Sales Intelligence is the Gamification of Business – And it’s Coming to Your Office

Sales intelligence is about quantifying your sales team’s performance to identify what works, what doesn’t, and how best to improve. The result is a team of high performers with continuous improvement based on measureable data, instead of a team with a handful of stars and managers relying solely on their gut for training. According to the Wall Street Journal, this makes sales intelligence the extension of Silicon Valley’s ‘gamification’ trend into the office.

Gamification refers to a principle for designing software and apps that keep users engaged by rewarding them for achievements and, often, tracking their score against their friends and colleagues. The popular app Foursquare was among the first to adopt the principle by awarding its users badges, and eventually coupons, for using the app and checking in to locations with their friends.

It’s easy to see how this translates to the office: managers hope that by meticulously tracking their employees’ activity, they can reward top performers and encourage greater productivity. The Journal predicts eventually everyone will have their work activity and results quantified as more and more of workers’ jobs are conducted through web-based software that makes it easier than ever to track.

The first department to see that trend, of course, is sales.

While the evidence is mixed that gamification of apps and software is a surefire way to make money in Silicon Valley – just ask Zynga – there is hard evidence that quantifying sales behavior improves sales productivity and effectiveness.

“Sales guys tend to be competitive by nature,” Steve Sims, vice president of solutions and design at gamification-software company Badgeville told the Journal, explaining that salespeople already compete for incentives and are open to having their work tracked with metrics and treating their work as a game.

Modern sales teams are replacing “the old sales-rank whiteboard in the break room” and stacks of Excel spreadsheets filled in by hand during weekly conference calls with modern sales intelligence tools that collect real-time sales activity data automatically. These tools allow sales agents and managers to focus on tracking and implementing best practices to improve productivity and grow revenue instead of managing and manipulating all of that data manually. Tools like Gryphon’s Core Phone make it easy for managers to turn their agent’s daily work into a game, motivating them to work harder, beat their competition, and generate more revenue.

So while sales intelligence won’t necessarily make your quarterly pipeline meetings fun, it will let you close more deals and grow your bottom line faster and more efficiently, freeing you from the slog of spreadsheets and creating more time for what you do find fun.

Interested in how Sales Intelligence can help your sales team today? Contact us today.