Learn More About Sales Gamification Software
What is Sales Gamification Software?
Many of the most successful businesses include a lively sales floor, with an enthusiastic sales force closing deals and ringing the gong with each big win. To help motivate these teams toward reaching and exceeding their quotas, managers will often incentivize closed deals and recognize the biggest contracts or most consistent performers. This friendly competition has the potential to bring out the best in salespeople, especially during pivotal moments in the fiscal year.
Sales gamification tools provide structure to this approach, using engaging visualizations of sales numbers and other metrics as a method of ranking and rewarding salespeople for their hard work. By literally making a game out of sales performance, these platforms can invigorate sales teams with both an enjoyable energy and a healthy desire to succeed. The sales department is a one-of-a-kind entity within an organization, defined by its constant up-and-down swings and commission-based compensation. Sales gamification can not only help employees stay informed about the team’s success but foster their desire to improve and help them be recognized by managers and peers alike.
Sales gamification platforms' CRM integration is one of the most frequently discussed factors in G2 reviews in this category, since these tools depend on syncing activity and deal data from systems like Salesforce or HubSpot. Based on G2 reviews, sales managers and sales operations leaders most commonly discuss CRM integration depth, ease of setup, and leaderboard customization when describing what makes these platforms work well.
Key Benefits of Sales Gamification Software
- Track the most relevant performance metrics for individual salespeople
- Compare the performance of individual salespeople through leaderboards, badges, and other visualizations
- Help managers determine best performers and distribute appropriate sales incentives
- Motivate salespeople to improve sales and increase personal accountability through friendly competition with their peers
- Improve the sense of community and engagement among team members
Why Use Sales Gamification Software?
For thousands of companies, regardless of industry, a steady cash flow requires a successful sales department. This can place an excessive amount of pressure on these employees and make for a tense work environment—particularly if their continued employment, or at least their expected income, is contingent on hitting various sales goals. Without the right amount of incentive and positive reinforcement, it may be difficult to attract and retain the top talent in the field.
With a sales gamification app, managers can make the selling process more fun and rewarding, which can help engage the team and ultimately lead to increased sales and lower turnover. That being said, the benefits of gamification may reverberate through an entire business, as sales goals are ultimately tied to the overall company’s survival and growth. For a startup or a company in a competitive industry, each new deal is just as critical as the last. Gamification in sales fosters an engaged environment for salespeople and rewards the behaviors of sales leaders, which can be a significant motivator through the highs and lows of selling. These modern platforms are indispensable tools for thousands of organizations, helping to prioritize fun and employee recognition alongside proper training and customer engagement.
Among the most trusted sales gamification tools, G2 user reviews point to day-to-day team experience. Within the most-reviewed and highest-rated platforms in this category, roughly a third of reviews mention morale and motivation, and nearly as many mention making work more enjoyable, with many also citing real-time visibility into team performance.
Who Uses Sales Gamification Software?
The gamification applications in this category are designed exclusively for sales departments or dedicated sales organizations. These solutions are specifically built to engage, motivate, and recognize employees in relation to sales performance. Other, non-sales departments can use a more generalized gamification software for similar engagement based around competition and incentives to foster employee engagement and brand loyalty.
The following are the major use cases for this technology within a traditional sales department of an organization:
Sales managers— Sales managers can deploy a gamification app and provide accounts for select team members or the entire sales force. Once a platform is configured, administrators may choose to broadcast leaderboards, dashboards, or certain milestones on TV screens or monitors that are visible on the sales floor.
Managers can configure the contests and incentives within these platforms based around the key metrics of their departments and adjust these details as necessary throughout the year. Then they can not only acknowledge and reward the high performers on the team as the situation calls for it but use the aggregated and collected employee data to identify sales leaders or those in need of additional learning to help reach their goals. Managers can adjust the messaging on the platform based around this data and also, when necessary, increase the number or the size of incentives for added motivation.
Sales employees — Depending on the structure of your organization, the sales team can take on a variety of forms. For instance, if you operate a retail business, you may have sales associates on the floor helping customers and selling merchandise. On the other hand, you may run an office with salespeople making cold calls and collecting leads. In any case, these employees may benefit from the interactive and healthy competitions that are made possible with these platforms.
Sales team members can conveniently track their own personal progress in relation to their coworkers by viewing the analytics that are displayed on these platforms. Those analytics are usually broadcast on centralized screens or can be viewed on employees’ personal devices. When competing for prizes during a certain stretch of time, employees may regularly check the leaderboards on a gamification platform to know where they stand and how much more work needs to be done to win. In some cases, individual employee accomplishments will also be highlighted on these platforms, allowing users to stay informed of their team’s success.
