How can we increase sales through gamification?
Let’s not kid ourselves: an unmotivated sales team is unlikely to meet its objectives at the end of the month. Engagement and motivation are essential to improve our employees’ performance; consequently, sales and gamification in a commercial environment make a lot of sense.
If our goal is to boost sales, it’s a known fact that sales are directly related to our employees’ commitment, we ought to use groundbreaking, innovative methods, and technologies that will ignite our team’s competitiveness.
In that regard, gamification techniques such as quizzes and scoring programs can help us achieve better results.
Improving sales through gamification
Training our sales force in the traditional way does not always yield the expected results and, instead, represents a significant investment for the company. However, we obviously can’t avoid training our employees! It’s key to find alternative ways to boost our sales team’s performance, which can be achieved through gamification. This technique is already widely used to achieve gamification objectives in marketing and it’s also beginning to be much more common in companies seeking to increase their profits radically.
In fact, several studies demonstrate its effectiveness. A report by Gartner, a world leader in consulting services, indicates that 40% of Fortune 100 companies rely on gamification to raise employees’ sense of competition and their desire to be better professionally.
Strategies to increase sales through gamification
Before you begin pondering how to improve sales through gamification, you should start by understanding what really motivates your sales team. These motivations may be both internal and external. Intrinsic motivations are those that drive your employees’ desire for self-improvement, such as progress, competitiveness, or praise from their peers, whereas extrinsic motivations occur when we motivate an employee to act through a rewarding system, that is, to obtain a reward.
Are they both important? Absolutely! Could you imagine what would happen if we only focused on motivating our workers financially, without taking into account other kinds of ambitions they have? We will probably fail in our attempt.
We must remember that in order to promote real behavioral changes that will last over time, we have to go one step further: we ought to have a clear objective, design procedures and carry out a communication strategy that is powerful enough to convey our goals with the gamification strategy to all of those involved.
There is no doubt that gamification works. It provides employees, especially in sales, with data on their daily progress, allowing them to have control over what they do and make better decisions. Would you like to discover other advantages of applying gamification techniques within sales departments? Don’t stop reading!
Advantages of gamification in sales
- Continuous training is key to having a trained sales team that is up to date with the latest trends. Dare to come up with something really innovative that, besides surprising your employees, will lead you to achieve your goal: you will train your sales force to sell more.
- Your sales team will understand business dynamics much better, they will strive to achieve their sales goals. Thanks to the tools offered by gamification, business objectives are much clearer and more visible to everyone involved.
- Gamification creates a dynamic of constant feedback that directly influences your employees’ motivation.
- To those in charge of the sales department, team management becomes simpler and more transparent.
Three gamification tactics you can put into action
- Games foster people’s competitive spirit and teamwork. Create several teams of vendors and challenge them to win a competition against each other! Virtual games are also very effective in promoting better practices in your company.
- If training your vendors has become a nightmare, we suggest you think about online learning schools. A portal full of interactive elements so that your employees won’t try to escape from training ever again. Missions, rankings, virtual rewards… Your vendors’ growth doesn’t have to be tedious or monotonous.
- Feedbacks are essential to vendors. Instead of working exclusively with complex and unfriendly reports, how about developing a virtual dashboard for each employee? This would allow employees to access their individual and group progress.
When it comes to increasing sales, gamification offers plenty of diverse possibilities, almost infinite. Gamification strategies are available for more than your sales team, they are very effective on the customers themselves. Gamification allows us to increase conversion rates, attract new clients, achieve customer loyalty and collect data. Do you dare to try it?
