What is Sales Gamification?

If you've ever run a sales contest with your team, then congratulations— you've experienced the power of gamification. And while it might seem like a simple concept, sales gamification is often poorly executed, leaving a truckload of untapped potential for lifting performance.

Here’s how you can dramatically improve your team’s sales performance with the power of gamification, and have some fun along the way.

How it Works

Sales gamification takes many forms, but as the leader in innovative sales games, our system works like this:

1. Employees share each sale they close

You might have your employees logging their sales into spreadsheets or databases, but this misses out on the social element of celebrating sales amongst the team. With Arcade, you get both— instantly. Your sales reps will love it for the team interaction, liking and commenting on each other’s sales. You’ll love it for the quick and easy sales data.

This system harnesses the “smartphone impulse,” our tendency as 21st century humans to check our phones as often as possible. According to a 2019 study by Asurion, we check our phones 96 times per day. You could see this habit as a barrier to productivity and ban phone use while at work. Or you could harness it to drive a stronger day. “Our business is about connecting with people, but it’s really easy to slide into emails and a lack of human-to-human connection. With Arcade, we’re able to pull that idea into this game that reminds us that, fundamentally, it’s a person-to-person business. It’s connecting.” —Karen Reifert, SVP of Insurance, Long & Foster

2. Reward every task and sale completed

Speaking of prizes, here’s where your employees earn them. Each sale (or lead, or phone call) is worth a certain number of points, set by you. Everyone has a subconscious love for points, often from a very young age. Either you collected them in your favorite 8-bit video game or you had a pocket full of them at your Chuck E. Cheese birthday party. The drive to collect them is natural. As an admin, you can also run special incentives worth double points to focus your team’s attention on a specific area.

You can alert your team to these incentives via the chat tool you’re already using, or the Arcade newsfeed, which updates live and will automatically celebrate your team. The social networking aspect of the newsfeed is useful for everything from policy updates to birthday announcements. Again, if they’re going to be on their phones anyway, why not make the habit productive?

Struggling to run sales games that lift performance? Learn how to design effective, exciting games by downloading our guide.

3. Employees spend their virtual points on real rewards

As a manger, you probably spent plenty of time and money rewarding your employees manually. Trips to get gift cards, finding out what restaurants they enjoy… it all takes time. Arcade has this function built in.

In the Arcade store, each employee can redeem his or her tokens for real-world rewards like gift cards to the restaurants, stores, or online services of his or her choice. Gift card amounts are customizable, so you can set options for anything from Starbucks to Best Buy.

You can also set special rewards in the store, like a week using the best parking spot, or free vacation time. It’s all customizable.

4. You get an eagle-eye view of your team’s performance

Employees might only see a fun game for collecting points and earning prizes, but you’ll get the real prize: data. Who are your star performers? How are your employees spending their time? What do they find easy, and what tasks do they avoid?

You also get the benefit of giving your employees positive feedback without needing to be there in the moment. This can be especially helpful if your team works from home. Even in a store, you wish you could high-five them every sale closed, but you don’t have time. With Arcade, every token earned is that high-five. It’s like a constant, real-time performance review without the awkward, time-consuming meetings.

Feedback is the Key

Gamification is essentially about that feedback. You can’t give away a $50 gift card every time one of your associates makes a sale. You can reward your top performers, but you don’t always have a solid metric for how they’re performing.

Employees need a sense that their extra effort is paying off, and the more often you can remind them of that, the more productive they’ll be. That’s what Arcade does. On the surface, it’s about collecting coins and leveling up. But subconsciously, it’s a high-five for every step forward.

A 2017 Gallup poll revealed that only 15% of the world’s workers are engaged at work, which means that most of us don’t like our jobs. Our natural inclination is to find our daily tasks mundane. Gamification is all about eliminating the mundane, transforming it from a chore to a challenge, adding fun to the mix in a whole new way.

It’s not just about earning rewards, it’s about always having the sense of being rewarded. This is what sets Arcade apart from the standard sales contest. According to psychologists Richard Hackman and Gred Oldham, that feedback is a major factor in cultivating intrinsic motivation, which is the drive to do a job for the joy of doing it, not just for a reward. This is the ultimate goal, because it makes your team happier and more productive, and it strengthens your bottom line.

Gamification is the next wave in employee motivation and is poised to change the entire landscape of modern work. Learn more and get started today.