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You probably already know that gamification apps can make a huge difference when it comes to your personal life. Maybe you use apps like Habitica or ToDoIst to increase your productivity, or fitness apps like Qapital and Long Game to gamify your finances.
You might not realize that gamification can also have a huge difference when it comes to motivating your employees, especially when you’re working with a CRM like Salesforce. In this article, we’ll look at some of the best apps out there for gamifying Salesforce. We’ll also weigh the pros and cons of each of those tools.
What is Gamification?
Gamification is one of the hottest trends in workplace technology. When used correctly, gamification can boost employee engagement and overall productivity, all by tapping into your staff’s natural competitive energy. It’s a win-win situation; gamification leads to a happier workforce, and also to a more successful company.
In fact, experts say that gamification increases employee engagement by as much as 33 percent, while leading to an increase in social media sharing, online commenting, and content discovery.
Gamification and Salesforce
If you’re in sales, you probably use a CRM to manage not only your sales records, but a wealth of valuable information about your clients and their history with you. Having all of that information at your fingertips can make all the difference in the world when it comes to boosting sales.
Salesforce is far and away the most effective CRM, especially for small and mid-sized companies.
However, many companies report that there’s a big lag when it comes to user adoption of Salesforce. In many companies, employees are slow to log info into Salesforce; they’re taking a long time to adjust to the new platform.
This comes down to human nature. It’s normal to resist change, and that means resisting new software too, even when that software is actually beneficial to us. That’s where gamification comes in. Apps that turn using Salesforce into fun can dramatically increase adoption of the platform. They also boost overall sales, return on investment, and other indicators of success.
Is Gamification Right for You?
Gamification apps can be hugely beneficial for most companies. However, they can come at a cost, and some companies – especially smaller, newer companies – might be reluctant to sign up for them.
If you’re hesitating about whether to try a gamification app, it’s a good idea to consider the following questions.
Do you have a great employee roster, but sometimes have trouble convincing your staff to log information into Salesforce?
Do some members of your team struggle to work effectively without constant input from you or from their direct manager?
Do some members of your team struggle to maintain their focus throughout the work week?
Do some members of your team have trouble effectively communicating with you, and with each other?
Do you ever worry that your employee morale is sinking too low?
If you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, then you would probably benefit from trying out one of the tried-and-true gamification apps designed to work with Salesforce. Here are a few of the most popular of those apps:
Level Eleven
Level Eleven is a cloud-based gamification app which was designed specifically for Salesforce. Like many of the other gamification apps, it targets people’s competitive natures by creating contests, leaderboards, and other indicators of excellence.
Level Eleven creates personalized scorecards for sellers; it also uses a proprietary pacing algorithm, a goal management system, and a warning system. Level Eleven even creates “activity snapshots” for employees, so that managers will have instant access to their work. The idea is to keep every employee actively engaged in the daily behaviors that have been proven to make a difference in terms of long-term sales.
Level Eleven also provides managers with an onboarding template, making for a smooth entry for new staff. The app also includes data-driven sales coaching and comes with configurable coaching templates, making it a breeze to train new staff or to help faltering employees on the road to improvement.
Level Eleven starts about $30 per user per month. It’s on the steeper side of Salesforce gamification apps, although users seem to believe that the high price is worth it. The app offers a discount to non-profits interested in signing on.
Hoopla
Like Level Eleven, Hoopla is an app designed to work seamlessly with Salesforce. Hoopla allows users to create leaderboards using virtually any metric that suits their needs. You can use it to rank employees by call time, conversions, or any other metric that works for you.
Hoopla takes the data from Salesforce and instantly broadcasts it onto leaderboards, which can be displayed anywhere.
You can also use the app to create tournaments or “face off” contests to boost motivation among your staff. Employee wins are celebrated with what Hoopla calls “newsflashes.” The “newsflashes” look like a traditional “breaking news” alert. They get broadcast on all the TVs in your workplace and are they are definitely going to get everyone’s attention. Before long, every employee in the office is going to want to win a contest, just so that they can be the subject of a newscast too.
Hoopla also makes it easy to directly engage with remote workers. Its mobile app is very intuitive and easy to use. You can easily challenge a remote worker to a “face off” contest, for example. The result? Using the mobile app makes it feel like the remote workers are right there with you, where you can keep an eye on their progress.
Centrical
Centrical used to be known as GamEffective, so some people still know it under that name. The app works on a few levels to try and incentivize employees to perform better and to implement Salesforce more fully.
The app gives you, the business owner, a great picture of how employees are performing at any number of different measures of success. In fact, the beauty of Centrical is that it lets you track employee goals right there inside the Salesforce window.
You can award points or badges to your most successful employees, and you can refer struggling workers for additional training sessions. You can also set up compeititons or challenges – there are plenty of different ways to set up competitions so that it never gets boring.
Centrical also has a strong focus on identifying areas for improvement. The app uses AI to automatically flag areas where individual employees have room for improvement. It then makes suggestions – both to the employees and to their managers – about means of training or coaching them. Centrical also has its own system of “microlearning” which, it says, works seamlessly with its gamification system.
Final Thoughts
Implementing Salesforce can be overwhelming, even for the most organized workplace. The platform can revolutionize your business, but there really is a steep learning curve involved.
As with any other new platform, the larger your workforce, the more intentional you’ll need to be about getting all hands on deck to implement the new tool.
Gamification apps, like the ones described in this article, can make a huge difference when it comes to implementing Salesforce. They really do inject a lot of fun into the workplace, and they do a lot to build a culture of hard work, camaraderie, and competition among the different members of your staff.
Even remote workers can benefit from using these apps, which tend to make people feel closer to each other, even when they’re physically far away from the office.
It can also be a good idea to talk to a professional Salesforce consultant. A good consultant will be able to talk you through any challenges that you may be facing; they will be able to give you solid advice based on experience and training.