Social Leadership and Sales Targets
Why you need Yapster’s KPI Gamification module
A leader’s job is to align and inspire colleagues to deliver a business plan…
Delivering a business plan as a corporate leader generally involves 4 primary pillars: setting a vision; nurturing culture; delivering sales; and controlling expenses. Since founding Yapster, we have seen Social Leadership (which we define as ‘the practice of influencing people at work using digital tools’) make a huge impact in most of these areas.
Setting the vision - once you have a vision, what could be more important than communicating it at scale?
Nurturing the culture - by publicly recognising ‘on brand’ behaviours; and
Controlling expenses - by avoiding miscommunications and flattening expensive hierarchies
However, one key initiative we saw Social Leaders struggle to influence was inspiring same-store sales growth (i.e. excluding opening new locations). We soon realised that whilst our customer leaders were cheerleading from afar via all-company news posts, we had the power to create site-level excitement to support them. We did this through social, site vs site ‘EPOS match play’ using the instant messaging function within our app.
Before I get into the practical details of how this innovation actually works. It’s worth quickly thinking about why incremental sales in Yapster’s target customer industries are so important, and yet so hard to come by.
Why is it so hard to inspire frontline colleagues to engage in sales campaigns?
Sales are like days off (we all want more of them!). However, getting more money through the till can sometimes be trickier in retail and hospitality than other industries. In part this is because in-store staff can’t drive footfall, which leaves them with two main ways to influence sales - converting more browsers into buyers, and ‘upselling’ existing buyers…
In a bid to boost productivity on slow days, many retailers ask their staff to offer a specific promotion to customers at the point of purchase. We call it the ‘Dairy Milk’ approach (made famous by a large UK travel retailer whose frontline staff, with varying degrees of relevance and enthusiasm, will generally offer a big bar of chocolate for £1 every time you visit).
However, there’s a huge difference between ‘up-offering’ and upselling
For staff not on commission, there’s little incentive to actively sell a delicious promotional treat to customers - it’s more common to reluctantly mumble “wanna buy some chocolate? I have to ask”.
Mystery shoppers, upselling policies, static league tables and sales training all have their place, clearly. But retail, hospitality or leisure leaders will know that nothing works like genuine enthusiasm and intrinsic motivation.
Injecting genuine social fun and real-time competition into sales initiatives
KPI Gamification uses mobile communication to turn friendly competition and positive reinforcement into powerful sales motivators. Staff can see the direct impact that their efforts are having on the business - in real time. And they win, or lose, each shift or period as a team.
This transparency not only makes colleagues feel more accountable to each other and managers, it gives them a fresh purpose and a belief that every conversion and upsell matters.
Yapster’s pioneering social selling in retail and hospitality. Alongside great customers like the Revere Division of Marstons plc, we’ve managed to increase like-for-like sales on campaign items by +7%.
How does KPI Gamification actually work within Yapster?
Match play
A popular format for social selling within Yapster is "match play" competitions between individual locations or regions across your business based on predetermined KPIs - we find conversion rate works well.
We break stores down into leagues and runs daily or weekly head to head matches in respect of those KPIs. After each daily or weekly ‘match’, 3 points are awarded for a win, 1 for a draw and 0 for a loss. Group chats including all relevant colleagues are set up and used to share scores and standings. Teams can also use these channels to celebrate, send messages of support, and engage in friendly banter with their rivals.
Find out more about the KPI Gamification match-play version from our 2021 Showcase here.
Leagues
The newest version of our Gamification feature allows you to run “Leagues” across your sites where teams are competing on a daily basis to be at the top of the League. Run league seasons for a week, two weeks, or even a month allowing all sites to compete for that top place. Allow your teams to engage in friendly banter and competition while driving commercial results.
Find out more about the KPI Gamification league version from our 2022 Showcase here.
