A few weeks ago we read a Venture Beat article about gamification: “Play to Win: 7 Steps to Making Gamification Work in Enterprise.”

Gamification operates by incorporating “game” principles to motivate people to complete certain tasks. Why? Because the human brain would rather do something fun than boring. For example, when used in an enterprise, gamification encourages and motivates employees to participate in desired behaviors, complete certain business tasks, and drive innovation.

Keith Lee has an even juicier take on the subject:

Older Readers might remember the heydays of video game arcades, in which people would compete for rankings on a High Score Leaderboard in Pac-Man, Galaga, Street Fighter, and the like. Whether players realized it at the time or not, a high score leader board was designed—not to display who was best at playing the game—but to encourage players to keep putting quarters in the machine.

By having a visible history of the best players, it encouraged people to continue to play the game in order to try and earn a spot on the leaderboard. It is a classic display of manipulating the ego of the user in order to drive them into further interaction with the system. (From: “Why People Fall Prey to the Allure of Social Media”)

Obviously, there’s some food for debate here. But let’s skip that for now.

The real question of interest here is—how many quarters do you want your sales team putting in your machine?

Well, seeing as Xactly is also quite privy to the intrinsic motivations of sales teams, we know gamificationists are onto something. In fact, we believe in the truth behind Lee’s high score analogy: both of our home offices display leaderboards replete with the scores and rankings amongst reps. We’ve seen the positive impact that applying meaningful metrics has on our sales team. And that means we’ve tapped into reps’ competitive nature in order to boost employee motivation, retention, drive, and focus.

You can also use gamification techniques to motivation less revenue-focused activity, like CRM adoption. Check out our 9 Step Guide to Activate Revenue Multipliers for more info.

When you play, play to win.

Want more winning strategies? Register now for our webinar, “Motivate Your Sales Team with Gamification,” Thursday, Jan. 24,  10:00–11:00 a.m. Pacific time.

—Erik Charles is Xactly’s Principal Incentives Strategist.