Sales Force Gamification = (Automation + Motivation + Socialization)^2

Survey 100 Salespeople and ask them if they enjoy learning and using a new Sales Force Automation (SFA) suite, and you’re guaranteed to get a sizeable number of expletive-laden responses.

Ask 100 kids if they enjoy learning and playing a new game and the enthusiastic responses will be overwhelming.

Now put them all in a room and train them on the respective systems. While the kids will be playing proficiently in a matter of minutes and mastering the game in a few hours, the sales force will spend endless man-hours and tens of thousands of dollars, to achieve a modest level of competence. Not mastery — just base level competence.

The argument “well the game is easy,” doesn’t fly as most digital games today have as much inherent complexity and problem solving as a high level SFA suite.

Still, most managers will say; “silly rabbit, those tricks are for kids.” But consider that Gartner just dropped this bomb: “By 2015, More Than 50 Percent of Organizations That Manage Innovation Processes Will Gamify Those Processes.” So prepare yourself for the coming gamification of Sales Force Automation.

Bad Motivation Kills Good Automation
Like the Industrial Revolution, early attempts at gamifying the enterprise have been slow, clunky, simplistic and sometimes downright counterproductive.

However, there are a few promising exemplars of Enterprise Gamification such as Rypple (enterprise social software) and Idea Street (a U.K. civic collaboration platform) that support the studies of human motivation by academics such as Daniel Pink and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Consumer loyalty programs have embodied game mechanics for decades. I’ll bet you know someone who’s taken a flight late in December just to keep his or her elite flyer status. That person is clearly a committed gamer.

Daniel Pink’s book Drive serves as a beacon to marketers, managers and trainers with the message, “beware extrinsic rewards for intrinsically rewarding activities!” Pink encourages managers to highlight a worker’s intrinsic motivations and reserve the extrinsic motivations (cash, points or prizes) for tedious or unappealing tasks.

I think most salespeople would consider learning and using a new SFA system “tedious and/or unappealing” regardless of the purported efficiency or profitability rewards.

Most enterprises, and most SFA systems, are built around carrot-and-stick, reward-and-punishment incentives. Mr. Pink turns this Motivation2.0 approach on its head with research showing that the fastest learners, and often the best performers are those who voluntarily take on challenging tasks with only intrinsic motivation or social status at stake. In fact, introducing extrinsic rewards in a clumsy, heavy-handed way can backfire, creating entitlement among users.

Learning a game, on the other hand, incorporates intrinsic human motivators and delivers extrinsic and social rewards in appropriate combination. Golf is the ultimate exemplar of humans voluntarily taking on challenging tasks with only intrinsic and social motivation.

The strength of gamification lies in the use of interactive on-boarding techniques to teach the rules and explain the objectives. Most good games need little or no upfront ‘training’ – you just start playing, discovering as you go, failing early and often through well-designed failure loops that facilitate learning.

Games employ Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “Flow” – making the tasks hard enough to feel challenging but easy enough to avoid frustrating the player. Good game designers plan out a player’s journey so newbies get easy tasks and earn lots of ‘sugar’ in their first few minutes of play while regulars maintain interest as the game gets more difficult and more features are unlocked. The few who master the game become mavens and are enrolled to create and curate content and may even be enlisted to coach newbies. These content-creating mavens are the key to any affinity group’s vitality and growth.

Most SFA implementations only address the goal of automating the sales force. Some of the more integrated and well-managed organizations are using their SFA to measure and motivate sales efforts and results. Only the enlightened few are using SFA to identify their sales mavens and only a fraction of those have any tools or strategies to empower these sales evangelists. They are missing the key element of socialization within the sales force.

The Sales Fire Triangle – Automation, Motivation, Socialization
Sure, sales managers are always trying to encourage mentorship and collaboration among their team. This typically takes the form of a ‘team building’ event at the local TGI Fridays. It’s not effective because its not built into the sales process.

Sales Force Automation systems are migrating towards Sales Force Motivation systems already. Some of them will evolve further to become Sales Force Gamification systems, weaving game dynamics and social interactions directly into the process flow.

In addition to creating a compelling on-boarding experience for newbies and continuing to teach and challenge more advanced users, gamification can provide the propellant to get the most valuable employees, the sales mavens, engaged in more meaningful, long term, and profitable ways than simply small talk at happy hour.

By applying game dynamics to SFA initiatives, managers can highlight the intrinsic rewards of helping others on the team through social indicators while providing the right extrinsic rewards for more mundane tasks. The rank and recognition game mechanic has driven the success of eBay, iTunes and Stack Overflow.

Gamification does not mean ‘to make a game.’ The art of gamification leverages the science of human motivation to highlight intrinsic motivators and supplement measurable action with extrinsic rewards and recognition in order to optimize experience and productivity.

Now that you’re looking for it, you’ll see examples of gamification in your everyday experiences, from shopping on Amazon to picking out your NetFlix rentals to checking-in on Foursquare. Commercial applications are demonstrating the power of these powerful automation, motivation and socialization techniques. As Gartner predicts, the gamification of enterprise, including the inevitable evolution of Sales Force Automation to Sales Force Gamification, has already started and is picking up speed.