Gamifying SFDC

Usually, team members complain that SFDC has ‘hygiene’ problems.  Meaning that the field sales force does not always fully complete the fields in a given opportunity.  Frankly, this seems to be systemic across every business I have spoken to recently.  Amongst my former team we used to say, “You can trust the trend but not the number”; and that pretty much sums up the situation.

I think that most salespeople think of SFDC as a necessary evil.  Sales management and HQ want visibility into the pipeline and that’s what SFDC really does.  It doesn’t do much for the individual salesperson pursuing a deal.  And that’s where I managed to put a little trick into the system that seems to yield a huge benefit.

As a competitive intelligence person, I want the field to have the latest and greatest information about dealing with all the FUD, landmines, and other dross put up by the competition while trying to talk to the customer and making a deal.  In an (un)official study at my former employer, we showed that a well-informed salesperson can have a significantly higher probability of closure, with a larger average deal size, closed faster than average.  This all leads to a lot more revenue.  @Jon Reed wrote about this a couple of years ago.  And as shown in some academic papers ​(Schillewaert et al., 2005)​, salespeople initially use technology in the hope that it will help them do their job better/faster and keep using it because it’s easy. That’s where ‘Game-ifying SFDC’ comes in. If salespeople have to use SFDC, then put the competitive information right into their deal, so it is timely, relevant, and specific to the deal.

The technique is simple: HTML email templates for each competitor and use case you want the sales team to attack. When they update their opportunities in SFDC with the right data, they get a response from SFDC telling them what strategies they need to follow. And I, as the CI person, get a note that they have a deal where I might be able to help, so I can pick up the phone and call them. The hard part is tweaking the templates and the triggers so that they fire appropriately. You don’t want to overwhelm people with too many emails, particularly if they have seen them before, but not too few that they forget what to do or who to call if they want help.

The funny thing about this technique is that once the field figures out that HQ is 1) trying to provide information and 2) will proactively call and see if help is needed, they start updating their opportunities with more, better information. Go figure. If someone thinks a system is valuable, they will work to make it work for them.