Why does Woods keep swinging? Why does Kobe keep jumping? Why does Federer keep hitting? They are all wealthier than a small country, yet they are fully engaged in the tough training and development regimes needed to be at the top of their game. So what motivates them? The thrill of winning and the recognition of being the best. The same is true for top sales professionals — they are fully committed to the necessary learning and development routines required to perform at a consistently high level. Cash incentives and loose sales management methodologies are not the secret to their success. In this brief we advance two models of Gamification and how they translate to strong sales performance and more effective selling.
Cash is not Always King
An incentive regime for a sales force at its most basic involves a quota or revenue target and a commission rate. A more sophisticated approach involves a tiered commissions rate or kickers set at a threshold. A multi-product company can design differential rates to drive revenues in different products. These incentive approaches are focused on cash, which is considered a strong motivator.
However research has shown that cash is not great at driving engagement in focused tasks or adoption of specific behaviors. One-off contests are frequently deployed to tackle exactly this problem. For a short period of time during the contest, performance rates do increase, but soon tail off and sink back to the original levels once the contest concludes.
An effective, balanced incentive regime mixes traditional cash centric regimes with a strong non-cash element derived from a structured game that builds points over a timescale appropriate for your sales cycle — be it monthly, quarterly or annually.
A Game of Sales?
Throughout the course of the game, sales professionals amass points as they progress towards their financial goals. The earning of these points and the associated recognition comes from completing necessary activities — missions — to improve the chances and speed of deal closure. These missions are derived from the best practice behaviours exhibited by your top performers and will focus on a range of areas including product and process skills, use of enablement tools, use of a coaching plan, management of the lead funnel, forecast accuracy, timeliness of quote production as well as other aspects of a company’s sales development scheme. The points enable a visceral, graphic leaderboard that does not require the disclosure of important customer and financial information.
The missions must be well defined and should have multiple levels. As the players level-up, reaching significant milestones, badges are unlocked that are shared in the game and via the company’s chosen social collaboration platform to earn recognition amongst peers and inspire others to adopt the same best practices. Each mission and level must be weighted to reflect their relative importance in the sales cycle.
Points Mean Prizes
The points earned on successful completion of the missions should be redeemable against rewards. Many companies are already engaged with professional reward vendors who offer a shop of desirable goods or gift cards redeemable at food, leisure, or retail outlets. In some companies or teams, a stronger reward is recognition, and so a dinner with the CEO or other leaders in the company acts as a more valuable currency. Budgeting for the rewards will need to be carefully considered as part of the overall incentive regime. A well-designed rewards scheme can extend the reach of a commissions budget substantially as points can be cheaper than cash.
Who wants to Play
To date gamification has been proven to drive customer retention and loyalty, in a time where, customers are more fickle than ever and loyalty is a scarce commodity. In essence the techniques above keep people engaged. Companies are always looking for ways to get their people more motivated and participate more in their jobs, especially sales. A company-wide game will deliver this no matter the demographic — you don’t need to be Generation Y to enjoy a good game! In fact the game becomes a change agent in itself. Whether you are implementing CRM for the first time or rolling out a new sales process, the concept of missions, rewards and a game will drive adoption.
What now?
Uncovering what the top performers are doing differently to their middle-ranking equivalent is the foundation of the game. The missions you set, the points you award and the recognition you gain are all tied to the activities and behaviours of your top performers.
This is a no-brainer for enterprises. A small lift across your sales and channel partners rolled up translates to significant top-line growth whilst stretching your incentive regime even further, giving you more engaged, higher performing sales teams and channels.