Is your traditional incentive program failing to motivate and engage your sales reps? 

There is a crucial element that provides your sales-hungry reps the nourishment to feed their success.

Adding game design elements into your channel incentive program will improve engagement, learning and empower your reps. You will see an immediate impact and provide sustained results for your organization. Channel gamification, it’s the secret ingredient for your channel program you’ve been looking for.

Improves Engagement

Games often provide a space for people to have conversations, explore the program, and work towards goals. In a case study by an electric utility company, they found that since adding game elements such as leaderboard and badges into their energy efficiency program, individuals, on average, were voluntarily reducing their consumption by 2-7%. There was greater engagement on the forums; for example, users would swap tips on reducing energy usage to improve rankings.

Sustained commitment is hard to achieve without a properly designed system in place. Adding channel gamification will increase interest in your program and achieve voluntary engagement. You don’t want your channel reps to drag their feet in participation.

Motivation by Progression

In a survey by TalentLMS, they found the most preferred game feature was the ability to progress to different levels in their employee training software. Using a progression style of gameplay eliminates or reduces the time to onboard and the feeling of anxiousness, as found in a study by Stott and Neustaedter. This allows the participants to restart when they feel stopped or stumped. It allows them the freedom to fail and try innovative ways to progress alongside providing frequent and rapid feedback for quick improvement in the participant’s behavior.

This means your channel reps will not feel intimidated and less likely to feel confused, defeated, and continue onwards. In a survey by TalentLMS, 83% of employees who received gamified programs felt motivated to complete training, compared to only 28% with non-gamified training.

Rewarding Success

Everyone wants to feel a sense of achievement, and channel reps are no different. When they achieve success, so does your organization.

With channel gamification, there is a slight lag in participants being rewarded incentives and being recognized for their efforts. In a recent case study where a BPO (Business processing outsourcing) company used fun and games in their employee program, employees reported a greater sense of achievement compared to traditional programs. They were rewarded when they learned new skills they could employ in the customer-facing role. Thus, increasing client satisfaction, a problem that the company wanted to fix. 

Learning

Most training systems emphasize a slow pace of learning and tend to be dry, which is a “death sentence” for today’s sales rep and their rapid-fire learning style. These stagnate training programs bore the participant, but they lack a proper reward structure for success.  

Adding gameplay has proven to improve learning and retention across the board. Simply put, it makes the hard stuff in life fun. A study by Ichiro Kawachi shows channel gamification reframes learning as enjoyable and challenging. Participants in a health program expressed gameplay push them to learn healthier behavior on their own. They didn’t feel like they were being badgered by their parents (we know the feeling), as they felt with the previous non-gamified program. Bottom line, it didn’t feel like an obligation, a chore, or a duty.

This means higher retention of knowledge, strengthening your brand, and understanding your products by channel reps. You want the information to stick, rather than be forgotten in the next week.

Conclusion

Adding games, fun and activities provide many benefits to your reps. Consider integrating it into your incentive program today because the best time to start was yesterday. Studies noted the best systems were well designed, planned, and involve collaboration from a third party.

It is time to start playing the game when powering up your channel sales reps. We are here to help!