Hello and welcome!  I’m Chris, “The Bulldog,” Collins, and I’m glad you stopped by.  Let me tell you a little about one of the best sales training tools available in the world today: gamification.  I’m sure you’ve been in a sales training seminar that didn’t work – we all have.  Some expert standing at the front of a darkened, nap-friendly room, droning on in front of a PowerPoint presentation – just picture it in your mind.  How many people are really paying attention?  How many are even awake?  How much of that seminar do you really think is going to help transform that business week, months or years down the line?  If your experiences have been like mine, the answer is: practically none.

Now picture that same room again, only each of those employees has a cell phone in front of him or her, and some silly little game like Candy Crush playing on it.  Now, how many are awake and paying attention to that game?  How many are totally engrossed, able to play for hours and hours, motivated, energized or even addicted?  Is it a coincidence?  Is there something about matching colored tiles that’s inherently more interesting and worthy of attention than sales techniques that could change their lives and increase their incomes?  Of course not.  It’s because game design principles work!

GAMIFICATION APPLIES GAME DESIGN PRINCIPLES TO BUSINESS

GOALS AND MILESTONES

The core principles of gamification are pretty straightforward and common sense.  Here at Chris Collins, Inc., we apply goals that are carefully designed to promote the real value-producing behaviors at your company, to give your employees long-term motivation, just like beating the game is the long-term goal in Candy Crush.  That goal might be weeks or months away though, so to keep people motivated from day to day, we apply milestones along the path toward those goals – just like progressing through individual levels and sets of levels is motivational in the short-term in a video game.  We provide visual feedback along the way toward and through those milestones to make it easy for employees to see their own progress, and how it compares to others’ and to the company’s expectations. This type of feedback also generates excitement and energy.

DIFFICULTY CURVE AND SOCIAL INTERACTION

To keep employees from getting overwhelmed at the start of the program, or bored as they begin to master it (just like a video game), our Bulldog Sales Trainers make sure to implement a nice, smooth difficulty curve, gradually ramping up the level of challenge in reaching milestones and goals. This is to keep people engaged month after month, year after year, and to keep their performance improving beyond your wildest dreams.  Social interaction is critical as well – Candy Crush achieves this by linking players’ performance to their friends over Facebook, but in a live sales team this can be infinitely more powerful.  We make sure that social interaction is tailored to your team’s dynamics and your business’s atmosphere – is it competitive or collaborative, or does it have elements of both?

REWARDS

Once all of that is in place, the final key is rewarding your “players” for achieving the goals and milestones you set out for them.  These rewards should be meaningful and powerfully motivational, and should never become boring or taken for granted.  One of the most powerful rewards in my experience is simple: cold, hard cash.  You can wave it around, you can count it out in front of the rest of the team; they can smell it and feel it, and it makes a real, immediate impact in their lives. It’s an effective reward whether it’s a $5 spiff for a low-paid coffee shop employee which could give them lunch money on a day they weren’t going to be able to afford it, or a $500 cash prize for a car sales associate who has his compatriots drooling and chomping at the bit.  Whether it’s cash, gift cards, merchandise, perks like better parking spaces or donations to a charity of the employee’s choice in their name, these rewards are vastly more powerful than the simple fanfare and flashing lights offered as a reward in a video game.

ARE YOU READY FOR THE BULLDOG?

And, of course, it isn’t just the gamification process … here at Chris Collins, Inc., we are also Top Dogs at teaching your sales team how to achieve those results.  If you’re ready, my gamification methods will make a huge impact on your business – my clients have experienced over $3.2 Million in year-over-year sales increases, and my record is $222,235 for a single month over the prior year!  What could you do with an extra couple hundred grand a month in profit?  Are you ready for Chris, “The Bulldog,” Collins to come turn your sales team into Top Dogs today?