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Angry Birds in Sales Performance Management

Posted by Steve Loftness on Fri, Sep 09, 2011
  
  
  
  

Angry Birds (and other well-done video games) has a great interface to emulate for your Sales Performance Management dashboards.  The reason?  It shows progress at tactical and strategic levels.  And progress indicators have been found to be a primary intrinsic motivator.

Look at this example from Angry Birds:

Example of a progress dashboard for sales performance management

Besides showing the strategy (birds vs. pigs), you can see that it shows:

1.  The progress towards the overarching goal of the 3 worlds at the top.  This could be akin to a Sales Rep with 3 different product lines, one of them (with the lock) that the rep may not yet be ready to sell.

2.  The progress of levels (number 1-17) within the world. In this picture's case, it is world 2, and 17 of 21 levels have been completed.  For sales, this could be a combination of different accountabilities and competencies that the Sales Rep is targeting.  Notice that 4 levels have not yet been reached because the 17th level is still being worked.  This could be 4 accountabilities or competencies that are planned but not yet rolled out to the Sales Force.

3. The progress within each level represented by one, two or three stars.  In Angry Birds, the more points scored in a level determines how many stars received.  For the Sales world, this is the quality of completing each accountability or competency.

4.While playing a level, the in-game screen (not shown) shows the number of birds remaining, the number of points attained, and the pigs remaining to be "sold". 

So why all of this focus on showing progress?  A recent book based on years of research and a large study points out that "...making progress in meaningful work is the most powerful stimulant to great inner work life" which then sets high performance.  The book is "The Progress Principle" by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. 

Are your Sales Performance Management metrics and dashboards providing your Sales Reps a look into their progress in order to stimulate their inner work life positively?

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Comments

A very good blog that describes a difficult subject to grasps in a very easy manner. A defined process with clear objectives is the starting point for any activity. But as pointed out the true driver is the achievement of each of the steps within the process that stimulates the sales person to want to get to the next step and ultimately make the sale.
Posted @ Tuesday, January 24, 2012 10:33 AM by George Petri
George,  
Thanks for your comment. Yes - getting to the next stage of the sales process is what we Reps should focus on. We ensure when designing sales processes that the buyer-exhibited Exit Criteria is clearly defined - in essence the mini-checkpoints along the sales cycle that a Rep should be using as progress indicators. See our other post on "Improving the Exit Criteria in Your Sales Process".  
Steve
Posted @ Thursday, February 02, 2012 8:37 AM by Steve Loftness
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