Motivating a sales team in January is easy; keeping it engaged in December is the hard part. In this episode of Jugando en Serio (in Spanish), Mónica Lobo, a sales director with more than 20 years in sales, explains how to build a gamified sales culture: competitions, recognition, useful training and data, always within a strategy.
Why it's so hard to motivate a sales team
Today's sales teams look nothing like those of 20 years ago: according to Lobo, salespeople are far more consultative and better trained. But the underlying challenge hasn't changed: keeping people genuinely engaged with the company's culture, values and goals.
Salespeople are on the front line, and that intensity has to be sustained over time. That's why Lobo argues for combining short-term actions, essential for hitting targets, with a long-term strategy that makes clear where the company is heading and balances individual and team goals.
When motivation fails, the blow is twofold. Turnover in a sales team is very expensive: you have to recruit, train and onboard all over again, on top of the opportunity cost of the time a newcomer needs to become productive. And demotivation drags the rest of the team down.
Gamifying sales: the game always needs a strategy
Lobo brings it down to earth with an example from her time at Bodaclick, which had more than 60 salespeople across Spain. On Fridays they spent four hours in the morning making calls to book visits, and every call went up on a whiteboard. There were prizes, but above all there was a structure: weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual competitions, with recognition for individuals, teams and even regions.
It works especially well in sales because competitiveness is part of a salesperson's DNA: nobody likes to be at the bottom of the leaderboard. The biggest challenge? Getting the team to buy in. For Lobo, that takes a game worth playing, part of a global strategy, that doesn't eat up too much time.
Gamifying is ultimately about creating a game. But it's not playing for the sake of playing: it has to be part of a bigger strategy and it has to be backed by the leaders, because otherwise things don't work.
Training motivates too (if it helps you sell)
For Lobo, training is another motivational lever, with one condition: it must apply to day-to-day work. Practicing a negotiation in a simulator or learning to detect customer needs is motivating; offering content nobody sees the point of is demotivating and can undermine everything else.
And since the market keeps changing, training has to be continuous, ideally in groups: everyone brings something and the team grows. At Game Strategies, she says, they use their own games to train their team.
Results you can measure
Lobo shares client cases. Pharmaceutical companies that train their reps on products and objections report, she says, higher productivity, a much lower training cost per employee, since the format scales very well, and a stronger sense of belonging. And a major national bank that launched a game to get more meetings and contracts achieved, according to Lobo, 40% more sales meetings and 17% more contracts sold.
Behind this there is no gamification “just because”, but a complete plan: training, competition, prizes and small milestones, with easy tools that don't add to the workload. And something Lobo particularly values as a director: data on where the team is strong and where it struggles, to decide where to focus.
AI to practice before the real meeting
The final piece is artificial intelligence. Lobo describes an AI role-play simulator that knows the company, the industry, the competition, the objections and the arguments, but also assesses what lies behind a sale: how you build trust and how you spot needs and hidden opportunities.
Her argument is about scale. And for salespeople, it's more fun to make mistakes in a simulated challenge than to put their foot in it in front of a customer.
You can't be running role plays with your teams all the time. The role plays you run yourself aren't scalable, you're not always exactly the same, and you're not always 100% objective. With this tool it's scalable, and the report it gives you is objective.
