Game on: Sales Training Meets Gamification at Medtronic
Compete with other users by sharing your activity stats on your fitness app. Track your pizza delivery with a colorful progress bar right on your phone. Even Uber serves up a live map tracking your driver’s path to meet up. Gamification is everywhere in today’s digital world, but it’s not just for personal use. Now it’s slated to score big in business applications.
It’s official — The corporate world has been ramping up its gamification IQ, especially in sales training and enablement. Our customer, Medtronic, is the largest medical device manufacturer in the world. Their salespeople need to be experts about Medtronic products to reinforce their credibility in the market. Obviously, sales training is a high priority.
How often do training materials get left unopened or glossed over? You know it happens more often than anyone wants to admit. Sales trainers are looking for innovative, engaging ways to connect reps with the materials that will ultimately make them even more successful. Enter the game zone. Medtronic partnered with People Productions for a custom-built solution that played to sales reps’ competitive drive and rewarded them with perks in the process. Their goal – level up their sales teams’ engagement with training lessons and activities on a global scale.
The Medtronic training team was accustomed to leveraging a variety of modern platforms to help reps tune up their product knowledge and sales skills, but were looking for new ways to:
- Bring together disparate educational activities
- Build excitement throughout the training program
- Intersperse specialized subject matter in lessons and tests with fun exercises and games to reinforce the learning.
Simplifying the Learning Experience
How could the training team make it easier for competitive sales reps to see the learnings laid out in front of them, despite the variety of platforms involved in the back-end?
Inspired by that competitive spirit, we created a unique, new sales training process. This is where gamification comes in, and the foundation of our leaderboard and board game approach.
Sales Training Leaderboard
A multi-faceted approach leveraged gamification, competition, and rewards. Using the dashboard would be familiar to reps because it would draw elements from mobile games and even traditional board games. Elevating the game-like approach included elements like animated achievement badges, bonus points, and scoreboards to dial up the competitive fun.
Learning Path in Game Format
Users logged into the program and personalized their avatar with a photo. Then they entered a Learning Path – a progress-based view of the lessons and activities that they needed to accomplish. Our team had multiple review rounds with various progress bars, pathways, and scoreboards. The team landed on a gameboard-inspired design, using Medtronic brand elements. This was a familiar and fun way to show participants how they were progressing through the training program.
Remember, this game pulled online training from different platforms and formats so this made it easy for reps to get a big-picture view of all their training steps. It couldn’t be any easier for reps to track their progress against other reps around the globe.
Lessons and trainings had to be completed on time to receive points.
Games
On-demand games with fun themes like JEOPARDY!,TM Quest Trivia, and Practice Your Skills took training and quizzing to even higher levels. To keep participants from hunting for new logins or other systems, the game board linked directly to their lessons and challenges.
Several games were hosted on popular platforms, like Kahoot and Bravazone, and made available on-demand so that participants around the world could compete with each other without the inconvenience of different time zones.
Practice Your Skills provided an opportunity for participants to engage in a mock customer conversation which was recorded and scored in the Allego platform.
Activities from various platforms fed into the scoring system.
Status Icons
Live games and lessons captured reps attention with a pulsing orange icon that linked directly to each activity. Once each activity was completed, a blue checkmark confirmed the sales rep received credit. If a deadline to complete an activity passed, a lock symbol appeared instead. This kept reps active and encouraged them to check the board frequently.
Bonus Badges
Badges were awarded liberally to boost the sense of achievement and surprise. Badges included 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th place for competitions, certification badges for completing sets of activities, and participation badges for lessons and games.
Point Tallies
The competition was driven by an easy-to-understand points system. Individuals with the most points won. Country and region winners were based on the highest average points per user. Points were weighted based on the difficulty of the achievement. Lessons, worth 500 points, were more intensive than games, which were only worth 100 points. Additional points were awarded as bonuses; +300 points for first place in a competitive game, for example.
