By Molly Kittle, Vice President, Digital Strategy, Bunchball
molly.kittle@bunchball.com / @MolKittle
There are kudos, and then there are bombastic, cartoon-stars-shooting-out-of-your-eyeballs kudos. The kind of kudos that put your career on a completely new trajectory because you’ve done something spectacular and unforgettable to benefit your company’s bottom line.
Think that kind of stuff doesn’t happen? Read on.
Consider the recent experience of a Bunchball customer – a large company with a global set of suppliers and distributors. Its salespeople rely on an enormous online price book, and the more they know it, the better job they do of selling. But acclimating to that massive, complex price matrix typically requires a grueling day of intensive training. Since these salespeople happen to work solely on commission, getting them to carve out time for training requires a special kind of motivation.
The solution was to gamify the experience of learning the price book. We designed challenges that motivated sales team members to progressively understand and master the optimal use of this vital, if not always intuitive, sales tool.
The results were nothing short of astounding – especially considering that 250 salespeople were entirely new to the organization, having just joined it via an acquisition. After gamifying the training environment, users became so proficient at using the price book that the company recognized an additional $1 million in profit in a single day.
And wait…it gets better. Over the next seven weeks, the company recognized an additional $8 million in profit.
That’s $9 million in newly recognized profit in just two months, directly from gamification. What’s more, the cost of training plummeted by more than half because the gamified learning experience now requires fewer people to manage price book training. Talk about ROI.
You can imagine the elation among the company’s C-level executives – not to mention the (bombastic) kudos they showered on the sales managers responsible for delivering remarkable bottom-line results after understanding the dramatic impact gamification can have on employee engagement and knowledge. Cue the cartoon stars!
Your results can be just as impressive. In fact, a wide range of companies are unlocking the true potential of their sales teams with gamification. And in a new free webcast hosted by the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (AA-ISP), I’ll explain how a handful of very different sales organizations increase their performance by using gamification to create a kind of “cold fusion” for turning around even the least motivated sales team.
The one-hour webcast, Motivation, Big Data and Gamification: Stop Wishing and Start Selling, takes place at 2 p.m. EST on Wednesday, Nov. 6. I’ll demonstrate how companies of all sizes are improving sales performance by igniting the five intrinsic motivators that exist in every employee – the desire for autonomy, to master tasks and skills, to interact socially, to progress and improve, and to have a purpose. Using challenges that persistently push people forward, these motivators in turn fuel the competition, recognition and teamwork so essential to every successful sales organization.
We’ll look at real-world strategies, tips and best practices, and how they are delivering results for companies like yours. For instance, you’ll learn first-hand how one sales team generated a 34 percent increase in “opportunities won,” even as it cut by 82 percent the time needed to move the average opportunity from “assigned” to “won.”
Register today and find out how your organization can apply gamification best practices to drive results like these. And who knows? The next batch of bombastic, career-changing kudos just might belong to you.
Motivation, Big Data and Gamification: Stop Wishing and Start Selling
A free webinar hosted by the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals
2-3 p.m. EST
Wednesday, Nov.6