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Salesforce Gamification: The Essential Elements for User Adoption

By Priyanka Malik

Most companies face people-centric challenges when it comes to Salesforce implementations – the high cost of training, frequent employee turnover, and various skills gaps that contribute to a lower ROI on their Salesforce investments.

To overcome these barriers, organizations should explore gamification techniques to drive implementation success while increasing employee engagement. Research suggests that gamification significantly impacts employee performance, with 83% of employees who receive gamified training, experiencing higher motivation and a 30% increase in their knowledge retention.

This blog will explore how Salesforce gamification improves employee performance and drives Salesforce adoption in 2022.

What is Salesforce Gamification?

Salesforce gamification is applying gameplay techniques to modify employee behavior and drive business outcomes. It enhances the learning experience by making content consumption fun and engaging.

For example, Trailhead gamifies Salesforce by allowing Trailblazers to earn points and badges to work their way up through the Trailhead ranks and compete with fellow Trailblazers – all while they are gaining new skills and becoming SFDC experts in the process.

Six Essential Elements of Salesforce Gamification

Salesforce gamification leverages multiple types of elements to engage end users. Here are a few of the most common elements of gameplay utilized in various gamification processes and tools:

1. Rewards

You must incentivize your sales team to complete Salesforce training by offering rewards. This can be as simple as gift cards or Salesforce certification vouchers that can easily be redeemed online.

For example, with Whatfix, companies can create customized pop-ups during application onboarding to spread awareness about various new features and training programs that need to be completed.

One Whatfix customer created a fun campaign around Easter. It included a pop-up that was a clue leading to a scavenger hunt inside Salesforce. Smart tips were replaced by “golden eggs”. Based on their collection of eggs, end users were rewarded.

2. Badges

Badges are a clear way to acknowledge efforts made by employees while tracking their progress. According to Salesforce, Trailhead badge completions have increased by 180%, accounting for 325,000 badges earned in a single month.

3. Leaderboards

Leaderboards present a competitive placement of the sales team based on either points or levels. A leaderboard allows users to evaluate their position and creates a sense of competition and challenge.

4. Intuitive Learning

Salesforce has a steep learning curve, and a workforce’s skills gap can be bridged only via continuous learning and improvement. Sales leaders must explore how to support learning in the flow of work in order to drive higher retention rates for their sales reps.

5. Communication Functionality

Communication capabilities (such as chat and messaging channels) allow employees to connect, conduct meaningful discussions, and tackle Salesforce challenges.

6. Integration Capabilities

Finally, any gamification tools that are incorporated must have powerful integration capabilities within an organization’s eLearning toolset (and with Salesforce). These tools must also be managed seamlessly to enhance the end user experience through simple gamification.

Salesforce Gamification Improves User Adoption

Gamification is used across many organizations to increase user adoption, engagement, and retention – across internal software implementations and new customer-facing applications.

For example, Autodesk raised its free trial usage by 40% and free-to-paid conversion rate by 15% with gamification, while Extraco Bank raised its customer acquisitions by over 700%.

To summarize, here’s how Salesforce gamification impacts sales productivity:

1. Employee Engagement

Gamification empowers Salesforce users to compete and collaborate simultaneously. Sales leaders are able to create contests for healthy competition, which enables sales reps to assess their performance against other team members.

2. Learning in the Flow of Work

The combination of conventional classroom training and lengthy process guides often leads to overwhelmed sales employees reverting to previous, unproductive behavior. However, leveraging the concept of learning in the flow of work with microlearning goes a long way to reducing content discovery time and helping your sales team retain key information.

DAPs improve Salesforce adoption by allowing trainers to add an in-app layer of custom walkthroughs, buttons, animations, and other tools right on top of the Salesforce user interface. By adding context and instructions directly into the platform, employees are able to learn at their own pace while using the platform.

3. Real-Time Feedback

Feedback is an important stepping stone to success. If employees receive real-time feedback instead of receiving feedback in quarterly reviews, they are set up for success and often outperform their goals.

4. Increased Content Consumption

Gamified platforms enhance user experience and modify behavior to drive adoption. They create an environment of constant learning to allow reskilling and upskilling of employees. This leads to increased levels of training completion.

5. Strong Sales Strategy

Gamification often incentivizes sales campaigns, resulting in a goal-driven strategy. Managers are able to easily tailor gamification activities according to sales deliverables (and vice versa).

Digital Adoption Platforms Can Change the Game for Sales Teams

In the spirit of gamification, digital adoption platforms (such as Whatfix) equip your Salesforce-powered teams with contextual in-app guidance and multi-format self-help content to reduce content discovery time, influence high win rates, and improve service quality. Whatfix provides your Salesforce users with intuitive features such as interactive walkthroughs, task lists, and smart tips to help them learn in the flow of work.

Discover how Experian used Whatfix to drive Salesforce adoption across geographies, while increasing employee productivity by 72% within the first year of digital adoption.

READ MORE: Salesforce Adoption

Final Thoughts

Salesforce gamification modifies employee behavior by using gameplay elements such as scorecards, frequent feedback, and continuous learning to reinforce KPIs, engage people across all levels, and establish accountability. Using gamification tools can help you drive Salesforce adoption by improving employee productivity, automating repetitive tasks, and reducing time-to-value for a higher ROI on your Salesforce investments.

Schedule a demo with our product experts to learn how a Whatfix DAP can help your organization get the best out of Salesforce CRM.

The Author

Priyanka Malik

Priyanka is a Marketing Professional with over four years of experience in different facets of Marketing.

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