Is gamification a good idea?

Gamification is a hot topic in the CRM space but I’m wondering if it’s really a good idea or a waste of money. The underlying premise seems sound. Make the interaction with the technology fun and recognize employees (particularly sales employees) for efforts such as entering information into the CRM system. The assumption is that the more information that’s in the CRM system, the more valuable that CRM system is to the organization. I agree with that, and we’ve published plenty of ROI studies measuring the return when sales and marketing teams are robust users of a CRM solution, but I’m still not so sure about gamification.

One thing we did notice when assessing the productivity of sales reps is that 8% is the optimal amount of time a rep should spend entering data in the system. More than that, or less, and they are not maximizing their efficiency.

Giving sales reps a virtual gold star when they reach arbitrary levels rewards them for data entry and that’s fine if they were data entry employees, but they’re sales reps. Data entry is their supporting activity, but sales is their primary activity. Rewarding anything else can create unnecessary distractions and excuses. Gamification is still new and we’ll see changes, but before you jump on the gamification bandwagon, ask yourself, are you promoting the behavior you really want?