For many sales departments, important metrics are based around set intervals of time—for example, a team may be expected to hit a certain quota by the end of a given month, which will impact salaries and bonuses. Through enterprise gamification of these sales numbers, employees can feel an added sense of urgency and personal accountability in the buildup to these deadlines. If there is a special rewards program set up by a manager, employees can know at all times how close they are to hitting certain milestones and receiving the associated incentives. This information can motivate employees and inspire winning behaviors, regardless of whether they are seasoned workers or are still learning the ropes. And as a whole, these tools can boost morale and make everyday routines more fun and exciting.
Based on G2 reviews, this holds true across company sizes: smaller sales teams tend to emphasize fun and day-to-day morale slightly more, while organizations with 1,000 or more employees place relatively more weight on ease of setup and administration, reflecting the added complexity of rolling these platforms out across larger, more distributed teams. Ratings stay consistently high either way, and reviews that specifically highlight team engagement and motivation tend to sit among the highest rated, regardless of company size.
Industry context shapes how these platforms get used. According to G2 reviews, sales teams in real estate and insurance, two of the most represented industries among gamification users, lean heavily on prize and incentive-driven competitions to keep agents motivated through high-volume, commission-based selling. Software and technology companies tend to use these tools a bit differently. SaaS and tech sales teams lean on sales gamification platforms less for prizes or formal incentive structures and more as a way to give fast-moving, often distributed teams a shared, real-time view of where everyone stands. For these companies, the value comes less from competitive rewards and more from the visibility itself, keeping the whole team aligned on the same numbers as they happen.
Sales Gamification Software Features
The following are some useful features you may encounter when researching the products in this category:
Highlight achievements — Positive reinforcement is a cornerstone of productive and effective sales management, when managers make a point to give recognition to individuals or teams following notable deals or renewals. Sales gamification platforms allow managers to highlight the team’s daily accomplishments with celebratory slides that are sent out or displayed on office monitors when someone reaches a goal or completes a major contract with a new customer. This visible acknowledgement can instill a feeling of pride in the employees who are the subject of the announcement, while also motivating the rest of the team and uniting their efforts for continued success.
The personal achievements that are highlighted on these platforms are often paired with custom incentives such as cash bonuses, vacations, or other gifts. Within some of these software solutions, achievements can also be supplemented with digital badges or other signifiers that are then associated with the employee’s profile on the platform. Managers can then choose to incentivize those employees with a streak of big wins or consistent success by monitoring these badges, while the employees themselves can share their badges on social media or simply use them to decorate their profile on the platform. Sales gamification apps may integrate with team collaboration software or email software so that external teams or the entire office can be instantly informed of noteworthy accomplishments in real time.
Leaderboards — One of the more common features associated with these gamification solutions is sales leaderboards. Once managers establish the team’s KPIs and other important metrics to follow, they can visualize the sales team’s progress as a head-to-head, points-based race that is updated in real time. Based on G2 reviews, real-time visibility and incentive tracking are two of the most consistently praised aspects of leaderboards. Live tracking matters, but reviewers say leaderboards are most useful when updates are tied directly to points, badges, or rewards, not just a standalone scoreboard. As salespeople increase their personal numbers by closing deals and renewing contracts, leaderboards are updated to show how the employees are stacking up against each other in the current sales period. These rankings can be accompanied by unique avatars or other signifiers that allow employees to showcase their personality and get into the spirit of healthy competition. If managers have established extra incentives for those who finish the fiscal period on top, these leaderboards can be a fun yet informative tool for helping salespeople strategize and fend for the top spot. Depending on the platform, leaderboards may be built around certain visual themes or templates, and in some cases are customizable in other unique ways.
In addition to ranking team members based on the revenue they bring in, some products allow managers to award points for other milestones. These may include significant “firsts" in an employee’s career (e.g., first deal within the company, first deal over $10,000), completion of different training or learning processes, or other notable milestones established by the management team. To make matters more interesting, there may be multiple leaderboards going at once that track sales performance in different ways and reward the winners accordingly.
Contests — Outside of regular leaderboard competitions, users may leverage certain sales gamification platforms for one-off contests and challenges. These can be enacted by the management team, or in some cases by and between individual sales team members, to motivate employees during critical stretches of time. Contests held within these platforms could involve any number of prompts, for example, who can sell the most in a day or which seller will complete the final deal en route to certain goals. By executing these contents, managers can help employees increase their contribution to KPIs and overcome periods of poor performance with special incentives and acknowledgement. How sellers get involved with these exhibitions can be valuable data in and of itself, highlighting those performers who work well under pressure and reinforcing their hard work accordingly.
Dashboards — Some of the platforms in this category can serve as helpful dashboards for sales goals, KPIs, and other relevant data as the team racks up their revenue and strives for success. Administrators can determine the most valuable data to display, whether on TV screens around the sales floor or on the personal devices of team members. These dashboards not only display metrics such as number of clients or revenue totals but also countdowns to various deadlines, among other things.
