LevelEleven Makes User-Targeted Changes to Compete App

Sales gamification company LevelEleven rolled out a series of product enhancements for its Compete app, designed to increase functionality and ease of use. The updates signal more forward motion for the 16-month-old company, which was spun off from ePrize and counts Salesforce.com among its investors.

The product draws on common problems encountered by sales managers, explains CEO Bob Marsh, himself a longtime sales manager. "When I was at ePrize [now HelloWorld], one of the first initiatives I had was to roll out a CRM system for our sales team. You're investing in this concept where if you can measure what's going on in the sales team, you can motivate them. I felt like that second part was missing. I could see people were logging meetings, but how do I get them to set up more meetings?" Marsh recalls.

Users at the 140 companies LevelEleven counts as customers will discover a few key differences with the updates. Sales managers now have better wizards that don't require them to enter as much information in order to set up a contest. They can save drafts of contests and move back and forth in the creation process. They can also choose from over a dozen precreated templates that draw on some of the Compete app's most successful contests. There's also a new way to set up a contest. Sales managers can motivate salespeople to follow up on dormant opportunities, such as ones that are older than a certain period or have a certain estimated value, another "very granular" way of setting up a contest, Marsh elaborates.

Recently, the trend seems to be on end user-focused CRM add-ons that focus on making the experience helpful, rather than a burden, to salespeople. Marsh sees Compete fitting in with this trend. Sales managers now have a more powerful motivating tool at their disposal, Marsh explains. "Instead of talking about an initiative in a team meeting, they can roll it out in a more engaging and fun way for sales teams." For the salespeople themselves, "You can figure out how you're doing with Salesforce.com reports, but it's not fun, it's not engaging. Putting it in the inbox, on TV, on mobile; that's much more motivating for the salesperson and a big part of why it's working," he adds.

Compete is built as a native app on the Force.com platform. It creates leaderboards that can be viewed on desktops, TVs, or mobile devices. A feed showing the results also shows up in Salesforce.com Chatter. LevelEleven is also working on partnering with other relevant Salesforce.com add-ons, such as Cirrus Insights, which brings Salesforce.com into Gmail, and has plans to integrate with ClearSlide.

For the rest of 2014, LevelEleven plans to continue to grow its sales and engineering teams. Marsh says the privately held company growing 40 to 60 percent every quarter, and has started to see more clients come in as referrals. Marsh is clear that the underlying concept behind LevelEleven isn’t new; it’s about the execution. “Running a sales contest is the oldest trick in the book. The problem is the way they’re managed, off spreadsheets or white boards. The data can be old or inaccurate. We turn those sales contests into a real-time experience.”

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