Virsera, LLC

2020 was a banner year for the SpurGo Goal Acceleration business, and not simply for sales and revenue, but from a "lessons learned" perspective.

A habit that I took away from one of my favorite managers, Mike Hard, is that every strategy or solution had to consist of 3 elements.  Not 2, not 4, but THREE, no matter what.  In fact, I am pretty sure that in his mind, Moses brought 3 tablets down from the mountain, with 3 commandments.

Regardless, here are 3 observations on a 7 year company surviving (and thriving) in 2020:

1.  Surround yourself with talent:  Build your company around smart people - this is how you weather the storms and stick the landing.  We are fortunate be surrounded by some extraordinary people who bring amazing gifts, including creative risk takers,  strong and experienced business gurus, and (literally) a PhD level development lead.  This combination of resources could successfully develop and sell ketchup popsicles to women in white gloves

2.  The Network:  After 7 years, you learn who your real friends are.  Oh yes, everyone is "supportive", but you really begin to understand the (3) buckets that you can lump your associations into.  You find that you have friends who will:

Actively help you:  help in the development of your solution, respond to your requests for council, take a chance to try the product themselves and promote you to their network.  These friends are priceless.

Throw you a bone:  flip a contact your way, answer some simple questions, or "like" a social media post promoting your product.  They at least acknowledge your existence.

Be black holes:  never respond…to anything, even simple conversations, maybe not even an ask, but simply ghost you when you reach out, as though you were a telemarketer.

Our eternal thanks to those in actively helped us or promoted us along the way - we wouldn't be here without you.

3.  Results:  In the end Gamification (aka Goal Acceleration) works!  In 2020 we engaged thousands of users who competed to complete activities as quickly as possible, all designed to retire company and partner goals.  The numbers:

Over 15,000 users playing SpurGo

72,836 SpurGo Tasks completed

SpurGo drove customer sales metrics, including $1.235B in 2020 customer pipeline uncovered and over $451M in sales closed.

Throughout this incredible journey, we have listened to our customers and partners and in 2020 alone have made over 75 improvements to the solution, all designed to make the platform more engaging for the players, and more easily managed by the game hosts.  And we are not stopping, as we sign up new partners in 2021 to sell and support the SpurGo platform, and continuously improve the experience on the web and mobile.

Thank you to our customers and partners for a fantastic 2020!

Getting some love from Microsoft after launching the SpurGo Dynamics plug-in.  Nice mention in post entitled, "Apps to raise productivity, build on Dynamics 365, and handle industry-specific tasks."  Thanks @microsoft!

How do you Accelerate Revenue without Micro-Management?

Being a sales manager today means one thing: delivering on revenue commitment.  But the daily demands on your time also require a myriad of tasks that may at best tangentially relate to achieving your sales goals.  Meetings, upward communications, cross-team communications, logistical planning, administrative reports, pipeline hygiene and employee syncs detract from the primary business goals of getting in front of customers and helping them to solve real-world problems with the solutions you evangelize.  Keeping your team motivated and focused is paramount, but how do you do that without feeling like you’re ‘herding cats’?

As any business guidance book will tell you, “Focus on the interactions that matter, that add the most value.”  When you meet with a sales executive, make that meeting the most productive one possible. Will you spend a chunk of your time with your employees talking about weekly reports, CRM status, expense reports, and administrative minutiae?  Or will you spend that time talking about customer solution gaps, value propositions, and approaches to close deals?

The creators of SpurGo have a combined 40+ years of experience managing sales and partner teams and believe that the level of administration demands in enterprise companies has reached a tipping point resulting in the majority of time spent on non-revenue generating tasks.  This = bad.

As such, the primary idea of SpurGo is a solution to sales managers and partner account managers that takes the extraneous minutiae out of the day-to-day conversations so you can focus on what really matters – solving customer problems and generating revenue. We do this by ring-fencing everything that doesn’t directly tie into sales revenue and creating a game out of it where players have a simple list of administrative tasks to complete and they compete against each other to complete those objectives.  The individual/team performance data is tracked automatically, and the peer pressure of a leaderboard naturally encourages engagement.

