Working from home or doing remote work is the future. Almost 66% of companies have already allowed their staff to work remotely, and 16% of organizations have fully gone remote, and it’s no surprise.
Employees these days need flexibility. Also, working remotely is an amazing way to maximize profits and minimize overhead costs. However, shifting to remote work is not that easy if you need to manage a sales team.
In this blog post, we have covered the five best gamification practices for online sales training. Let’s dive in to find out!
Best Gamification Practices for Sales Training
1. Form groups and competitions
While sales may seem like a battlefield where every man works for himself, trainees can reap benefits from teamwork. The foremost benefit is the delegation of responsibility.
When a trainee feels he can rely on his teammates to learn, he will gain knowledge with greater ease. For virtual sales teams, you can help them by setting up a Slack channel or any of your in-house tools where trainees and sales staff can communicate.
Moreover, creating an environment of friendly competition will assist trainees in transforming into highly productive sales representatives. Then, turn a training session into a game by making teams and forcing them to compete against each other. Track their activities and behavior and reward them with points.
2. Problem-Solving Scenarios
There is nothing like practical work to train your intern staff and set standards. Gamification can be immensely helpful here. WooCommerce gamification can
- Increase engagement.
- Encourage the application of theoretical knowledge and critical thinking.
- Improve knowledge retention.
You can modify them to fit the lessons and modules you need your sales trainees to complete. These games can help your trainees remember what they’ve learned by making problems and situations that might happen in their daily work lives into games and rewarding them accordingly while making sure they stay motivated.
Help your sales trainees see how their training is going, and you will see their completion rates go up.
3. Establish Correct Metrics
One of the major obstacles remote sales teams face is communication issues.
When your reps can’t communicate and can’t get to know each other as people (as they would in an office), they might not trust each other. The odds of conflict can skyrocket, and the atmosphere might become cutthroat.
Fortunately, now you can bring gamification to communication. The sooner you start doing this, the better results you will get. The optimal time to begin gamifying communication is in sales training.
4. Product Knowledge and Reward Culture
Another crucial part of sales training is culture and product knowledge. If you work with virtual sales teams, you still need to make sure they follow your company’s rules.
Further, sales representatives need to possess the deep product or service knowledge they are selling. However, absorbing every piece of knowledge can take a while. When you add gamification into the equation, things get better and smoother.
How to Share Product Knowledge in Online Sales Training
It’s about how you make or frame it.
If you frame absorbing culture or product knowledge as a game, your trainees will get an exciting time learning it. For instance, you can make a map-like game where trainees complete searches as they complete modules. Or you can make different levels and give trainees badges when they finish lessons or other culture-related actions.
5. Roleplay Customer Personas
Another exciting way to train your sales staff on the various customer personas they will be speaking to is through roleplaying.
All you need to do is to divide your trainees into different teams and ask every member to represent a different client persona. The other team must guess who they are via Skype and successfully sell to them.
The major benefit of this gamification method is that your trainees or new staff can empathize with your clients. Also, they will significantly enhance their improvisation skills.
While the exercise is a game in itself, you can track scores and add points to encourage some friendly competition.
Bonus: Making Virtual Identities and Finishing Missions
Everybody loves games, not just for fun but because they can, for a while, remain in someone else’s shoes. It is interesting to see how people adapt to new challenges and situations when they are given a new avatar to work with.
In several ways, gaming is like getting used to a new task. You need to assume a new identity, filled with new duties and knowledge.
Mission: Accomplished
Final Words
Training has a major role in any department, especially in sales. During remote work, the significance goes up. However, if you apply gamification, you can add productivity and efficiency to your training modules. Also, the methods mentioned above can help you a lot in this regard.
