Gamification can blow your sales figures right out of the water
Times are changing. Methods require modifications and tried and true tactics we use to fall back on, are forcibly revised and revamped. If shift can be great for a business, it also brings its share of discomfort.
Has your sales team lost its mojo? Are your people hitting walls, lagging, or disconnected from your higher mission? They are most likely fearful, bored, disoriented and video conferenced out of all the Teams, Zoom and WebEx calls. Perhaps all those things. Employee disengagement costs companies between $450 and $500 billion every year!
With the right tools, the smarts, and the strategy behind gamification, things can change for the better. Sales teams spend every waking hour thinking about targets. And whether it’s today’s numbers or tomorrow’s achievements, it all boils down to performance. But what happens when things stagnate?
It’s humanly impossible to keep motivation up, every hour of every day. But while struggling may be normal, it doesn’t have to be the norm. And if a team that needs nudging will benefit from added motivational tools, know that a group that’s already psyched about doing its job, will react positively to change and stimulation in the workplace. You want your good people to become great, your greats to exceed their own expectations, and your superstars to reach unimagined results. Sure, you want everyone to get the job done, but if they can feel amazed, challenged, and motivated while doing so, you’ll knock results way out of the ballpark. This is what great teams are made of.
It is possible to increase your sales to experience triple-digit growth.
For sales gamification, there is a lot out there. Unfortunately, 99% of the proposed tools stick to leveraging the basics: points, badges, and leaderboards of all sorts. Hence, our studies show that these basic tactics only engage folks temporarily. The added value lies in getting people involved on the longer term. Extended engagement creates or enhances corporate culture, while pulling in the results required for the company to thrive.
Among the many clients we work with, allow us to tell you about 2 that stand out from a sales perspective.
Case Study: Financial & Insurance Products
First, there’s Wiz, a 40-year-old Brazilian company that focuses on the distribution of financial and insurance products such as life insurance, home insurance, property insurance and consortia for both companies and individuals.
All companies invest in programs at some point during their developmental journey. They purchase and implement a powerful tool, only to realize that its power lies in teams exploiting all that it can do. With Wiz, the challenge was to engage all 1,500 employees so they would learn and adapt to the new intranet and all its features, plus look forward to using it, knowing what does what, and why.
We did several things to make this happen:
a floating intranet widget was used to present challenges and provide instant feedback whenever the salesperson completed any of the proposed actions
progress bars, instant feedback, leader boards, levels, narrative, points, step by step, elitism, evolved UI, status points, virtual goods, exchangeable points and dangling all served to engage the sales folks in performing the required tasks so as to reach the target goals/KPIs set-forth by the management team.
Remarkable Results
The results are so outstanding, you would think they’re fictitious, but they’re not.
Lead handling increased by 1013% from 31,671 leads handled in 2017 to 352,550 in 2018.
Sales increased by 155% from 25,103 to 64,109 successful sales.
Effectiveness of planning execution increased by 80%.
Case Study: Telecommunications
TELE2 is a major European telecommunications operator headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden that operates in the Nordic and Baltic countries and is an alternative provider in many others. TELE2 serves roughly 17 million customers in 8 countries and has a franchise in 1 additional country.
The Challenge
TELE2’s commercial leadership team needed a dynamic learning solution, to accelerate engagement-driven results, that reflected their brand and engaged all their salespeople across European operations. Their existing learning tools were not capable of delivering the right experience to give the thousands of TELE2 retail outlets a direct line to corporate, plus workforce insights on everything from ideation to immersive learning and beyond for quicker go to market capabilities.
The Solution
Month-over-month increases in employee engagement was achieved after TELE2 initially executed a pilot of our LXP (learning experience platform) solution to gamify learning and incentivize employee training. This approach has been a huge success, with initiatives like sales contests giving a big boost to their KPIs. Funifier’s platform is also being leveraged as a one-stop-shop to efficiently scale their business. Today, TELE2’s receives all the training and communication resources needed to open a new location, by any sales team. It’s become a breeze.
The Impact
Funifier developed the gamification design strategy to encourage the knowledge transfer from the senior sales professionals to the junior salespeople. The organization provided clear mentoring guidelines that were ‘gamified’ to encourage the sharing of experiences, mentoring, coaching, motivational activities, etc.
We rewarded the salesperson’s expertise in separate ways as training was an important aspect of the role. Each player can collect experience points from both processes. Through this approach, an overall increase in sign-ups proved that the sales workforce was instantly motivated to take on a trainer’s role.
Elite learners continuously improve their team’s performance, by playing on the job, to demonstrate their ability to become better trainers and sales professionals.
Why Does Funifier’s Sales Gamification Solution Work?
Funifier’s sales gamification solution works for many scenarios. Regardless of the industry, certain foundational aspects are appreciated by all:
Leveraging Funifier’s gamification framework-agnostic mechanism to drive ongoing sales excellence, creating deal awareness and sustaining delightful customer experiences while working towards revenue goals, and being an A team-player.
Seamless integrations into other enterprise systems that customers already use through Funifier’s built-in IPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) capabilities, featuring a drag and drop workflow designer for gamification program managers.
Complete transparency for sales teams into what their peers are doing to become sales rock stars and which activities bring them closer to achieving their bonuses.
More Sales Gamification ROIs
Examples of other outstanding results are cited in this comprehensive list of 90+ gamification cases with ROI stats. Here are a few that resemble projects we’ve worked on:
Extraco Bank: raised customer acquisition by 700% through a gamified system
Investorville: with a property-investing game, Australia’s Commonwealth Bank created 600 new loans
Hewlett Packard: launched Project Everest to give rewards like holidays and other goods to the best reseller teams and saw a 56.4% increase.
Cisco: used gaming strategies to enhance its virtual global sales meeting and call centers to reduce call time by 15% and improved sales by around 10%
LiveOps: call center reduced call time by 15% and increases sales by over 8%
Autodesk: gamified the free trial, incentivizing users to learn how to use the program and offering both in game and real word prizes, increasing trial usage by 54%, buy clicks by 15% and channel revenue by 29%
Deployment for any of these solutions can be from a day or two to a maximum of a week for the Branded solutions. A fast turnaround for what could be your best year, ever. Think about it. But not for too long.
Every click could bring you closer to those results you are striving to achieve.
Igor Radić,
Funifier Partner & CEO