In addition to the general dashboards that are shared with the team, individual users may be able to configure personal dashboards to act as helpful resources in their daily routines. These can sometimes offer a live view of personal targets and act as progress trackers toward established benchmarks and achievements. In some cases, sales associates can receive feedback from managers based on the data surrounding their personal track records, customer loyalty, and other historical selling behavior. Sales gamification products may integrate with sales performance management software to generate and share the best possible insights on dashboards and track the progress of both individuals and the team as a whole.
CRM integration with platforms like Salesforce or HubSpot is also one of the most frequently discussed factors among sales gamification buyers. G2 reviewers generally describe the integration itself as a strength once configured, citing automatic leaderboard updates and notifications pulled directly from CRM activity.
Mobile updates — A number of platforms in this category offer mobile apps that employees can use in conjunction with the fully featured tools used in the office. If there are significant deals signed by a colleague or new challenges issued by a sales manager, salespeople can receive notifications on these apps regardless of where they are in the field. These mobile apps can also act as a helpful reference for leaderboard data or personal quotas, among other information. In some cases, sellers can send or receive direct messages on these mobile apps that are related to ongoing sales competitions or goals. As previously mentioned, some products in this category can sync with team collaboration or messaging tools to help facilitate timely interactions across a sales team, alert employees about content updates or major deals being signed, or communicate any other newsworthy items.
Other Features of Sales Gamification Software: Social Collaboration Integration, TV Streaming
Software and Services Related to Sales Gamification Software
There are a number of worthwhile solutions to consider for monitoring, motivating, and engaging with your sales staff. The following are some solutions that can work well alongside sales gamification software to bring the best out of your sales department:
Sales performance management software — Sales performance management software is designed to track and analyze the most critical data related to individual and team-wide sales performance, without the competitive focus of gamification platforms. This not only allows the team to track their important sales numbers and goals throughout the work week but also gives the management team critical insights into high and low performers and areas of improvement for the entire department. These platforms may offer deeper insights than are possible with gamification programs alone, helping managers shape performance-based learning and correct the course when quotas are in danger of not being hit. The more that sales teams can understand about their successes and failures, the better they can turn things around and continue to improve their processes. Sales performance management can be an essential component of a successful sales department, and the tools in this category allow teams to gauge their efforts every step of the way.
Sales intelligence software — Sales intelligence software takes the analytics of sales performance management tools one step further, generating complex data about prospects and timely sales opportunities. These analytics can give already efficient sales teams a running start at signing their next deals and identifying the most valuable moments during early negotiations. With these advanced platforms, salespeople can improve the quality of leads and refine their prospect lists to identify those customers who have the most potential. These platforms share similarities and can often work in tandem with lead intelligence software. For a driven and competitive sales department, tools like these give employees the edge they need to optimize their approach and land more deals than ever.
Sales coaching software — The success of salespeople is as important to managers and mentors as it is to the individuals themselves. Sales coaching software allows managers to oversee customer interactions and offer continuous learning and suggestions when they matter most, for the benefit of the team’s collective goals as well as the individual’s. In some cases, these solutions allow managers to observe sales meetings in real time and either send instant feedback to the seller or join the conversation when the situation calls for it. In other cases, these tools will record calls and offer tools for analysis after the fact, so managers can identify the caller’s strengths and weaknesses and help identify pivotal moments of closing or upselling for future reference. For an ambitious salesperson, whether competing with a team or on a personal push for greatness, there is no greater tool than the sage advice of managers and sales leaders. These platforms help to facilitate these teachings when they matter most.
Sales coaching goes hand in hand with sales enablement software, which provides easy access to training materials, scripts for sales calls, and marketing collateral for active salespeople. As these employees schedule and execute the conversations that will drive them up the leaderboard, sales enablement platforms can help ensure they always have the right responses lined up for their prospective customers. Even the most accomplished salespeople can leverage these resources to boost their performance and maximize their closed deals, along with improving the customer experience.
Sales training providers — Whether you are starting from scratch with a new sales team or want to elevate the skills of your current roster, you may decide it best to enlist the help of third-party consultants who specialize in sales techniques. Sales training providers can offer custom-tailored training programs for select employees or the team as a whole, with workshops and lectures based around various aspects of the selling process. These learning sessions can be a valuable complement to your company’s internal training program and set your staff up for success as they face new challenges throughout their tenure.
In addition to working with these consultants, businesses can invest in sales training and onboarding software to assist with new hires and promote continued learning in the sales department. These programs may offer features like meeting practice and simulations in addition to equipping salespeople with workbooks and other traditional training materials. A proper training program should be a priority for sales managers as they aim to build a successful and consistent sales initiative. The solutions in this category help to curate and oversee a winning training strategy as your new recruits prepare to be faces of the company and the first points of contact for your valued customer base.
