by Toby Beresford of Veneficus
Why Sales Development? According to Pipedrive’s latest State of Sales report, 51% of salespeople regularly, usually, or always struggle to find enough leads.
In fact, 40% of them list it as the most challenging part of their job, higher than both closing (36%) and qualifying (22%).
Without enough leads, you’re not going to make enough sales: 15-19% say they rarely hit their quota.
That’s where the Sales Development Representative (SDR) team comes in.
Rather than a jack-of-all-trades but master-of-none approach, the modern sales funnel flows from SDRs to Account Executives to Customer Success Reps.
More leads, more sales, more repeat customers, because everyone is a master-of-one.
But even a master can improve. That’s where gamification comes in.
The Right Kind of Sales Development Feedback
Improvement in anything depends on practice, feedback, and review.
Sales Development is no different. Having the tools to reflect on your performance provides new insight and identifies your strengths, weaknesses, and areas to focus on tomorrow, next week, or next month.
But not all feedback is created equal.
You’ve likely seen some Glengarry Glen Ross-type competition meant to motivate and incentivize the team. First prize? A new car. Second prize? A set of steak knives.
Third prize? You’re fired.
But where’s the feedback and opportunity to improve? Even if you won, all you know is that you did better than the person beside you. You’re stuck in a loop of you did well, you did okay, or you did poorly.
Even worse, you may be getting substantial quantitative feedback, but it’s provided in an unmanageable way:
- Information Overload: too many charts, stats, figures, and graphs.
- Raw and Messy: a raw data dump on spreadsheets with multiple pages, tabs, and colleagues all mixed together
- Untimely: a quarterly, semi-annually, or yearly performance review
- Unfair: a live comparison that updates in real-time and puts colleagues in another time zone at a disadvantage
- Silent: not using the available information for any of the above-mentioned reasons
Sound familiar?
Feedback presented this way is almost as bad as no feedback at all. It needs a redesign in order to be useful.
Enter Gamification.. And even better, Infinite Gamification.
Infinite Gamification
Infinite Gamification is a design process for numerical feedback. It motivates SDRs and teams with simplified and digestible weekly updates. And it appeals to our intrinsic love of games, friendly competition, and play.
The Infinite Gamification Canvas seen above is a basic template to organise design thoughts for your new program. Services like rise.global can then host and arrange the data on a user-friendly weekly sales scorecard.
Migrating to an infinite gamification feedback model does take some time, and most programs will go through at least a few iterations to work out the kinks, but it’s definitely worth the investment.
In fact, 72% of employees feel more motivated, 90% are more productive, and 95% enjoy the experience when gamification is used at work. It can even replace the need for incentives like prizes and cash rewards.
Infinite Gamification At a Glance
SDR feedback programs designed from the ground up with infinite gamification principles have three main benefits going for them:
- Feedback arrives as news. The update arrives at the same time and on the same channel — social media, email, or instant messaging platforms — so that employees consistently know where and when to look for it.
- Feedback is simple. Multiple sales metrics are combined into a single consolidated score, allowing employees to instantly understand if it was a good week or a bad week.
- Comparison is helpful. Rather than the counterproductive, winner-take-all competition, a good gamification design provides helpful, equitable comparison with colleagues on metrics that matter to SDRs. It supplies useful benchmarks that serve to encourage and motivate.
If you’d like to learn more about using infinite gamification for Sales Development, pick up a copy of my book, Infinite Gamification: motivate your team until the end of time. In it, you’ll find step-by-step guides, common pitfalls to avoid, and checklists to make it all happen.
More leads means more sales.
Game on.
