Gamification and Salesforce: Why it’s the Perfect Match

Salesforce makes it easier to engage with your customer and prospects – and salesforce gamification makes it easier to engage with your employees. So, a match made in heaven? Many experts believe so.

Gartner predicts that by the end of 2015, 40% of Global 1000 organizations will use gamification as the primary mechanism to transform business operations.

And this means, improving business processes, increasing CRM user-adoption and ultimately making more sales and maintaining good customer relationships.

So, what is gamification?

Quite simply, “gamification” takes the tactics which make games engaging and addictive and applies them to things that are far from games – often businesses processes. The result is that mundane actions become more engaging, making it easier to change behavior.

Everyone craves feedback and gamification is a way of instantly rewarding people for little and big tasks, keeping them motivated. An interesting side effect of increased feedback is that employees feel more in control – and when they have more control, they feel more powerful. This makes whatever they’re doing feel more important.

Gamification in sales and service

Gamification is ideal for motivating sales and service teams – as the action they need to take on a day-to-day basis can be gamified to encourage the right behavior and to boost employees’ engagement.

Both the sales and service teams struggle when employees are disengaged in work – for instance, how can you be truly empathetic about a customer’s problem, if you don’t care about your job? And how can you convince a prospect that your product is right for their business, if your mind is elsewhere?

Alongside disengaged employees, another common problem in sales and service is when employees are engaged in their work but indifferent to logging their activity in Salesforce. This is particularly problematic with sales teams, where agents are very competitive and motivated in their job – but just don’t record the details.

Gamification not only gives your average and poor performers an incentive to push themselves, but encourages your top performers to use the CRM correctly – so that you, as a sale manager, can plan for the future better.

Behavior = points

Gamification is so effective when combined with Salesforce because the change can be instant. As you’re not measuring an outcome far in the future, but instead looking to change every day behavior, you can see an immediate change.

When it comes to sales, gamification may not seem quite so new – with the sales contest playing a part in most teams across the world. However, the concept of gamification is different. It doesn’t just motivate your team by tapping into their competitive side, it can fundamentally change behavior to encourage your team to be more organized and cooperative.

In customer service, gamification is particularly useful because customer data is extremely valuable – so you need to be sure your team are recording everything correctly. Plus, as customer service teams tend to have a high employee churn rate, ensuring your team stays motivated should be one of the top priorities of any manager.

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Gamification and Salesforce: the perfect match

You can only benefit from the power of Salesforce if your team use it correctly, so it makes perfect sense to link the way you motivate your employees to the tool you use to engage customers and prospects.

In many ways, gamification is how to link the data in Salesforce to the actual results you want. Short-term reinforcements will keep your team on-track and motivated every day, so that the long-term goals are easily accomplished.

Too many businesses fail to get the most out of Salesforce. Find out how Motivate for Sales and Service could help your team use Salesforce to its full potential – as well keep your team engaged in their work.

What impact do you think gamification will have on sales and service in the future? Share your thoughts below.

Image by The Sales Whisperer