A little healthy competition goes a long way, especially in the office. While collaboration should be your number one workplace culture goal, nothing says friendly office sales contests are off-limits. Turning sales numbers into a game with concrete prizes incentivizes your sales team to do their best, drives up key performance indicators (KPI), and reinvigorates interest in generating sales.
Here, we discuss how gamification of sales can boost your overall sales numbers, as well as how to keep office games friendly and competitive. Then, we cover our favorite sales contest ideas to motivate and inspire your team. So, without further ado, let's get right to it.
Topics at a Glance
- How Gamification Can Improve KPI
- Healthy Competition and Sales
- Sales Contests to Motivate & Boost Productivity
- Cold Call Avalanche
- Lead Crafting Contest
- “No” Winners Here
- Team VS. Team Events
- One VS. One
- Daily Challenge
- Fantasy Football
- Sales Bingo
- Me, Myself, and I Contest
How Gamification Can Improve KPI
While enjoying your job can obviously work wonders, gamification of sales can significantly improve overall KPI and even make it easier to track key performance numbers. You'll have even more data to work with if you motivate your sales team to accurately report their sales and keep detailed notes on interactions, call volume, and more.
Of course, hand-tracking sales numbers is a thing of the past, especially with programs like SalesCompete to help track sales performance numbers and reward sales associates for a job well done. Integrating this Slack bot into your sales channels can reduce time spent reporting numbers, allowing sales leads to focus instead on generating sales. If you're looking for the perfect app to help gamify your sales department, SalesCompete is an excellent option for any office.
By tying job performance to small tangible rewards outside of semi-regular raises and performance reviews, you simultaneously cut down on overall performance stress while raising interest in performance numbers. In addition, with work performance correlated with fun activities and healthy competition, you can reduce overall stress and keep employees motivated throughout the year.
Healthy Competition and Sales
One of the critical cornerstones of gamification of office tasks is keeping all competitions healthy and constructive. Infighting, cheating, and bickering do not help an office environment. Ensuring employees use automated trackers to report numbers is one way to keep things even in the office.
Another thing to remember is to ensure your office culture supports gamification from the start. Building an environment that promotes friendly competition among sales reps is crucial before offering rewards for a job well done. While acknowledgment is a great way to motivate employees, ensure you're not encouraging infighting between your sales team over a gift card or raffle tickets.
Some ways to keep things even and level the playing field include excluding past winners from winning the next raffle or contest. While their numbers still count toward records, leaving some buffer room between competitions allows other team members to win. Resetting game tracking numbers over a set period of time can also keep things even and friendly in the office.
Play around with different team activities as well. By encouraging collaboration with other sales team members, you can boost productivity and sales quota at the same time. Make sure to mix individual performance games with team revenue goals and more to help keep things fresh and exciting and to encourage office cohesion.
Sales Contests to Motivate & Boost Productivity
Sales contests are a great way to motivate employees remotely and in the office and help increase internal revenue. Creative sales contest ideas are a great way to boost that competitive spirit and get employees excited over simple prizes and rewards. Here are some of our favorite sales contest styles to get you started. Remember to switch up activities over time and keep leaderboards fresh to encourage new winners and individual sale numbers.
Cold Call Avalanche
This game is perfect for offices just getting started or looking to clean out that Rolodex of contacts. Well, virtual Rolodex, we don’t think anyone still owns a Rolodex in 2023. Challenge sales reps to make as many cold calls in a day as physically possible. The person with the most cold calls wins.
You can add other metrics, such as the person with the most extended call of the day, the most sales in an hour, etc. The goal is to get your sales team to reach out to new potential sales as quickly as possible and take some of the awkwardness out of cold-calling different businesses for the first time.
Lead Pipeline Crafting Contest
Got a team of creative sales reps? This contest challenges sales teams to craft their own sales pipeline and get as many new leads as possible. Have each team explain their pipeline design and how they identified a new lead, and then have them show off how effective that lead hunt is by reaching out to new leads.
Creativity and innovation are worth encouraging even if you have an established lead pipeline in your company. You may stumble your way onto the new industry standard for lead hunting.
“No” Winners Here
This sales game is perfect for that one sales lead who tries their best but gets told "no" every five seconds. The goal of this game is to call as many leads as possible and get the most "nos" in a set period of time. This event should run alongside another game and ensure that sales reps understand that thrown calls and intentional "nos" are highly discouraged and unprofessional.
Offering rewards for the most calls with a negative answer shows that even the best sales rep can get stuck in a bad streak, but the high outbound call amount shows perseverance even if they keep striking out.
Team vs. Team Events
Internal sales on the left, outbound sales on the right, both teams competing for the title of the best sales team in the office; who will win in the office octagon tonight? Okay, so you don’t need to use a wrestling theme for this one (though you can), but the goal of this sales game is to pit different teams against each other in a friendly competition.
Track sales numbers across the board, see who can attend the most conferences in a year, or have a cold-call battle to see who can call the most clients in a day. No matter which style you go for, having individual teams work together against their coworker builds office cohesion and helps bolster sales numbers simultaneously.
One vs. One
Do you have two sales reps always working to outdo each other? Set up a one VS. one challenge at the end of the year to see who is the best sales rep in the office. Try and keep things civil in this challenge, and see if you can make the reward small, like a trophy for their desk or a crown.
The goal is to put two naturally competitive workers against each other in a friendly competition that will boost revenue and garner new clients. This can even work as a showdown between the two workers with the highest win rates of all sales team games.
Daily Challenge
Hosting a challenge of the day is a great way to get workers into the spirit and keep them engaged daily. These mini-challenges are perfect for fighting off the post-lunch malaise in the office and help encourage sales reps to set their own goals throughout the day.
See who can make the most sales, or offer a gift card for whoever cleans out out-of-date contact information the fastest. The goal of these competitions is less to get things done and more to fight burnout and boredom by keeping your sales team engaged whether they work remotely or in the office.
Fantasy Football
If you have an office full of fantasy football fans, turn sales reps into fantasy teams to boost productivity and engagement. Make sure to track sales stats over a certain weekly time period and compare results at the end of the year. Have some employees or sales managers in charge of keeping everything fair, and use auto reporting software to ensure nobody boosts their numbers to make themselves the MVP of sales football.
Me, Myself, and I Contest
Our final suggestion is to set up a competition against any sales wiz's most significant competition: themselves. This contest pits each office member against their previous records. By encouraging office members to compete to break their records, you encourage them to simultaneously set personal goals in the office and boost overall sales performance.
This is a great game option for offices that want to keep the competition to a minimum but still motivate and inspire their team to reach new sales records. By working with automatic sales number reporting tools, you can run this competition remotely without issue, ensuring that all sales reps know their own personal best and can work to beat their records by the end of a set period.
