When it comes to gamification and sales, there is more to do than just investing in a CRM. Because gamification is an effort to improve sales while keeping work engaging, not many are able to take full advantage of a gamified CRM tool. Most people tend to be under the impression that gamification will simply solve all problems; which it does, but not on its own. While a gamified CRM app offers a range of features of keep sales interesting for your sales teams, there are five ways in which you can increase the effectiveness of CRM gamification further.
Behavioral change is one of the primary goals that salespeople wish to achieve through a gamified CRM. If you feel that your CRM is still unable to fetch you desirable results, then you probably have to work a bit more on its usage and implementation.
So, here are five effective success tips for using a sales gamification CRM platform that can help you fetch the best results and bring out the best in your salespeople.
Understanding your audience
Because every customer is different, you need to gamify your CRM to target specific sections of your customers. Try and identify your salespeople’s behavioral profiles. You can filter certain phrases and words that your sales teams seem to most commonly use and relate closely to. Incorporate these words into your CRM’s gamification features like contests and challenges that you create to attract their attention. You can also use these words in communication channels and rewards. Understanding different behavioral profiles will help you make challenges more relevant to them, specific to their job and abilities.
Keep it balanced, always!
While gaming can be fun and interesting, excessive gaming might lead to unfulfilled sales targets and a disturbed workflow. Your salespeople need to stay motivated at all times. As you are considering behavioral profiles and gamifying sales activities accordingly, you need to strike a balance in the kind of games and level of challenges as they progress. Increase the degree of challenges and complexity of games as your salespeople increase their skill and performance. Simple and easy games might just lead to boredom and counter-act with what you actually wish to achieve through a gamified CRM. For complex challenges, create a step by step process without making it too boring or time-consuming for your sales teams to achieve. Don’t create too many games or challenges at once. Take it slow and only have few at a time. Believe in gradual progress and do not throw all contests and challenges at once.
Create a positive user-engagement
Challenges that you create need to be healthy and competitive. A level of positivity is required in the contests, games, and challenges for salespeople. Examine all kinds of communication that take place among your team members and monitor the kind of experience that the communication channel is generating. For better user-engagement, you can establish a competitive spirit by awarding titles like Novice, Expert, and Master upon completing milestones. Your sales teams need to realize what they are learning and how they are actually benefiting from the newly acquired skills and improved performance.
Don’t make it all too simple for your salespeople!
Encourage cognitive learning by creating games and contests that are simple to understand but a little difficult to achieve. Keeping things simple all the time may not help your salespeople learn anything new or explore their skills. Don’t just simply create contests and giveaway rewards and points. Instead, focus on cognitive learning where you make things simple but difficult to master. For example, when someone reaches the Novice level, you can toughen up things to reach to the Expert level, making things more challenging to reach the Master level even further on. Customize contests and challenges as you see your salespeople growing and getting better each time.
Focus on three important motivators – Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose
Financial rewards are always not the answer. You need to step up and go beyond rewarding your salespeople only financially or by points. Based on the three main motivational drivers-
- Autonomy – where you create a desire to direct one’s own activities
- Mastery- where you create the urge to get better each time
- Purpose- where you establish a sense of belonging
Using these three motivators in your user-engagement profiles will help you bring the best out of your salespeople. Therefore, make sure that the contests and challenges are primarily based on these intrinsic motivators than extrinsic drivers like financial rewards.
Just adding game mechanics is not going to do any good to you or your salespeople. With the above tips, you can delve deeper into the behavioral aspects of your sales teams and incorporate motivational drivers to improve business performance.
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