Microsoft acquires FantasySalesTeam, an innovative sales gamification platform, to help...

[Guest Bob Stutz]

I’m excited to announce that Microsoft has acquired Incent Games Inc., the developer and owner of FantasySalesTeam, an innovative sales gamification platform that’s helped hundreds of companies boost sales productivity, drive revenue and improve CRM adoption through collaboration and team based competition. The benefits of this creative and popular feature will soon be available for our customers to help them incentivize their sales teams to new heights and better results.

 

While incentive programs and contests are leveraged in almost all sales organizations, most suffer from common shortcomings: the same top performers almost always win and the rest of the team tends to disengage fairly quickly once they realize they’ve fallen behind or out of contention. FantasySalesTeam creatively addresses these problems with a tailored approach that drives amazing results.

 

They’ve disrupted the old sales incentive model with an original twist that combines gamification with fantasy sports and expertly applies it to a sales setting. Their platform is highly effective at increasing team collaboration, productivity and consequently driving greater results and business growth. Through team-based competition and involvement of non-sales employees (such as managers, service, operations, marketing and finance) employees “draft” teams and become truly invested in each other’s success. Individual and team results become highly visible, driving both competition as well as collaboration and creating positive, impactful cultural change.

 

When you look at this product, there is nothing like it on the market. This feature is revolutionizing team building in the sales setting and the impact has been nothing short of staggering.

 

• Service Corporation International (NYSE: SCI) recently ran a pilot with 130 sales reps and compared their performance to almost 700 others. Those using FantasySalesTeam on average closed 88 percent more deals at 213 percent the average contract value.
  
• Wireless Zone saw a 176 percent increase in total sales, 35 percent increase in specific product sales and a 9 percent increase in profit in the first month they ran FantasySalesTeam.
  

 

These are just two of the many examples, case studies, reviews and customer quotes littered across this website.

 

With Microsoft’s focus on productivity and our obsession with customer success, this acquisition is a great fit. To help drive adoption of our CRM solutions in fun and creative ways, we are integrating FantasySalesTeam into our offering. Our focus continues to be on not only providing the best solutions to our customers, but also helping them be wildly successful. We are committed to going the last mile in helping them impact revenue growth. 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.

 

In the coming months, we will integrate and offer this service to our customers and will continue to support customers using FantasySalesTeam with other CRM solutions. The potential of applying this feature beyond the sales scenario to other fields and areas within a business is exciting as well. We will evaluate these other scenarios closely as we integrate and evolve FantasySalesTeam into the Dynamics ecosystem.

 

FantasySalesTeam represents the best of an entrepreneurial spirit that takes a wholly fresh look at age old challenges and delivers a unique, original and innovative answer. It’s the very embodiment of reinventing productivity and we are happy to welcome them into the fold, to share these great capabilities with our customers and to explore ways to expand this concept to other areas of the business in exciting and creative ways.

 

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