People love games. Up to 40 percent of the world’s population (3.1 billion people) play games every day, whether they’re word games, casual puzzles, strategy games, role-playing games, or anything else. The games provide a discharge of energy. People play for a sense of accomplishment, because they enjoy exploring and solving problems, for the social aspect, or for a combination of reasons. And no matter how well (or badly) we finished the previous session, we come back.
With so many gamers across all demographics, it’s ironic that when L&D comes up with gamified training, it’s often associated with a younger cohort. Among employees over the age of 45, 97 percent agree that gamification would improve their work. The research also reveals that for 90 percent of these respondents, gamification helps them be more productive.
Gamification—Ideal for Sales
Gamified training provides a safe space for practice, fosters collaboration, and encourages problem solving while harnessing the innate competitiveness of salespeople. With more than 13 million salespeople in the US spending 33 percent of their time searching for product information and customer inquiries, it’s time to close the gap to build high-performing sales teams through training sales capable.
To keep up with a dynamic marketplace and ever-changing customer needs, the training requirements for a sales team are constantly evolving. To be successful, organizations must deliver sales training that is highly focused and perfectly aligned with their business objectives.
Gamification brings the X factor. It goes beyond technology by combining an effective learning strategy with an instructional medium that accelerates learning and engages employees like no other. By including modern technologies like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), gamified training creates a fun learning experience, maximizes knowledge retention, and adapts to meet the ever-changing demands and nuances of a landscape. evolving sales.
Training managers or sales leaders struggling with low learner engagement can significantly improve their learners’ knowledge in less than 12 minutes based on data from a recent study of 2,500 games played on Training Arcade, Game Agency’s DIY game creation tool:
- The average length of the game was 3 minutes and 52 seconds.
- The majority of students (57 percent) played each game three or more times.
- The players saw a 58 percent improvement in knowledge between the first and third attempts.
Success stories of gamification in commercial training
The impact of gamification as a sales training strategy has reverberated across all industries. From life sciences to retail and from finance to technology, companies have strategically implemented gamified sales training to reinforce product knowledge and assess performance.
- IT Cosmetics offers a fully immersive learning journey to sales associates around the world through a gamified learning management system (LMS), a suite of training games, and a virtual reality simulation. Through formal and informal learning and the power of play, this cosmetics giant offers a collaborative and competitive learning experience that ensures its students stay on top of ongoing company announcements and product launches.
- One Door, the leading cloud-based visual merchandising software provider, implemented gamified merchandising training to help merchants efficiently run in-store promotional displays by creating a game to test memory, speed and the accuracy of product placement on retail shelf displays.
- Lundbeck, an international pharmaceutical company, needed an engaging solution to improve their sales force proficiency in key product information and customer empathy prior to their national sales meeting. Leveraging Training Arcade, they created a gamified app that challenged sales reps around the world to complete interactive courses and play booster games. As they moved up the leaderboard, the top artists collected prizes at the national sales meeting.
L&D options have the potential to make your sales team an indispensable part of your customers’ buying process. If creating and delivering better learning experiences is a core L&D goal for your organization, gamification can be your ace in the hole. It’s time to start your game.