Result?  More productive meetings and targeted intervention with low-performing players while allowing high-performers the space to do the work that really matters.  The end of micro-management.

And once you’ve got all the extraneous administrative burdens on autopilot, you can turn your attention to gamifying actual revenue acceleration.  With Salesforce and Dynamics SpurGo plug-ins, you can now monitor CRM hygiene and sales cycle progress via SpurGo as well.  

Partner Ecosystem Result? Partner account manager can see, in deep detail, which partners are delivering, and which partners need a little help. This will provide underlying evidence for funding plans when considering which partners can best utilize the dollars.

Field Sales Result? Sales managers can create dynamic competitions between sales reps and teams to provide actionable motivation to move the needle.  The leaderboards guide the sales managers on who to laud and who to coach.

This is next-level management.  Targeted, efficient, and motivated; yielding the only thing you actually care about: RESULTS.

Ever go to a party where you meet new people, play trivia games, take selfies and record whimsical videos? That's what parties are all about - having fun and meeting people!

What if you attended a business offsite training or conference and you had the same experience? That is what happens when you gamify these events with SpurGo, the goal acceleration solution and makes even boring business activities fun!

Innovative business teams are using SpurGo to spice up their training events and engage every attendee with SpurGo Tasks all designed to elevate the experience AND make it fun:

Take a selfies with people you don't know - engage with each other

Answer trivia questions about sessions - engage with the content

Form teams to develop solutions to customer problems - motivate and collaborate with your teammates

Record videos describing what you have learned - internalize the training material

Explore the city that your event is in - you can't stay indoors all day and night!

For years, customers have been successfully using SpurGo to motivate employees and partners to deliver on business objectives in a fun way that challenges players to be their best. Now SpurGo and the Mobile Companion Apps for iPhone and Android are doing the same for training events, trade shows and conferences.

Turn the tables on the vendors who you support - challenge them via SpurGo to complete imperatives that drive engagement for you!

It's no secret (or is it?) that the SpurGo Partner platform is an excellent solution for accelerating the revenue that flows through a business's partner channel.  In previous posts we have seen the data and it's irrefutable: gamification and goal acceleration with SpurGo Partner drives more business.

Now, how about turning the tables?  Savvy partners have learned that they too can accelerate their own revenue by hosting SpurGo Pro Challenges aimed at the vendors that they support.

In the sea of partners that your vendor supports, how do you distinguish yourself?  How do you grab the attention of the vendors sales force and incentivize them to work with you?  It's simple: host a SpurGo Pro Challenge!  You can use SpurGo Pro to:

Get sales people to learn more about you via videos or online training

Meet your team - especially handy if you are a new partner on the block

Nominate joint target accounts

Introduce you team to their customers

Register deals together in their CRM system (maybe even automatically with SpurGo/Dynamic integration!)

Conduct joint POCs

Close deals together

The possibilities are endless!  The point is that while SpurGo Partner is successful in driving challenge revenue, there's no reason that a good partner can't use the same platform to better engage with the vendors that they support.

Real ROI

I just had the pleasure of presenting an ROI report to one of our enterprise customers on the use of SpurGo to drive partner revenue. These metrics span three years of use. 

The results are clear - the platform is working and driving more revenue than ever before.

This customer used to run manual, ad-hoc programs and contests to stimulate partner revenue. Now that these programs and initiatives are centralized, transparent, and tailored to specific goals this customer is realizing tremendous growth in the only metric that ever really mattered: revenue.

If you have or manage partners, SpurGo is the right platform to drive revenue. Feel free to reach out to me any time.

SpurGo + CRM = Accelerated Sales

A friend once told me, “Your product will evolve to what customers actually want.”  He was absolutely right. 

SpurGo was originally developed to allow people to make a competition out of any activity.  After two years in the marketplace, our product has evolved into an extension to CRM that allows companies to accelerate sales activities through peer based Challenges.  Employee teams and external partners are using SpurGo to motivate the right behaviors in the sales process resulting in increased revenue.

