Keeping your team motivated is one of the most effective ways to accelerate and increase your sales. Nowadays, many different strategies are used to incentivize a company’s sales force. When it comes to achieving success and reaching the finish line with great results, gamified incentive programs are one of the most innovative and effective strategies in the market.  

By employing a gamified incentive program, you are creating a communication channel where you educate, motivate, and reward your workforce while they achieve high levels of engagement, sales, and recognition.

To create a program that lasts over time, we want to share with you Optime’s best practices for designing, planning, and executing a successful gamified incentive program. Optime’s best are: goal definition pillars, 3 steps framework, end-to-end services.

GOAL DEFINITION PILLARS FOR GAMIFIED INCENTIVE PROGRAMS

After 24 years of experience working with our fortune 500 clients’ channels and sales force, we believe that any framework of incentives and recognition must be divided into two main pillars: sales and behavior.

INCENTIVE PROGRAM’S SALES GOALS

Defining your sales goals at the beginning of your strategy is crucial, always reassuring that your incentive promotion creates excitement, competition, and recognition.

The sales goals you should establish for your campaign should be:

• Sales growth | expected in %, in currency, units, etc.
• Incremental sales | expected in currency, units, etc.
• Influence sales mix | expected in currency, units, etc.
• Win-back sales | expected in currency, units, etc.
• Deal registration | expected in frequency, deal size in currency, units, etc.

INCENTIVE PROGRAM’S BEHAVIORAL GOALS

Motivating your target audience to consistently access, use, and share your content based on enablement layers is key to success. Keeping your audience engaged will ultimately encourage collaboration and user loyalty.

You can do this by implementing strategies such as:

• On-demand training | Frequency, levels, certifications, tests passed 
• Digital event’s attendance | Frequency, participation, interactions
• Live Hands-on participation | Frequency, participation, interactions
• Partner-ready campaigns launched | Frequency, launches, results 
• Blog & content | Downloads, curated content upload, comments, etc.
• Social Media sharing | Posts, likes, shares, comments

THE 3 STEP FRAMEWORK TO UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE

Optime’s 3 step framework is designed to understand your audience’s expectations, motivate them to take action, and reward them for their performance. 

1. AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT

The first and most important step in defining the scope of your strategy

Successful companies must understand their audience’s needs, expectations, and what inspires them to leave their comfort zone, exceed behavioral patterns, and get the recognition and rewards they deserve. 

One of the most effective ways to strengthen your business relationship is with incentive and collaboration tools that organize and simplify how you plan, communicate and measure results.

2. ENABLEMENT OF YOUR GAMIFIED STRATEGY

The second and most valuable step to empower your strategy

Once you understand your audience’s motivations, it’s time to build and deliver a powerful gamified strategy that teaches them how to play and how to win! Use this opportunity to keep your team excited to sell more, learn faster, and add value to the community organically.

Not only are you motivating your audience to be engaged, get rewarded, and be recognized, but you are also giving them the tools to stay excited and constantly playing.

For a successful enablement process, you need to:

• Define “best selling” products
• Share the way to accelerate sales
• Motivate deal registrations
• Simplify education and certification paths
• Reward partner-ready campaign usage
• Motivate your audience by sharing success

Your gamification strategy can be completely customized to the needs of your audience. From challenges, trivia, and quizzes, players can win points, badges, trophies, and more while achieving their desired goals.

3. REWARDS TO RECOGNIZE YOUR AUDIENCE

The third and most exciting step of your strategy

This is the step where game mechanics are used to showcasing how points, badges, and trophies empower healthy competition and open the possibilities to reach even more inspirational and aspirational rewards. 

Regardless of what your goal is, the purpose of rewarding is to celebrate every little win and motivate efforts for extra recognition.

Rewards can be customized towards your business goals, but these can be:

• Cash or gift cards rewards
• Experiential rewards
• Annual recognition events
• Non-profits donations
• Education and certifications

Remember: Recognize & celebrate the success of the people who drive your business growth.

OPTIME’S END-TO-END SERVICES

At Optime, we become the extension of your marketing teams, offering our expertise and best practices to increase project effectiveness and ROI.

By using the principles of human-centric strategies and business intelligence, we design, develop and manage gamifiedl incentive programs to recognize and reward your workforce. From beginning to end, we deliver ready-to-use, budget-friendly solutions.

Creating a gamified incentive program may sound complicated, but when you have the help of consultants like Optime Consulting, it’s a process full of creativity, excitement, and a lot of recognition.

We invite you to explore our latest promotion, the F1 Miami Speed Race. Our ready-to-use gamified strategy encourages your sales reps and partners to live the Formula 1 Experience while playing, selling, and winning 2 three-day tickets for the F1 Miami Grand Prix 2023.