Not Just For Kids: How Gamification Can Help Fill Your Channel Pipeline
Author: Lynn Smith
“Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it”. This article is an interesting read into feeding the competitive nature of marketing and sales. Gamification is where you put measurement devices, like those found in videogames, into places where they are not normally found. These measurements can be used to give immediate feedback to salespersons, by giving them a chance to see opportunities to grow. This gamification is most often found in car sales industry. In the car sales industry employees become incentivized to make sales. Normally the company posts sales and creates a leaderboard; this is a two way approach. The two methods are the “stick” and “carrot”. The stick is comes in the form of threats and social pressure. The carrot comes in the form of incentives and bonuses.
Gamification really became popular once data became more widely available. With all of the advances made in cloud computing, social media, mobile technologies, and lastly quantitative analytics, there has been a major increase in the opportunity to quantify and optimize life events. Sales in particular can be seen as a game, with this extra data you can see where to shore up some weaknesses, or show off your skills. As companies grow more towards this gamification, there is better collaboration, increased performance, and overall a more exciting sales environment.
Personally, I love the idea of creating a competitive environment. Most if not all my life I have been playing sports, which by nature are competitive. By using analytics, companies can increase production, by first knowing how much of one thing is being done, and secondly by seeing what that produces for them. If a company wants to have more sales this month as opposed to last month, they can look and see what every employee did in sales. They can add incentives to top sellers; make a leaderboard to callout achievement. If money is tight and they need to let someone go, then the leaderboard approach lets you know who the weak link is. By adding the use of this data and by making it more “game” like, businesses will see an increase in sales and production.