Hello and welcome! I’m Chris Collins, the Bulldog, and I’d like to help you get great results using gamification sales training in your organization. But first, let’s take a moment to talk about what gamification is, since that’s a common question I get all the time.
Have you ever played a video game you just couldn’t put down? It doesn’t have to be some big AAA title, even just something small and silly like Candy Crush, or Cut the Rope on your cell phone, can be addictive and fun, even though they’re obviously pretty pointless. Imagine finding a way to make your sales training fun and addictive in just that way, to get your sales team truly engaged in exactly the activities that increase your organization’s success and profits. Sound improbable? It isn’t.
WHAT EXACTLY IS GAMIFICATION?
In fact, gamification is fairly straightforward to implement, once you understand what it really is. Simply put, gamification is the application of the same principles that motivate people to continue to play games, to business training or even the business itself. These include goals, milestones on the way to achieving those goals, visual indicators of progress toward and through milestones, increasing levels of difficulty, group interaction, and of course, rewards for achieving goals.
FIRST, UNDERSTAND YOUR ORGANIZATION
In order to gamify the right things, you have to understand exactly what drives your organization’s success. For example, if your business sells consulting services to other businesses, you might do some research and discover that on average, to land one new client, a salesperson in your organization has to have six introductory meetings with prospective clients. Once you know this, you have information you can use to gamify your business. Your training would consist of role playing and other gamified interactions surrounding the behaviors that earn your sales staff introductory meetings, for example asking for referrals or answering the phone promptly and professionally.
SET GOALS AND MILESTONES
In the above example, a good goal might be for each salesperson to win 2 new clients per month. You know from your research that that’ll require 12 introductory meetings, so each introductory meeting is a milestone. You could set up a reward system for each milestone met – in my experience, cash is king, but you also don’t want to be too predictable – and then larger rewards for each client landed.
MAKE IT FUN, HAVE VISUAL FEEDBACK
Not only does reducing the goal into milestones make it much easier to achieve an introductory meeting for a reward, than to face more rejection between rewards if only the new client goals are used, but those milestones can easily be converted into a visual format. A chart perhaps, with a caricature of each sales person in a race car driving along the milestones toward the goal, for example, is a fun way to show progress toward the goals, and to motivate each of your staff members to work hard to achieve them.
DON’T BE AFRAID TO ASK FOR HELP!
While it may sound fairly simple, there are many pitfalls along the path to successful gamification of your sales training program. That’s what I’m here for! Come on inside, and take a look at what I have to offer, in terms of online training programs, books and DVDs, and of course, my personal appearance and expertise. I want to help your sales team become Top Dogs today!
