Microsoft announced today through a blog post that it has now added Incent Games Inc. to its sea of acquisitions. Incent Games Inc. is an Austin, Texas-based company which is the creator and owner of a “sales gamification” platform called FantasySalesTeam, which is often dubbed as the ‘Next Big Thing’ in team collaboration.
The company has helped hundreds of other companies including the likes of HP, Siemens, Michelin, GuideOne Insurance, FSU Credit Union, Service Corporations International, and others to boost sales productivity, drive revenue and improve CRM adoption through collaboration and team based competition.
FantasySalesTeam was founded in 2012 and has been a heavyweight since. It raised $1.4 million in outside funding from investors including ATX Seed Ventures, Central Texas Angel Network, and Marvel Venture Partners. This year it closed on its Series A, which was $750,000 of that $1.4 million.
FantasySalesTeam is a product that disrupts the traditional sales incentive model to a more original and better one. Normally most sales organisations, regardless of incentive programs and contests conducted, suffer problems because only the top performers are always on top while the rest of the team tends to disengage fairly quickly once they realize they’ve fallen behind or out of the contest. The way FantasySalesTeam addresses this issue is a sort of art in itself.
They have twisted the sales programmes to be more like sports, addressing each sales rep, based on performance as a ‘player’ and then awarding prizes associated with various outcomes tied into the company’s desired sales metrics and achievements as their ‘teams’ score. The platform exponentially increases team collaboration, productivity and consequently drives greater results and business growth. The scores can be recorded externally in the business’s CRM system via integrations with platforms like Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics.
To prove the high efficiency of this new method,
- Service Corporation International (NYSE: SCI) recently ran a pilot with 130 sales reps and compared their performance to almost 700 others. Those using FantasySalesTeam on average closed 88 percent more deals at 213 percent the average contract value.
- Wireless Zone saw a 176 percent increase in total sales, 35 percent increase in specific product sales and a 9 percent increase in profit in the first month they ran FantasySalesTeam.
According to Stutz, there are hundreds of organizations out there that have benefitted from this new method of driving sales teams.
Not only this, Microsoft will be providing FantasySalesTeam as a product for its customers to “help drive adoption of our CRM solutions in fun and creative ways”, says Stutz.
Our focus continues to be on not only providing the best solutions to our customers, but also helping them be wildly successful. We are committed to going the last mile in helping them impact revenue growth. We believe that motivating users of Dynamics CRM to focus on their most important metrics while simultaneously increasing usage and adoption can help drive tremendous impact on our customer’s success.
adds Stutz.
Microsoft is apparently going to be integrating this new feature in the coming months and offer it to its customers. They are also going to continue to support customers using FantasySalesTeam with other CRM solutions too. Applying this feature to other scenarios, other than sales, also seems to be something Stutz is excited about.