Any field in Salesforce, SAP, or Dynamics can be read by SpurGo and put into a SpurGo Challenge where players compete to win awards and accolades.  It’s automatic, transparent, and produces business intelligence to analyze individual, team, region and activity specific performance.

In our continued interviews with customers, they say the biggest benefit is the concrete data on pre-sales activities most likely to yield the greatest impact and generate revenue; it exposes information showing which individuals and geographic regions need help or deserve recognition.  Knowing the outcome is not enough, knowing what led to the end result is critical.  That’s where SpurGo shines as a valuable extension to CRM.

The surprise of 2017 has been the creativity in customer Challenges hosted on SpurGo.  With each successive Challenge, the output of BI data offers specific ideas on how to fine-tune future Challenges to focus on key activities that prove successful to a broader audience.

Here are some cool ideas our customers have put into action:

Shark Tank – Company drops leads into the SpurGo ‘Shark Tank’ that allows their partners to ‘grab’ a lead with specific, time-based milestones to achieve in order to retain the lead – a “feeding frenzy” for you business!

Whitespace – A list of whitespace accounts is published in SpurGo, allowing partner companies to race to follow up.  Milestone and time based to retain the account ownership

One-day blitz – SpurGo hosts single day ‘call down’ Challenges for inside sales and partners

Sales Cycle Challenge – Internal     sales teams compete to move their accounts forward in the sales cycle via specific, CRM-tracked activities

Appointment Challenge – Partners are challenged to set up sales appointments with customers in conjunction with sponsoring company reps

 And we have more ideas in development which we will be excited to announce in the new year.

At this point, SpurGo has become a business intelligence and competition platform tailored to customer demand.  Every customer is unique and wants to incent their own specific behavior metrics.  SpurGo offers that capability.

SpurGo + CRM = Your Revenue Accelerator

www.PlaySpurGo.com

  Happy Holidays,

The Blind Home Builder

Picture yourself tasked with building a house.  You have no instructions, no manual, and only broad guidance.  You are employed to deliver a house by a certain date.  The actions and process to build that house are documented by hand on a piece of paper.  When you finish the house, you must build another house.  But the documentation of your progress, mistakes, and successes are gone.  You must start from scratch once again.

In our never-ending quest to understand motivation techniques, we recently interviewed 12 companies across the nation.  These companies sold products and services on behalf of large companies.  We call them ‘partners.’  Some sold technology solutions on behalf of EMC, VMWare, Citrix, and Microsoft.  Some sold cars on behalf of GM, Lexus, and Audi, and a few sold nutritional supplements on behalf of large supplement distributors.

The common thread? Every sales, support, and finance team ran contests weekly, monthly and quarterly to incent their people to hit a desired metric. These motivational awards were based on specific actions that led to the end-goal. At any given point in time, employees were working, and competing, to win incentive awards.  The incentives never stopped.

This is not surprising. What was surprising was the way in which these incentives were managed.  From Spreadsheet print-outs to sticky notes on the wall to hand-written whiteboard leaderboards, every company managed their incentives manually.  The end-goals were tracked automatically, but the management of the actions leading up the end goal were managed manually.

Let me repeat this: The actions leading to the end goal were managed manually.  This means that the very behavior that results in accomplishing a metric is ad-hoc, point-in-time managed.  Once the contest concluded all the data on behavior that worked and didn’t work were lost.  

This is today’s incentive management process.  Hit the goal, incent the right behavior.  Rinse, repeat.  No analysis, no best-practice sharing, no increase in efficiency or improvement in process based on past learnings.

There is a better way to grow.  A centralized, automated platform that takes the best of incentive based competition and marries it with historical business intelligence yielding data-based decisions and team-wide improvement.

This is SpurGo Partner.

If you’d like to discuss our case studies on Microsoft and Citrix, both current customers, please reach out to me.

We are hiring! Virsera is looking for a highly motivated business development person with experience in channel management or channel sales, preferably in high tech. If you know someone who fits this description, please message us directly.

