One of thestruggles many learning and development organizations have is keeping their salesforces up-to-date on new products and new product functionality. However, withthe constant addition of new tools and new functionality, continuallybombarding a sales force with online or stand-up courses can become burdensome.This was the problem faced by Scott Thomas, director of product enablement forExactTarget.
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ExactTarget is aglobal marketing organization focused on digital marketing tools—email, mobile,social, and web—that was recently purchased by Salesforce.com. ExactTarget is aleading cloud-marketing platform used by more than 6,000 companies, includingCoca-Cola, Gap, and Nike. Forover a decade, ExactTarget has been working toserve and inspire marketers in all industries and all organization sizes byhelping them better communicate with their customers. Marketers at their core,ExactTarget has always believed in the power of relevant and targeted marketingcommunications.
Challenge
A fewyears ago, ExactTarget’s ScottThomas was searching for a new tool for his product-training toolbox to helpdeliver instruction related to a new product. With a tight launch date fortheir MobileConnect product, Thomas found an interesting platform that hewanted to explore. He had played a free game—College Hoops Guru—on the platformand became intrigued by the possibility of using it to help train his sales forceon the new MobileConnect product. The platform was a game-based interface calledThe Knowledge Guru.
Beingable to show—rather than just tell—was critical to securing sponsorship of thegame. Thomas’s own play of the College Hoops Guru demo game was a pivotal partof his success in convincing stakeholders that the game could have value. Hesaw how the game worked, and then communicated his experience to stakeholders.The other key was the game engine’s ability to track what learners were doingand how they were performing. The metrics sold the game.
Gamification solution
Users log intothe game via the internet; the entire solution is hosted in the cloud. Whenplayers enter the game for the first time, they get a narrative that explainshow the game works. The player must ascend a mountain for each topic. The gameconsists of three paths up the mountain to deliver a scroll of wisdom to theGuru: three paths, a different scroll each time (Figure 1). The game’s“mountains” are the instructional topics to cover. Each mountain has learningobjectives associated with it.
Figure 1: TheKnowledge Guru challenges you to bring forth the scrolls of wisdom
Players see their score as they answer eachgame question; there is also a leaderboard to document their progress (Figure2). If players answer correctly, their score goes up. If they answerincorrectly, their score goes down. There are consequences, just like in reallife. The Guru game engine used to create and house the MobileConnect Game hasa detailed “backend,” allowing specific tracking of designated information. Itenables a supervisor, learning professional, or other vested stakeholder to seehow players are performing. If needed, the game can offer ad hoc support based on these results. An administrator can evendrill down to see how a specific player is performing and determine what they have accomplished,where they have struggled, and how much time they’ve spent playing in TheKnowledge Guru platform.
Figure 2: Thegame-like interface clearly shows progress toward the final goal
ExactTarget deployed this solution as anoptional activity that followed webinars on the product they were rolling out.They put together a marketing campaign that encouraged people to play, awardingprizes to daily high scores and to the overall winner. They also did a featurearticle on the overall winner, recognized as the MobileConnect Guru.
Business impact
Theimmediate benefit of a game over a traditional training tool is its allure.People wanted to play Knowledge Guru; they don’t always want to attend atraining session. The result for the business was that, of all the launchesdone in the two years previous to the MobileConnect launch, the sales teambuilt one of the quickest pipelines for this product. The gamification approachimproved product knowledge and helped the team build the sales pipeline whilesimultaneously reducing call-response times.
Why it works
Repetition is the key to success within this platform as well as usingthe game elements of challenge and story. These are all key game aspects that motivateand instruct the learner. The learner is cast into a role that requiresascending a mountain by overcoming a series of challenges in the form ofquestions. The process is repeated several times and this repetition is whatreinforces the learning that occurs as the learner receives feedback on his orher answer.
Conclusion
Thecombination of various game elements and the documented business results showsthat you can successfully use gamification to motivate and instruct a sales forceon new products and features. As Scott Thomas said after the launch of thegamification solution, “I can’t tell you how many people are coming to mewanting another game solution.”
Editor’sNote: This is the second in a series of articles highlighting the impactgamification can have on organizations from a learning and development perspective.These case studies were gathered by Karl Kapp as he researched his latest book The Gamification of Learning and InstructionFieldbook: Ideas into Practice and theseries is designed to illustrate real-world application of gamification and theresulting business impact.
