Gamification drives sales productivity

Are you considering implementing “gamification” at your company?  Do you know what gamification is?  And what it can do?  Neither did I, until I researched it, implemented it, and saw a 200% increase in productivity over the past year!

We’ve all been exposed to gamification, whether through getting mileage with the airlines, or a credit card that gives you points, or Facebook.com Zynga style games…  you know what it is.  The question you ask yourself, is if it can really impact sales productivity at your company.  I’m here to tell you – it can, and it has at ON24!

In early 2011, when I joined ON24, it was similar to most companies that I join – reps who have been on board for a long time, who are used to leads flowing in a certain way, maintaining a list of install base accounts, and covering a broad range of prospects from SMB to Enterprise to Strategic.  Enter, a few new levels of leadership who are experienced leaders in setting up a competitive infrastructure designed to bring the highest levels of productivity possible to the organization.  And in < 6 months, the culture was set, the teams in place, and productivity could soar.

The baseline – SalesForce.com and Data.com.  Salesforce to run email campaigns, track leads, opps, accounts, build quotes, and everything a CRM should do.  Data.com to bring in contacts–by the thousands.  To be exact, in < 12 months 320,000 net new leads and contacts were brought into SalesForce.com, by the sales organization.  Marketing did media spend, campaigns, and drove marketing leads, sales drove target accounts, specific industries and titles, and specific 1:1 messaging.

Next step – implement appexchange partners.   Email marketing automation from the likes of ActOn, Marketo, or Eloqua (ActOn great for sales or marketing users, Marketo works for both, Eloqua designed for more complex marketing campaigns).  Power Dialer from the likes of InsideSales.com or Refractive Dialer (IS for b2b or b2c, Refractive more b2c).  And finally, a gamification application to sit on top of SalesForce.com such as Achievers, Badgeville, Bunchball or Hoopla (all ON24 customers by the way)!

The specifics:
Step 1 – Enable sales users with Data.com for Salesforce to allow them to pull contacts/leads on a nearly unlimited basis.
Step 2 – Enable sales users with ActOn, Genius or Marketo ($100M+ company, may need to go eloqua), < $100M company almost certainly ActOn, Genius or Marketo a perfect fit who can scale from a few users up to hundreds).
Step 3 – Set up your SalesForce.com dashboards (red, yellow, green goes a long way to driving gamification, with the CRM you already have)!
Step 4 – Power Dialer for SalesForce.com from InsideSales.com.  Insure website/marketing leads are called in < 15 minutes driving 100X better results.  Enable local presence to drive 3-4X better contact rates.  Sales leverage to the max.
Step 5 – Once you have deployed the “right metrics” to drive the right behaviors, enable Hoopla.  Hoopla gamifies the dashboard with real-time performance streamed to a HDTV in every office.  Pipeline, activity, bookings, whatever behaviors and outcomes you want to track.  Click here to watch a short video on how Hoopla impacted sales at ON24.
Step 6 – Iterate, and iterate some more.  You can always get better.  Learn what other companies are doing to track behaviors, how they are rewarding employees, and implement pilot programs to drive productivity.

The results?  Come and learn more at Dreamforce 2012 in San Francisco, CA on September 18th at Mascone Center at the Gamification track where I’ll be covering these topics and more!

I’ll give you the big one – 200% increase in high value sales qualified leads & opportunities to feed the sales engine!  To learn the rest, and participate in the gamification track at Dreamforce, login to your agenda and sign up on the waiting list.  The session “sold out” the first day, and we’re trying to move to a larger room.  I hope to see everyone there, and if you are looking to implement 1) “Sales/Marketing Automation” or 2) Power Dialer, or 3) Gamification such as Hoopla, feel free to email me, I’m happy to meet for breakfast or sometime during the event.

Good selling!

Chad Burmeister
highvelocitysales.wordpress.com
Twitter: Velocity_Sales