Personally, I’m a huge fan of gamification. At Extu, we have a work hard, play hard atmosphere. We try to incorporate fun in everything we do. We have a gong in my office that our ROI-certified sales reps hit every time we partner with another company for their incentive program. There’s a loud bang. The whole office cheers. We also use Quick Points to award our employees on the spot and Total Recognition so that we can shout each other out.
Engagement is everything if you’re looking to increase sales, improve productivity, or accomplish both by getting your sales reps to participate in an incentive program.
Insurance Thought Leadership published an article by Extu’s Former CEO, Mark Herbert, about this topic. “Gamification: Key to Engaging Sales Force” discusses the importance of incentive program gamification in terms of engagement and generating ROI for your incentive program. Here’s a quick break down:
Sales Reps are Easily Distracted
Incentive programs are a proven way to train sales reps on desired behavior. Offer rewards for productive behaviors, and those behaviors will be repeated more frequently. However, sales reps have a lot on their plate: generating leads, contacting leads, qualification, phone calls, meetings.
Incentive programs are fun. Once sales reps are invested in redeeming points and claiming rewards, things tend to take care of themselves. The problem is getting buy-in on the front end, during the onboarding phase. Afterall, they have other things to do that seem more immediate.
Incentive Program Gamification
Gamification is the use of game-like elements—points, rewards, competitive platforms, and interactive leaderboards—that improve engagement for online platforms. As Mark Herbert points out in the article, incentive programs, by their very nature, already use a lot of gamification elements.
However, using incentive technology to enhance these game-like elements makes your incentive program even more effective. This is important in the early stages of your incentive program. In the article, Mark gives an example, where life insurance agents are given a quiz to test their product knowledge and are assigned points based on their performance.
These points plug into a leaderboard, where they can compare their performance to their coworkers. As you probably know, sales reps can be very competitive and status-oriented. They can also compare the value of those points to rewards on our online catalog. This kind of setup immediately captures their attention and gets them engaged.
Integrating Your Incentive Program
Mark Herbert also touches on the importance of making your incentive program easy to access for your participants. Afterall, out of sight, out of mind. We’ve spent a lot of time creating incentive technology to make your incentive program easy to use and easy to integrate with your existing platforms. Participant portals, as well as website integration, and an optional mobile app keep your incentive program top-of-mind with your sales reps.
In addition, we provide marketing to your participants to generate awareness for your incentive program. From there, incentive program gamification and great rewards keep them engaged, and your incentive program is able to accomplish what it was designed to do: generate ROI.
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