By Chris Sullivan, Vice President, Sales, Bunchball
Chris Sullivan, @Sully63
If your business depends on channel partners, you know how critical it is for them to be informed, engaged and loyal.
However . . .
If your business depends on channel partners, there’s no doubt that you also know it’s extremely difficult to motivate them to be any of those things. After all, to your channel partners, you’re just one vendor among many they can work with.
At Bunchball, we know gamification can help solve this problem . . . and to help me make the case, I’d like to explain the three main reasons a leading global virtualization and cloud company recently implemented our Nitro™ gamification platform. This customer is channel-driven and is now using gamification to transform its partner sales.
Here’s why:
Gamification boosts education. Our customer’s global partner program boasts nearly half a million professionals. But, educating such a large and fragmented group was proving to be a challenge. As it turned out, very few of the company’s channel partners were inclined to learn all the educational material offered to them.
There wasn’t a problem with the material. By all accounts, the content is fantastic –and incredibly valuable. Unfortunately, though, what used to happen was that the company’s partners would start to engage with the information . . . but then drop-off, rarely finishing an entire sequence.
By introducing Nitro, our customer is confident its partners will become more knowledgeable about virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions. The newly gamified environment threads through both an online informational portal for the company’s partners and an online learning community where they can build skills.
Gamification improves motivation . . . even across different tiers. Our customer’s Nitro platform promotes participation across different levels of experience and expertise. It encourages new channel partners to quickly become familiar with the features of the portal, while inspiring all of them to improve their skills by completing a series of challenges. Participants pick up customized recognition badges as they achieve progressive levels of proficiency, and they receive real-time feedback, delivered via status indicators and leaderboards, to let them know where they stand against their own goals. Nitro also shows them how their progress stacks up against other partners similar to them in size and focus.
What’s more, the gamification platform uses big data analytics to create very personalized experiences. How? Well, as participants engage, they generate information about what interests and motivates them. Then, our customer can draw on that data to create a highly customized gamification experience designed around those individual motivations.
For example, after a participant congratulates another community member for achieving a certain level of certification, that participant might receive a notification reminding him that he’s just one lesson away from achieving the same goal.
Gamification drives revenue. Here’s the bottom line: Ultimately, gamification drives behaviors that drive business. Our customer has found that as its channel partners ascend through the Nitro program –gaining experience, stepping-up their knowledge and engaging with one another as they do –they attract larger deals and generate more ongoing business. Adding gamification to create personalized learning experience for partners has become the classic “win-win” of a shared business imperative.
Does your business depend on channel partners? If so, it’s time for you to consider implementing gamification. In today’s ultra-competitive vendor marketplace, Bunchball can help you keep your channel partners informed, engaged and loyal.