Virsera is the leader in channel revenue acceleration through its flagship platform: SpurGo. Large companies use SpurGo to automate, report, and influence behavior of their partner ecosystems to drive increased revenue, and we are looking for someone to drive sales with us.

Sometimes a simple picture says it all:

Lessons Learned

We at Virsera have been pursuing business gamification for four years now and launched four products in that time (Bungo!, SpurGo, SpurGo Pro, and SpurGo Partner).  We have built up a nice customer portfolio in this time and I wanted to talk a little bit on lessons learned.  Some good, some bad.  Here we go:

Gamification Does Not ‘Auto-Run.’  Players have many distractions at work, home, and on their devices.  A thoughtful communication strategy is key to landing a game based on business imperatives. The best practice we have seen is a weekly email to players outlining Leaderboard stats, Top Movers, and Priority Point Potentials.  This keeps players reminded of their position in the game and the overall game status.

Integration Helps.  While SpurGo can be used immediately with host created tasks, integrating into back-end systems to automatically reflect player performance seems to be the smoothest way to reflect Leaderboards and allow players an instant view on rank.  

Gamification Works for Players Accustomed to Incentive Programs.  This is particularly true of partner ecosystems, where partners are already used to participating in sales, lead, and training contests.  Automating incentive programs across a company with integration into CRM and BI systems allows customers to consolidate their incentive programs under one roof, making it easier for the partner and company alike.

Partners Love Consolidated Views.  We have noticed that partners value the centralized and automated nature of incentive programs.  As such, we have seen double digit growth in participation month over month for the past year and a half.

Internal Employees Don’t Always Like Being Publicly Ranked. This was a tough lesson for us. We initially thought everyone would like the competitive nature of SpurGo.  Turns out, non-sales related employees don’t like it so much.  Across our customers, the trend in non-sales games has shown that about a third of the employees engage vigorously while the remaining opt not to play for fear of looking like poor performers.  This is how we evolved into focusing on sales and partner ecosystem focus for SpurGo.  In these two arenas, the participants are well-versed in the competitive nature of incentivized games and the engagement is universal.

In these lessons we gleaned a bit of psychology, a dollop of tactics, and a whole lot of customer feedback.

One of the beautiful aspects of a Software as a Service platform is the ability to seamlessly deploy upgrades, features, and improvements on a per-customer or all-up basis.

Our Mission is simple: Drive increased performance by making work more fun and engaging.  

Our Approach is equally straightforward: Continue iterating per customer response.  

 Until next time,

john

Announcing the ‘Shark Tank’!

We are proud to announce a new feature to SpurGo Pro and SpurGo Partner.  Internally, we called it the Shark Tank, but I’m guessing there are some copyright issues there so the official name is the ‘Task Pool.’

In addition to creating game based objectives, customers have requested the ability to throw a single task into the mix and let the first player who wants it, grab it!

And today we are happy to announce that this piece of functionality is now available.  What does this mean?

This means that if you have a single task that you want someone on your team to do, you can throw it in the Task Pool and let the most motivated player take it for him/herself.

Got a lead?  Throw it in the Task Pool and see who wants it

Need someone to visit a client site to do a demo?  Throw it in the Task Pool

Want someone to build a deck for your Monthly Business Review?  Throw it in the Task Pool

Task Pools can be part of a larger game or a separate game in and of itself.  The reason we’re so excited is it allows individual players to stand out from the crowd.  In addition, it gives managers the ability to take a single goal that can be achieved by a single person and allow a driven employee the opportunity to shine.

The next step in the evolution of motivation is here.

A Managers’ Best Friend

The scenario is always the same.  You manage a team or you manage a set of external partners and/or vendors.  You have goals you want them to achieve.  To reach those goals, your team must perform certain actions.  Those actions are tasks.  Some are one-time tasks; some are repeating tasks.  You ask your team to do them.

Then you wait.

You check in with individual team members on a weekly or monthly basis via email, submitted reports or discussions.  You check your automated reports on goal achievement.  

