Pete’s story on gamified CRM is the cover story for December's issue of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management (ISMM) magazine 'Winning Edge'. We received our copy in the office today and it is exciting! Below is the finished article.
CHECK OUT THE FULL ARTICLE BELOW
In this article, Pete “analyses the merits of gamification for a sales CRM system, and hints at the possibilities it holds for a company’s salesforce in the future”. I won’t go into too much detail on the article, but my personal favourite part of the article is as follows:
The ISMM are a prestigious body who were first established in 1911 as the Sales Managers Association, the ISMM exists to promote the prestige and integrity of selling by inspiring those employed in the industry to reach greater heights of achievement by providing education, guidance, information and encouragement. Any profits made by the ISMM are re-invested in the pursuit of its purpose. The ISMM is committed to developing sales talent and is the United Kingdom’s only professional sales qualifications awarding body recognised by the Government regulatory body, Ofqual, with a full range of qualifications exclusively focused on Sales, Marketing and Sales & Marketing Management.
“Results from our staff focus groups indicated three main types of reward that would motivate that wasn’t money. The preferred rewards fell into these categories: Personal experience and voicers, team based rewards and activities and additional time off work. We needed to keep the reward selection simple so that we could get it up and running quickly, while heeding the lack of additional monetary budget. So we launched the reward scheme by restricting it to rewards based on time off. Staff could cash in points for half an hour off work, on hour, two hours, half a day off and a whole day off. We applied a simple rule that the maximum you could redeem was one of the hourly rewards per day, or one of the daily rewards per week, to ensure that there would be enough staff available to cover the incoming enquiries on any particular day.
Because the client didn’t want to risk giving away too much time off too quickly, we tripled the points cost of each reward, making it that much harder to achieve. We expected it to take at least three months for the first person to have saved enough points to take the whole day off, and we assumed they weren’t also cashing in points for the odd hour off along the way.” It was expected that it would take three months for the first person to cash in the ‘whole day off reward’. How long do you think it took for the first person to redeem it? 10 weeks? Eight weeks? In reality, it took the first person a mere six weeks to redeem this massive reward.
This is a lovely illustration on how effective gamification can be. Being on the cover of the ISMM is also an effective indicator that gamification is slowly gaining in popularity, just like everybody is predicting.