Gamification stuff we love: Building sales confidence
For a number of my clients I work on building better results for sales teams. As part of my work as a business coach, I always focussed on catching people doing something right and praising them for it in the moment with specific feedback. With sales managers this is often an overlooked approach in favour of focus on the big number to be reached at the end of the month or quarter. Here is where gamification can be very effective.
Break down the meaningful touchpoint in the sales process and build a process of small success to build the basis for the bigger wins. It is looking at what would constitute good at each level and making that clear to the sales person, so they can become a good judge if their moving along the right track or not. Sales people more than other professions need to deal with rejection, which can sometimes be perceived as a negative other times on step closer to a win, hence building confidence and maintaining it is key to be most effective. Even experienced sales people can get knocked back to the point of needed to go back to basics.
There is confidence in knowing your basics are solid, so breaking down each step of the sales process into smaller chunks with measures of good attached to each meaningful step is the start of sales gamification. My first question when sales coaching is always “how did you feel that call, appointment, meeting went?” and the follow on “what would you change next time?”. For some of my clients we are building apps where people can rate their effectiveness on each of the breakdown steps, for others managers are breaking down the meaningful activities and publicising everything from activity wins to major number gains. Celebrating done deals is an absolute must for each and everyone of them!!!
Tapping into the intrinsic motivations of the sales person and getting them to track their own performance sometimes privately and for other clients publicly can be very useful. Most sales people are able to pinpoint flaws in their approach, when given the chance and equally positive points, enabling them to continuously improve through self-rating and self-rewarding works. Leaderboards have been part and parcel of sales for years and for a lot of my clients we have made these relative to the level of the sales person, meaning that new people are measured against their peers, experienced people against their level. Often the base of the leaderboard is a measure of quality and quantity, activity and results, where company culture and sales approach is the key driver.
On game element I like using with sales people is the daily instalment into the confidence bank, namely what one thing do you do exceptionally well today. They can share it with the team or take note of it in their app or positive reminder, ideally this is one of the last things to do in the working day, so they leave on a high note.
What are you doing to keep sales confidence high through gamification?
