Purpose
This article is meant as a guide for Allbound administrators on how to build a successful gamification program.
Introduction
One of the most important parts of building a successful partner program is fostering strong relationships and maximizing partner engagement. As organizations seek to create and maintain mutually beneficial partnerships, the concept of gamification has emerged as a transformative strategy. Gamification is not just about making business interactions more entertaining; it's a strategic approach that leverages the natural human inclination for competition, achievement, and enjoyment to enhance partner collaboration and drive extraordinary results.
Imagine a scenario where your partners are not just content with your program, but they're enthusiastic, committed, and constantly striving to excel. That's the promise of gamification. By weaving game elements, such as rewards, leaderboards, and interactive challenges, into your partner program, you can transform routine collaborations into exciting journeys.
In this article, we will delve into the numerous advantages of incorporating gamification into your Allbound platform. From fostering deeper partner engagement and loyalty to driving increased sales and mutual success, you'll discover how gamification can revolutionize your partnership ecosystem. Join us as we explore the best practices of gamification and learn how it can elevate your partner program to new heights. Are you ready to reimagine partner engagement? Let's get started.
Basics
A partner gamification program is a strategic initiative designed to incentivize and reward partner engagement, collaboration, and performance. This innovative system combines the principles of gaming with business partnerships to create a win-win scenario for both the organization and its partners.
At the core of this program is a straightforward conversion: for every point earned by partners through their active participation and successful outcomes, they receive the equivalent of one cent in US currency. These points can be used to redeem e-gift cards through the Points Redemption feature. This direct correlation between points and real-world monetary value makes it easy for partners to understand and engage with the program.
Here's how it works:
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Earning Points: Partners can earn points through various actions and achievements, such as registering deals, completing training modules, or simply logging in and viewing content. Each of these actions is assigned a point value based on its significance within the partnership program.
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Accumulating Points: As partners accumulate these points, they will be eligible to redeem them once their account accumulates enough points. These points serve as a tangible representation of their contributions and progress within the program.
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Redeeming Points: When partners decide to cash in their points, they can exchange them for e-gift cards, reinforcing their motivation to actively participate and excel in the program. With the 100:1 point-to-dollar conversion, it's simple for partners to track their earnings and benefits.
The benefits of such a system are twofold:
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For Partners: Partners are motivated to engage with the Allbound platform knowing that their efforts directly translate into financial rewards. This not only fosters a sense of recognition and appreciation but also encourages sustained engagement.
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For the Organization: The program drives increased partner activity and performance, ultimately leading to more successful partnerships and higher revenue. It also simplifies reward management, as the 1-cent-per-point structure ensures transparency and ease of tracking.
In summary, a partner gamification program is a transparent and rewarding way to boost partner engagement and drive mutually beneficial results. Partners are empowered to convert their actions and achievements into tangible monetary rewards, while the organization benefits from heightened partner performance and collaboration. This simple and effective system aligns partner interests with business objectives, creating a winning partnership dynamic.
Best Practices/Tips
- Prior to officially releasing the Gamification feature to your portal users, we recommend strategically testing each action's point limitations with this best practice:
- Determine which portal actions are the most important for both your company and your partner companies users
- Actions such as registering deals and completing learning tracks should command a higher point total than actions such as logging in and viewing content. One-time actions such as completing a profile can have a higher point total as well.
- We recommend trialing the Gamification feature for a total of four weeks with your point assignments:
- Within the first two weeks, assign your initial points to the actions. Once two weeks have passed, you may analyze and determine if you need to add or subtract points to the actions
- Within weeks three and four, determine if you need to further adjust your points before rolling out the feature to all of your users
- To achieve greater control over earned points for your users, we recommend setting a points limit and a points frequency to the Gamification actions with these best practices:
- A points frequency is an important limitation to add to the Gamification actions to ensure your users are not abusing the system by accruing more points than necessary in a given time frame. The frequency setting is located within the Gamification Settings in the Points and Actions tab. For example, for the action "Logged In," how many times per day do you want your users to gain points every time they log in to the portal? We have seen "a user can gain 10 points once every day when they log in to the portal."