The game board provided a clear set of objectives to work through within a specific timeframe. Sales reps pushed to achieve their own personal learning goals because the path was clear and the rewards were achievable. Gamification really does work.
Global Sales Training Leaderboard
How can you engage sales reps across the globe who need the same baseline product knowledge and sales competencies? A little healthy competition and teamwork can go a long way. Sales reps from 10 countries across four global regions participated in the 12-week program, in an effort to not only increase sales training compliance in a specific territory or team, but also across the entire global sales organization. The Medtronic reps learned their materials in a fun and engaging manner.
Stack-Ranking Reps, Countries and Regions
The Leaderboard aspect of the program gave reps a chance to see how they ranked against their global colleagues throughout the 12-week program. Friendly competition and teamwork were amped up even more with country and region rankings.
Rewards
Sales careers often appeal to those who are motivated by financial rewards, but typically completing sales training does not have a direct financial impact for reps. To keep sales reps engaged throughout the program, prizes were awarded for passing points thresholds. At the end of the 12 weeks, top-scoring regions, countries, and individual salespeople were rewarded with prizes including gift cards and company swag.
Planning for an Uncomplicated Experience
Right from the start, we knew the reps would love having all of the training in one place on this dashboard. Reps would learn faster and be more effective when we brought many disparate educational systems together.
In order to simplify the process of participating in sales training and activities, we needed to leverage multiple platforms with a variety of capabilities and integrations. It was important to work within Medtronic’s rules for data privacy and security, and leverage existing platforms and lessons that were already meticulously developed by the Sales Training team and other internal Medtronic resources. A discovery phase helped the team navigate requirements and understand the possibilities from the start.
Hosting, database requirements, and manual and automatic integrations, and authentication were discussed with the Medtronic team, including an IT Liaison assigned to the project, Sales Trainers leading the project internally, and others. We interviewed multiple stakeholders and platform specialists, documented technical requirements, and weighed options for executing the experience.
Strategy and Design
While we uncovered technical questions and looked for answers in the Discovery process, we held strategic discussions with Medtronic and began to formulate the necessary elements for the experience. Using a data schematic and wireframes, we formulated a strategic direction, and then developed design comps with a range of creative ideas pulling inspiration from retro video games, outer space, and the client’s brand, ultimately bringing the vision to life.
Results and Enthusiasm From Participants
An open feedback loop was built into the game board, and reinforced with email communications to participants. The People Productions team and Medtronic project leads were available to answer questions or troubleshoot any issues during the 12-week program. For example, a few changes to the user interface were made on the fly, based on user feedback.
Hani Al Ariss, the project lead with the Sales Training group had this to say: “What we have achieved is very impressive. There is a lot of excitement about this program.” A survey was sent to participants during the last week of the program. Responses were positive, many shared positive experiences with quotes like “Loved it!” to “Enjoyed this.” The Medtronic team is considering ways to scale the program so that more reps have the opportunity to participate.
Participation, by the Numbers
Weekly reporting and analytics allowed the team to keep track of progress and identify any participants who needed an extra nudge to stay engaged.
Upon completion of this initial roll-out, the Medtronic team is exploring how to expand this sales training tool to include more sales reps in more locations, and continue to increase sales training engagement throughout the organization.
Successful Sales Training and Enablement With Gamification
Salespeople are more effective when they are knowledgeable consultants who assist their customers with complex buying decisions. Developing reps into valuable resources for their customers takes time and effort to practice of strategies that deftly navigate customer objections. It’s a lot for reps to keep up with.
When sales reps are motivated to learn in a variety of ways — with games, quizzes, and practice exercises — the learning becomes an engaging, interactive layer of their work life that sparks their competitive side and provides the dopamine hit of getting rewards for their hard work. When you’re looking for a way to drive engagement and encourage camaraderie, all while accomplishing the core goal of training your sales teams for success, gamification is a win-win.
Ready to Gamify Your Sales Training?
Curious if a gamified experience can win over your sales organization? Let’s discuss your goals and explore ways to drive engagement with gamification.
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