Gamification has gained widespread traction in business over the years. While its application has largely been for better engagement, more & more business leaders are looking to tap into other applications of gamification to make it an essential part of their sales enablement & learning solution.
Used correctly, gamification in sales can not only boost seller engagement & enhance skills, but also drive business performance & productivity.
Business leaders are also recognizing the role of gamification not just for enabling & upskilling sales teams, but in driving KPI, ensuring process adherence as well as in more effectively engaging with customers.
As organisations invest in sales enablement tools more than ever, making gamification a core aspect of the sales enablement platform can significantly increase the lifespan & future readiness of the salesforce as well as customer support teams.
Below are five essential ways to boost the performance of your sales & customer support teams in 2021 using sales gamification:
1. Onboarding New Sellers & Customer Support Hires
When it comes to getting your newly onboarded sellers up to speed and acclimatized to your organisation, gamification in sales enablement can be leveraged in more ways than one.
Creating a structured but gamified learning pathway can streamline the seller’s progress in terms of skill sets that he/she must master.
Furthermore, having readily available sales collaterals, sales talks, demonstration presentations & other customer materials available from Day 1 as part of his access within the sales enablement platform can ensure faster readiness & clarity on how to sell.
A day-wise progression in content based on the new seller’s progress from the previous day would further instill a sense of achievement that can be further compared with other sellers from different regions.
Gamification when delivered in cohesion with bite-sized micro-learning content, can greatly enhance learning effectiveness by up to 300% through spaced repetition & repetitive testing.
Since gamification is inherently collaborative, it would encourage new sellers to interact with peers for tips and tricks to navigate their daily challenges and thereby develop stronger team collaboration as well.
2. Data-Driven Insights and Decisions
A well thought through series of game designs and microlearning content can enable business leaders to derive deeper insights about their salesforce.
For instance, an analysis of the skill gap of a key product can help business leaders take a stock of their reps’ performance in their field or identify and improve a process gap if any. Sales gamification, using repeated testing, can spot micro competencies wherein a seller might be struggling to convince a customer or develop more prospects, among other things. This approach of pinpointing seller specific gaps and then being able to suggest a more targeted approach to plug them can greatly personalize the sales enablement experience for each front-line rep. More importantly, repetitive testing and spaced learning can ensure each seller gets regimented of enablement content that is specific to his or her gap, which can greatly improve the seller’s performance on the field.
Data insights from sales gamification can also be ‘exported’ to the field where sales managers & sales trainers can observe live interactions between the seller and customer. Data points from these interactions can also be fed back to the sales enablement platform to further recommend the appropriate learning content for the seller. By gamifying the process of observation along with the consumption of content, we can reinforce a learning & gaming loop that continuously generates newer insights about the seller while constantly upskilling and assessing him on sales competencies required to make him successful on the field.
3. Gamifying Customer Engagement
In a recent survey, 46% of business leaders claimed customer experience to be a top business priority for the next 5 years. That was also corroborated by the fact that 86% of buyers were willing to pay a premium for a great customer experience.
Gamification of customer engagement hence can significantly enhance how sellers interact with buyers and can enable buyers to better imagine the possibilities of using their products and services.
As part of an organization’s sales enablement platform, gamifying customer experience can include:
· badging and rewarding customers for viewing product brochures or sharing them with their friends and family
· enabling customers to play gamified assessments to better understand the product or solution’s capability.
· interacting with digital assets that are more conversational as an experience and result in an active dialogue between the customer and the content, rather than passive viewing.
Gamification of customer interactions can not only make sellers stand above the crowd, but also create an indelible experience for the customer with your brand that can solidify their decision to buy as well as advocate your product across their network.
4. Engagement And Reward Mechanism
Gamifying your sales enablement platform encourages positive learning reinforcement among sellers. Badges and leaderboards motivate sellers to perform better, strive for social recognition and encourage discretionary effort to further improve or overachieve sales quotas.
Managers should ensure that sales reps are adequately rewarded through the use of badges, scorecards & leaderboards via various competitive situations such as playoffs, tournaments and other live matches. Enabling sellers and customer support teams to redeem rewards periodically can enhance seller commitment and build a constant feeling of progress that can further stir sellers to develop their capability & overachieve their quotas.
5. Gamifying KPIs & Performance:
Sales teams are motivated to perform through better monetary & non-monetary incentives. Your sales enablement platform can be used to track incentive achievement of sales reps and gamify this experience through leaderboards based on incentive committed, achieved or both.
Gamification can also be used to track KPIs & metrics as well as for process workflows by assigning points to them. This can further be used to give monetary & non-monetary incentives to sales teams on an ongoing basis.
Not only does this drive consistency across the salesforce, but it ensures better adherence to processes & compliance to the organization’s way of selling & servicing customer requests.
Gamifying KPIs also builds a more fluid approach to daily performance and instils the right sales habits which the organization can reward instantly and signal to the salesperson whenever he or she might be going astray.
Sales gamification can also trigger sales teams to have a more balanced approach to sell across the organization’s product portfolio, rather than constantly focus on selling one or two products that the seller is more predisposed to sell. This can create more sustainable & healthier growth in the sales rep and within sales teams as well as reduce any product-related risks in the organization’s business.
When utilized effectively, and cohesively with sales gamification can bring out long-lasting behavioral changes in sales teams and improve revenues multifold. For gamified sales enablement to be effective, business leaders need to be clear about their specific objectives and outcomes and know their sales teams well enough to set the right goals, benchmarks, and incentives to motivate them. Once implemented correctly, sales leaders will be rewarded with elevated levels of productivity & morale and a future-ready salesforce that constantly brings out its A-game.
If you are looking for a gamified sales enablement platform to give your organization’s sales enablement strategy a boost, Master-O could just be the platform you are searching for. With elements of game-based learning gamification, microlearning and incentive tracking features, Master-O is a comprehensive enablement solution that addresses the requirements of not just sales reps but also sales trainers, managers, and business leaders.