Summary...

Just give them their quota, territory, price list, and phone, and they’ll either sink or swim as a sales rep.” This antiquated sales management mind set is fortunately a past-tense approach for most contemporary leaders of business-to-business (B2B) selling teams, one that may have worked on boiler-room sales floors in the past, but is a poor excuse for 21st-century practices requiring a more holistic methodology to drive success. New Aberdeen research published in Motivate, Incent, Compensate, Enable: Sales Performance Management Best Practices (January 2013) validates how top-performing organizations take a “kinder, gentler” path to managing sales teams, who then respond positively with better revenue, quota, and profitability results. This Research Brief dives specifically into a relative newcomer to the Sales Effectiveness space — gamification — and reveals best practices associated with its use.

Great article inasmuch as it points out the potential that gamification offers to the B2B marketer. We believe that B2B gamification can significantly supplement and compliment your content marketing strategy, which of course is the fuel to the marketing automation process. You can easily see how gamification could be the sole sources of content for marketing automation. No hard direction from this article, but rather wondering outloud, as you can read from this excerpt...

Many companies profess to be thought-leaders in their industry - especially in BtoB - yet few are good at engaging employees to use social tools like blogs to demonstrate this thought leadership in an engaging kind of way (IBM being an obvious exception). How might we use game theory to help employees see blogging as a game? Maybe something as simple as posting a company league table of KLOUT scores on the intranet would begin to change behavioural dynamics. Would this cause the leading thinkers in our organizations to challenge themselves to raise their Klout score? How can we create a game-like challenge so employees can solve it, just as gamers solve obstacles put in front of them in games?