- A points limit is an important limitation to set within the Gamification Settings to ensure your users are not abusing the system by adding more points than necessary in a given time frame. The limits setting is located within the Gamification Settings in the Gamification tab. For example, you may set a maximum amount of points all of your users may gain within a certain amount of days. We have seen that "users can gain 10,000 points every 60 days."
- We recommend strategically thinking about your user's journey through the portal in order to apply the points frequency and the points limits
- Plan out how you format your controls and point generation structure
- Allbound allows you to set up your controls and scoring in a variety of different ways. It is best practice to choose one way that you will manage most of these controls and use that as your methodology to make changes or implement your processes.
Examples
The following is an example of how you can build a sustainable gamification program for your Allbound portal. In this example, we are going to be setting point generation cap controls on the actions themselves vs globally. Additionally, we will outline the logic that went into the planning of the values that were used in the actions. This will be a good starting point for how you and your team should go through the planning process.
Under Allbound Settings > Gamification Settings
For the control model we are using, we will be leaving these fields blank. It is helpful to add disclaimers so partners are aware of any limitations that you set up.
Next, go to Points & Actions and set up the following rules.
The logic here is that we are putting an emphasis on high-impact, revenue-generating actions, and less emphasis on low-impact, general engagement actions. The logic behind the above rules is as follows:
Register a deal - 500 points
We want to give the highest value action a good baseline of 500 points. This way, there is still an incentive to submit a lot of deals, but not enough incentive to submit a lot of low-quality, unvetted deals simply for the quick payoff. You are able to manually adjust point values on individual actions retroactively, but more on that later. We have found that a 500-point baseline is a good floor for one deal registration.
Complete profile - 250 points (1 time)
We simply want to log the action once and avoid a user updating their profile over and over for $2.50 per save. A one-time update is enough.
Complete Learning Track - 1000 points
We would generally consider the completion of a learning track a high-impact action that takes work to complete. There are no frequency specifications needed for this. Once a user completes a learning track, they cannot log a "completed" action again for that learning track. So, the controls are built into the functionality.
Logged In - 25 points (1 time every 7 days)
Logging in is a general engagement activity that doesn't carry much value overall. But, we feel that if a user logs in once a week, it generates the most amount of engagement overall. This can be changed to 4 times every 30 days and it will carry the same overall value, but 100 points a month is a good benefit for the cost of the action.
Viewing Content - 50 points (20 times every 90 days)
This is an action that can very much be abused if it doesn't have restrictions on it. We want partners to engage with the content, but we don't want it to carry so much weight that it is worth it to abuse. We also don't want to put restrictions on how many times a user can view one asset to generate points. Engagement is engagement however it manifests.
Created Prospect Page - 100 points (20 times every 90 days)
We would consider the creation of a prospect page as an indirect revenue-generating activity that could lead to a registered deal. Additionally, creating a prospect page does take some work to put together. So we gave it a little higher of a value than viewing content. It is also an action that can be abused since there are no checks and balances on what gets created. We feel that this point value and frequency is an adequate representation of the value that the action holds.
Manually Updating Point Values
The section above about setting a baseline point value for all deal registrations lower, that option gives you the flexibility of giving out more points for deals that are ultimately converted into opportunities and even more for deals that are closed won.
Let's say in our example, we have a baseline of 500 points for a deal registration. Now, let's say we want to give a user more points once the deal is converted into an opportunity, or even more when it is marked as closed won. To do this, go to the Gamification Activity section and search for the user that you would like to assign the points to. Once you find the deal action, you can simply adjust the points in the box to a new amount.
For example, let's say we want deals converted to opportunities to be worth 2500 points. All we need to do is change the 500 to 2500 and then click "Updates Activity" and the points will be updated.
If you still have questions, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or Open a Support Ticket.
Also, please refer to these articles to further learn about our Gamification feature: