How Salesforce Gamification Tools Can Improve Team Performance

Salesforce fuels the sales and customer relationship management operations of many organizations. It provides a backbone for sales teams as well as marketers, customer service, product development, and other departments.

Yet, salespeople often struggle, no matter what systems are supporting them. For example, a 2020 study found that only 24.3 percent of sales employees exceeded their quota from the previous year. There’s always room for improvement—and salespeople often want that improvement.

Gamification provides a strategy for motivating salespeople, improving skills, and boosting results. When combined with Salesforce, gamification tools drive performance even further.

Yes, Salesforce Can Be Gamified!

As the world’s leading CRM platform, Salesforce is many things to many organizations. It manages customer journeys, tracks sales data, identifies opportunities, automates sales processes, charts future strategy, builds websites and apps—we could go on for paragraphs. You may already be using Salesforce and enjoying the vast capabilities it provides your team.

Because Salesforce is so customer- and data-focused, many companies don’t consider what it can do to make their employees better. Sure, there’s data that can chart their performance and automation that makes their jobs easier, but Salesforce also can directly facilitate employees’ improvement with gamification tools. This empowers companies to gamify the sales process within the platform that their employees already may use and rely heavily on.

Why Gamify?

Over the years, the idea that salespeople go above and beyond simply because their jobs call for such commitment has been discounted. Everyone, whether or not they’re working on commission, can benefit from extra positive motivation, and workers who aren’t technically salespeople but are expected to help sell also need inspiration and encouragement.

Gamification can improve engagement, even with highly engaged teams. It also offers other benefits, including:

• Employee enthusiasm - Gamification turns ordinary, everyday activities into goals to be achieved, metrics to be tracked, and competition to be embraced. Employees bring new enthusiasm to these tasks, which feel less mandatory and more like an opportunity.

• Better customer experience - More employee enthusiasm and engagement inevitably trickle down to better service for customers. That can lead to more sales, which provides more motivation for employees, who stay engaged for customers—thus setting a cycle of success in motion.

• Getting even more out of Salesforce - With Salesforce tracking every customer journey and touchpoint, integrating with gamification tools provides additional insight into your processes and results.

• Overall sales strategy - Gamification can provide added incentives to sales campaigns, promotions, goals, and so on. Results then inform future strategy with managers being able to tailor gamification activities to certain sales activities—and vice versa.

What to Look for in Salesforce Gamification Tools

If you choose to add gamification tools to Salesforce, don’t scrimp on features. The more functionality an application has, the more likely employees will embrace it. Here are some things to look for:

• Contests - Set up games and contests with sales and interaction data being able to automatically flow from Salesforce into the platform.

• Leaderboards - Give your employees a way to track team progress and see how they compare against each other.

• Rewards - Choose tools that allow employees to redeem rewards directly from the app. Gift cards can be offered in increments—employees simply pick what they want when they’re eligible to receive one.

• Recognition capabilities - Shouting out great work is a key component of gamification that inspires confidence and builds morale. The best apps make recognition easy and give managers the ability to attach rewards to it.

• Communication tools - Chat and messaging functionality allows employees to converse with each other, exchange friendly banter/trash talk, and celebrate each other’s successes.

• Robust reporting and data - Salesforce already brings data to the equation; gamification tools should take metrics a step further with reporting that measures every aspect of the process.

• Easy integration - Apps are known for being hit or miss on how easily they integrate with the CRM. Choose a solution that can be seamlessly implemented and then can be managed with no fuss.

Arcade and Salesforce: The Perfect Combination

The Arcade platform brings powerful gamification that turbocharges your Salesforce capabilities. Our platform drives performance across Salesforce objects (leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, and so on). If you’re looking to improve your team’s number of phone calls, emails, or any other activity the CRM tracks, Arcade can help. For example, our integration allows you to instantly launch micro-incentive games or run contests based on any Salesforce metric you’re tracking, from emails to phone calls to follow-ups to sales.

Just as importantly, Arcade is easy to integrate, backed by an expert team ready to help if you need it. We’ll be in the Salesforce AppExchange soon, and we can get you set up before then. If you want to learn more, request a demo to see everything Arcade can bring to your business.

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