to provide you with just about any kind of information you need, and use it to manage your business accordingly.

One of the biggest problems with too much information is that it can be hard to distill that information and refer to it often enough to be useful for your business. When you include an element of gamification in that reporting, however, your employees will be pressing you to review those reports on a more regular basis—and they will give you all the motivation that you need to review your reporting as much as you need to. Indirectly, CRM gamification improves your focus on metrics and hard data.

Getting Started

While some companies have advanced gamification programs that are both thematic and complex in their game mechanics, SMBs and those starting out don’t need such complexity. All you really need is the ability to track stats in real-time, share them with employees, and have some consequence for reaching certain goals or having better scores than others on the team. Keep it simple at first.

Within Agile CRM, you can set up a dashboard that tracks metrics such as revenue or deals won by team member. Start there, and tie a simple reward to something like most deals won for a given month.

Then, once you and your sales team is used to game elements, you can expand into more complex game elements.

Gamification doesn’t need to be hard or even a new initiative. You just need good reporting and a way to share it in real-time.

Agile CRM gives you that functionality. So if you haven’t included CRM gamification in your sales process, give it a try. You might even make a game of seeing if gamification works by testing several different sales games and seeing which comes out on top as the most transformative.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Sandeep Das .