How to use gamification in real estate sales

‍

Gamification is the use of game mechanics to other areas, such as a sales environment, to improve motivation and performance. The use of gamification is becoming increasingly popular in the business world, and has found its way to real estate sales and motivating real estate teams.

Businesses that invest in gamification have been shown to increase profit and overall employee satisfaction over time. When asked about gamification in a recent study, 72% said gamification inspires them to work harder.

Overall, gamification works by applying game principles to the workplace. The key outcome overall is to create constructive, competitive tension between players towards a shared goal with rules.

If you are looking to help improve team motivation and performance, here are three ways you can implement gamification for your sales team.

1. Sets goals or objectives

The core of every game is the pursuit of an objective or goal. This is the simplest step of gamification. Without clearly set goals, your team will have nothing to competitive for (either as individuals, or as a team).

To set goals for your team, you can use leaderboards or individualised goals that agents will need to try and hit.

Objectives can be more than simply revenue goals, and can include:

• Prospecting targets
• New database growth %
• Conversion rate increases
• Number of open houses
• New clients signed

2. Implement levels

Levels are another core game mechanic. Levels allow you to measure the amount of challenge that you provide to a player in order to maximize their motivation and feelings of accomplishment.

Setting the same target for a new agent and established agent may be too overwhelming for you new agents, but easy for your established agents. The aim here is to provide the optimal level of challenge to reward.

To set levels, you can create them around your targets based on agent ability, or simply by strategic team objectives such as boosting the number of new of prospecting calls made to an area.

Examples include:

• A level for new, established and senior agents in your team
• Tournaments for all team members to generate new ideas or approaches

3. Sustain motivation with points, badges and unlocked rewards

Many of the most playable games provide motivation along the path to achieving the ultimate objective. These micro-rewards provide additional motivation to help keep your players on track and continuing.

Monetary rewards are often the major reward as part of your commission plan, however there are many rewards that can also be used after completing certain levels to motivate your team. Ironically, the opportunity to tackle more important challenges can also be a reward in itself, such as leading a new territory or desirable project in the office.

Example rewards include:

• Office awards and recognition for passing a level, program or target
• Unlocking an office-sponsored treat, such as a gift basket
• Using leaderboards, keep public score of key metrics
• Provide additional high level challenges
• Extra mentoring time or training courses

Conclusion

Gamification is an interesting and potentially fun way to motivate your team, with some interesting science to backup it's usefulness. Be sure to align your gamification efforts with your overall business objectives as part of your team member strategy.

Read more: Best practices for high performance real estate teams

‍