Introduction

If you’re a sales team using Close CRM, you’re undoubtedly getting a lot of valuable insights about your current data and managing your workflows pretty efficiently through the platform.

However, this isn’t all that Close can do for you. With your Close data, you not only have the opportunity to create a more efficient sales team, but one that’s happier and more motivated as well.

How? By engaging with the gamification capabilities found through the Plecto x Close integration. Using this integration, you can unlock your sales data and display it on digital dashboards, and have full access to Plecto’s gamification features to create a more cohesive and engaged workforce.

What is gamification?

The simplest way to explain gamification is that it’s game-based activities applied to non-game contexts. Think of how you obtain points for leaving reviews online, or for taking flights that you can apply to future airfares. Or in using apps like Duolingo, where you earn points, badges, and progress through successive levels of difficulty.

The same principle applies to Plecto’s dashboards: gamification to enhance data visualization is our (not-so) secret of success! Gamification is a proven means of improving performance, as it taps into people’s innate competitiveness and love of winning to deliver results.

That all said, let’s take a closer look at Plecto’s gamification features, so you too can discover how your team can benefit from using them on a daily basis.

Notifications

Plecto’s real-time Notifications are small messages that appear publicly to alert your teams whenever an employee has reached a goal (often KPI-related), hit a milestone, or obtained another accomplishment.

The Notifications feature consists of either automated messages that appear on Slack, Teams, Plecto News Feed, and all devices connected to your Plecto account; or personalized videos or GIFs that show up on TV screens across your office. Even better, these notifications can be accompanied by light and sound effects via Philips Hue and Sonos!

In short, Plecto Notifications are a wonderful way to identify, publicly recognize, and celebrate the small daily wins—the vast majority of the work that employees put in every day, even ahead of closing the big deal or reaching the most important milestone.

Achievements

Also known as badges, Plecto Achievements are a small but highly effective means to keep your employees and teams motivated while recognizing their hard work. Achievements consist of star icons, dollar signs, trophies, or a customized icon that will appear next to an employee name on your dashboards.

Achievements are highly customizable and can be used for really anything you can think of. Expand your horizons beyond “Employee of the Month” and consider all of the ways that you can use Achievements to recognize employees for a job well done!

Contests

Out of all the gamification features listed here, Contests are probably the star of the show. Plecto Contests set up employees to compete against each other, either in an individual- or team-based format, in a fun and affirming way to help accomplish a larger goal. You can even use the recently-released contest formats—Race in Space, Jungle Race, and Mountain Climb—and even create your own personalized avatars.

Copenhagen-based If Commercial Insurance did just that. In 2023, teams composed of individuals from different departments competed against each other to see who could earn the most points—through selling to new customers, hitting CS KPIs, or gathering research on customers—and win ice cream for the whole summer to celebrate. → Read the customer case here

Similarly, If’s parent company did a walk-a-thon during the pandemic, helping keep employees motivated while meeting goals. The victor’s prize? A trip to the sunny Spanish coast! → Read the customer case here

Ultimately, Plecto Contests are among the most effective ways to drive results (and revenue!) across your team. Get your team’s adrenaline pumping, unleash their competitive spirit, and watch your goals be achieved in record time.

Leaderboards

Plecto Leaderboards are another powerful means to keep engagement and motivation high. They are a particularly versatile tool, because they can be used to display data directly from Plecto Contests, or to indicate data from more informal contests of your own making.

For example, Plecto’s Marketing team in our Danish head office uses a Leaderboard to indicate employee progress on their sprints—basically, “to-do” lists that employees complete on a biweekly basis. While they’re not hard-and-fast goals, it’s still fun to see who is completing the most tasks within the given timeframe, encouraging individuals to do their best work every day.

Reward Store

The Reward Store might be the universal favorite on this list—why? Because it offers tangible prizes for the hard work employees put in every day. The Reward Store works on the basis of extrinsic (externally-based) motivation, and unashamedly so!

What are some of the prizes you can offer in the Reward Store? Popular favorites include movie tickets, a bottle of wine, restaurant gift cards, or easy parking access at your office for a week or two.

How does it work? It’s pretty straightforward. Just as in a real store, every item in the Reward Store is worth a certain number of coins. When employees win coins for completing a task or reaching a goal, they can redeem these coins for Reward Store goodies.

However you slice it, whatever context you decide to use it in, the Reward Store is a perfect way to keep employee interest and motivation high while giving your workers some recognition with IRL value.

Spinning Wheel

It might be the last item on this list, but its notoriety is by no means diminished. The Spinning Wheel is Plecto’s ultimate game of chance…the perfect way to build team camaraderie through an uncertain but exciting activity, where you might win big…or not at all!

You can think of the Spinning Wheel as a way to randomize the prizes found in the Reward Store. How you want people to participate in the Spinning Wheel is up to you—for example, it can be an activity that only top performers do to win an additional prize. Or it can be open to the whole office as a lighthearted social event—a favorite Friday afternoon at Plecto’s head office.

Conclusion

Engaging with Plecto’s gamification features has multiple fantastic benefits: increasing motivation, providing recognition and rewards, aligning individuals and teams with shared goals, and increasing overall job satisfaction.

If you want your Close-based data and workflows to have the additional enhancements of dashboard visualizations and gamification, you can’t go wrong with Plecto. Try our free 14-day trial, integrate with Close, and unlock the powerful benefits of using both platforms together!