Games are intentionally designed to draw players back, time and time again, to continue playing, achieving goals, acquiring badges, making progress, and advancing through quests, objectives, and storylines. They’re carefully crafted to make the player experience a powerful psychological need to keep playing.
Some very clever brands have mastered this art. One of the pioneers of gamification is Starbucks. When they launched their App, they connected a direct line to their fans and made buying coffee and specialty drinks a game. Collect more stars, by buying more stuff, and get free stuff. Double star Tuesday, half off drinks in the afternoon, the list goes on.
Gamification taps into the principles and elements of game design and applies them to other areas of life. Most of us have already experienced gamification in the various apps we use, from personal finance, to weight loss, to learning opportunities—they’re all designed to give a sense of progress and accomplishment that helps keep us on track toward our goals.
Sales is no different. There’s tremendous potential for applying the principles of gamification to the way you manage your sales team and create sales comp plans in order to keep reps motivated and on track.
In this article, we’ll look at why gamification works and how you can use gamification to motivate your sales team.
Why gamification works
Gamification works by tapping into certain principles of behavioral economics—the field of psychology that explains why people act the way they do. By understanding what motivates people, we’re able to leverage those principles to drive behavior.
For example, the principles of competition and social proof refer to how people tend to compare themselves against others with a desire to be the best and achieve recognition. Games tap into this via public scoreboards.
Reward timing and hyperbolic discounting refer to the preference people have for receiving rewards as soon as possible, even opting for smaller rewards overall if it means acquiring them sooner. And the goal gradient principle describes how people become more motivated the closer they come to completing a goal. Games employ these principles by breaking large goals down into smaller more quickly achievable goals with individual rewards for each.
And gamification more broadly applies these principles in a game-like manner to other everyday goals people need to accomplish.
5 ways to use gamification with your sales team
Gamification can be a powerful way to motivate your reps, boost morale, and drive sales. And while there are plenty of designated platforms you can use to go all-in on gamification, like SalesScreen, Spinify, or SmartWinnr, these represent an additional cost and a bigger investment. There are plenty of ways you can apply gamification for your sales team without using those platforms, in some cases using tools you may already have—such as a good Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) platform like Performio.
Here’s how you do it.
1. Frame an overarching narrative
Great games almost always include a storyline to help keep players interested and engaged. Even if that story is tangential to the gameplay itself, it’s still ever-present in the overall game design, giving players a reason to continue moving on from one quest to the next.
Gamifying your sales comp plan starts by telling a story that your sales reps can see themselves in. It should frame the “heroes” and “villains” (likely you and your competitors), tie into overarching company goals and values, and clearly show what part reps get to play in moving this story forward.
2. Divide large goals into smaller “quests”
Big goals are great—you need them—but the longer a goal takes to reach, the less motivation reps will feel to achieve it. By splitting them up into smaller, more readily achievable goals or “quests,” you’re able to tap into the psychological principles that increase motivation to reach each one. And every time a sales rep completes a quest, it gives them a positive emotional boost that pushes them on to the next one.
This can be accomplished as simply as marking out individual milestones that break up the larger targets, making a point to recognize when a rep crosses 25%, 50%, and 75%, for example. But you can make those divisions even more meaningful by attaching a tiered reward system with individual bonuses that increase in value whenever a sales rep passes one of those milestones.
3. Provide a way for reps to track their progress
Many games constantly display your progress and let you check how far along you are. Some may have a wide range of progress bars for different tasks, goals, skill levels, and collections. Progress bars also work incredibly well for keeping sales reps on track toward meeting their goals.
You can include progress bars that show reps their individual progress toward quotas, how much they can expect to earn in compensation, and the team’s overall progress toward larger company goals.
In Performio, progress tracking is included by default, and you can customize it to show whatever specific types of progress you’d like your reps to see.
4. Encourage healthy competition with leaderboards
Game design frequently includes scoreboards that not only show an individual player’s score, but compares it with their friends or broader community of players. This encourages lower-ranking players to up their game in order to climb the board, and it encourages top players to hold onto their position.
The same principles work to motivate sales reps to try to improve or maintain their sales metrics. Internal leaderboards allow them to see at a glance how they compare with other reps, encouraging them to increase their performance.
Performio makes it easy to set up these leaderboards with the click of a button.
5. Run mini contests
In addition to having players make progress on their personal gameplay, games tend to host frequent mini contests with smaller rewards. This creates additional competition and taps into the fear of missing out (FOMO) in order to get players participating each time a new contest is announced.
Similarly, you can run mini contests for your sales team, targeting specific performance on a limited time basis. You can judge these contests based on a variety of factors, from highest sales volume to most new clients acquired to demos booked or whatever other sales activities make most sense to incentivize.
You can also run contests that promote collaboration, setting team goals that result in a reward if achieved within a certain time frame.
Use psychology to drive sales performance
Gamification uses psychological principles from the field of behavioral economics to leverage motivators and drive performance. But gamification is just one of the ways behavioral economics can be used to motivate sales reps.
In our free ebook, The Psychology of Sales Comp: Behavioral Economics and Compensation Plan Design, we expand on the psychological principles we briefly covered in this article, explaining the many ways you can use these principles to enhance productivity, boost morale, and drive sales performance.
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And to see what Performio can do for your organization, request a demo today.