Gamification is more than a buzzword.
It’s a proven way to motivate, revitalize, and inspire your team to achieve great results. In sales, gamified initiatives can have ripple effects that reach every corner of your company.
With strategic implementation, consistency, and intentional connection, you can build a system that recognizes accomplishments and rewards through personalized incentives.
To paint a more detailed picture of gamification, we had Brian Trautschold, Co-founder & COO at Ambition, on the show to discuss the approach of making work fun without losing productivity.
We covered the benefits of gamification, ways to track team accomplishments, personalizing incentives, and more.
The Benefits of Gamifying Sales
Gamifying—or more aptly, gamification—means using gaming benchmarks such as point scoring, competition with others, and rules of play to bring engagement and fun to learning and/or workflows.
As beneficial as gamification is, a lot of companies have no idea what gamification means or how it could impact their business. It’s completely new to them.
Because more often than not, even in the technology space, companies are too busy thinking about “are my sales people hitting quota?” instead of “how could we gamify this process to take our sales process to the next level?”
If the past several years have taught us anything, it’s that healthy competition drives results. Just look at Peleton. How many people hop on those bikes every day, looking to take down the leaderboard? To rise to the top? It’s not done in a mean spirited way, but humans are wired for healthy competition.
If you can build up this framework of measurements, you can continually have positive feedback.
Brian Trautschold – Co-founder & COO at Ambition
If we show people the metrics that matter, and keep them aware of the things that will lead them to be successful, that helps everybody. It raises the baseline for everyone, and gives them more autonomy to make good decisions as a sales rep or account manager.
Incentivizing Gamification
The best gamification isn’t going to work if it’s not incentivized. People are so busy these days, that while that competitive drive does live inside all of us, we have to make decisions every day about what is worth our dedication and competitive attention.
And if there’s nothing in it for you, you’re far less likely to participate in any meaningful way.
But before you go throwing Amazon gift cards out, think about this: We’ve spent the past nearly two years being restricted. Forced to turn to places like Amazon or Target or other retailers. Those experiences just aren’t special anymore. Are they appreciated? Sure. Are they motivating? That’s less likely.
It’s not just one size fits all, one incentive fits all. It’s more of a personalized, smarter approach.
Brian Trautschold – Co-founder & COO at Ambition
Incentivize your gamification in a way that people will remember. Trips, experiences, even dinner out with a partner. Something that the individual wouldn’t be doing for themselves anyway, like shopping at Amazon.
Automating Gamification
Gamification is a game changer, but only if you implement it the right way. Nobody wants to have to spend their entire day chasing down salespeople, updating dashboards, refreshing leaderboards, or any of that.
So it’s important to look to companies that can help you automate and track your competition. You may still have to do some manual dashboard or leaderboard manipulation, but you shouldn’t be spending your entire day on it.
Do your homework, and look into the professional gamification space, because there are a lot of solid options that exist to take your already competitive sales team to the next level.
To hear this interview and many more like it, subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or our website.
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