Games people play: Microsoft acquires FantasySalesTeam to help cos incentize

Microsoft has gobbled up FantasySalesTeam-maker Incent Games, and will bake the software into its Dynamics CRM product.

The fantasy sports component developed by Incent will be a new offering in Microsoft’s CRM, making it appealing to the competitive sports fan who’s also in sales.

Microsoft announced on Monday that it has bought a startup with a winning way of using game play to boost the performance of sales teams. Where in other incentive programs, the top performers win and the rest of the team loses interest, “FantasySalesTeam creatively addresses these problems with a tailored approach that drives unbelievable results”.

FantasySalesTeam also allowed companies to draft non-sales employees to their teams, including managers, service, operations, marketing and finance staff, to increase company-wide collaboration. There are case studies to back up his claims. Service Corporation global ran a pilot with 130 sales reps and compared their performance to about 700 others. FanstasySalesTeam on average closed 88 percent more deals at 213 percent the average contract value, Microsoft says. Wireless Zone, a chain of cellular and mobile stores, has increased total sales by 176 percent and increased profit by 9 percent during the first month of running the software, according to the Stutz.

Incent calls FantasySalesTeam “sales gamification” (no, me neither). Microsoft plans to combine FantasySalesTeam into its personal Dynamics CRM product line, in accordance with an August three weblog publish saying the acquisition.

“Individual and team results become highly visible, driving both competition as well as collaboration and creating positive, impactful cultural change”, Bob Stutz, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Dynamics CRM, wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition. “We believe that motivating users of Dynamics CRM to focus on their most important metrics while simultaneously increasing usage and adoption can help drive tremendous impact on our customer’s success”.