Then you wait.

You check in with individual team members on a weekly or monthly basis via email, submitted reports or discussions.  You check your automated reports on goal achievement.  

Then you wait.  Rinse and Repeat.

At the end of the allotted time period, you check your goal reports and you either celebrate or you worry.

What went right?  What went wrong?  Who did the best?  The worst? What tasks paid off and what tasks floundered?  How do you make sense of real performance?

You have some vague ideas. You are a leader.  You make some intuitive decisions, make changes, and try again.  Repeat.

In companies large, medium and small, we have seen this rhythm it has remained the same.  The ideas change, the approach does not.

This is what we’re trying to improve upon.

There are myriad tools and reports that managers can use to show the end result.  But the problem is that by the time you see the end result, time is up.

We call SpurGo a managers’ best friend because our solution provides real-time data managers can use to adjust on the fly.  By identifying key task deliverables for specific time frames and tracking them in accordance to the person and team, a manager can dynamically intervene to coach individuals and fine-tune strategy to address goal execution pitfalls.

No need to wait until the next 1:1. No need to send another status request. No need to wait until time is up.

Set up the tasks you want your team to achieve, sit back, and watch.  Act when necessary, leave your team alone if they’re moving the needle.

Make SpurGo your goal acceleration engine.

A New Year, A New Way              

Two weeks into the new year and by now folks are settling into their goals for either H1 or H2 of their fiscal year.  You either have new goals to attain or are trying to figure out how to get to ‘green’ by the end of H2.

It is at this point that as a manager, you should have the following bullets memorized:

The key scorecard metrics to track

High level motions to attain these goals

In our conversations with large companies, managers are generally pretty good about having these two bullets securely implanted into the team consciousness.  

But here’s where best laid plans typically go astray: What are the specific actions needed to execute on those goal motions?  The manager will typically have a vague idea, and each employee will have a differing idea on what it takes to execute.  The result?  A disparate execution process that varies from employee to employee with varying outcomes to the scorecard.  

So, with that in mind, here comes the hard part (and the most rewarding part): Figure out what specific actions need to be taken to fulfill the high-level motions prescribed to attain your key scorecard metrics.  Identifying the actual tasks that need to be done to execute on high level motions is the ‘last mile’ in ensuring a team is firing on all cylinders toward top line priorities.

Some managers will know these precise actions immediately.  Some will need to consult with their employees and peers.  In both cases, understanding exactly what needs to be done is critical to overall team and individual success.

And once the specific tasks have been identified, the final step is to manage it.  So why not automate that function and make a game of it?

This is why we created SpurGo.  We’re the ‘last mile’ in managing priorities, providing as much automation as possible while concurrently providing transparent performance and status data to ensure a motivated march to ‘green.’

Go get ‘em and good luck in 2017!

Happy Holidays from Virsera

A quick note to wish everyone peace, tranquility and gratitude this holiday season.  While there are certainly more than enough problems, anxieties and strife to go around – it is our sincere hope that you are able to take time to reflect on the good things and all the little reasons to be thankful for this short moment on earth.  Our last SpurGo challenge of 2016 is focused on spreading the love.

All the best to you,

Is Your Scorecard Yellow?

Or red?  Start 2017 with a game that excites and motivates your audience to hit the ground running and drive toward a green scorecard. Whether it’s revenue, consumption, training, or administrative – getting everyone together and competing drives the results you want.

Here are examples of what some of our customers are doing to kick off 2017 with a bang:

Americas Regional Partner games to drive leads, joint sales calls, and revenue

APAC Partner games to drive cold calls, leads, and revenue

US District consumption games for internal sales to drive customer product consumption on subscription based services

US based warehouse competitions pitting warehouse vs warehouse on logistics scorecard, efficiency and scheduling milestones

US field sales office competitions rewarding partner engagement

North America based partner contests based on marketing event leads and ROI

Get your team on the same page, consolidate performance data, automate tracking, coach your stragglers and reward your top performers.  It’s never been easier to increase performance.

Happy holidays everyone!