Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Rajat Paharia, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Gamification Leader Bunchball (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is there any other application for your platform other than training?

Rajat Paharia: People use it in the employee space. They use it for sales and sales performance, for collaboration, etc.

SM: Sales is a tricky one, because salespeople are usually very motivated to make money, and they are perfectly incentivized to do that. Why do you need gamification on top of that?

RP: Why have salespeople been running contests forever? They already have their money or quotas. They are running contests because those things work. After financial incentives, the number two motivator for salespeople is internal recognition inside their company, and number three is competition. If you are using only dollars, you are only using one of your three potentially most powerful motivators inside the company. What gamification does is it gives you an automated, scalable, and repeatable system for implementing recognition, competition, and achievement programs internally to motivate your salespeople to perform better.

Often, it is not just about the sales. The easy thing to do is to just think about the quota number at the end of the day, but there are so many of our customers that are also trying to drive better data quality, better following of process and procedure, better scrubbing and cleaning of pipelines – all the “hygiene” things that give them better forecasting or better marketing ability. All this stuff is very powerful. These fundamental foundational steps lead to good results. Roland Fryer Jr. at Harvard has been doing studies of incentives in schools. One of the most stark cases of this is they are trying incentives like, “Here is $50 for every A you get at the end of the quarter.” Then there are incentives like, “You will get $1.50 for every day you show up to class on time” or “One dollar for every book you read.” In the first case you have a big incentive tied to a big thing at the end of a quarter, and you get paid out every three months. In the second case you get paid every day or week. It is something small and fundamental that you have control over. They found that the later ones have a bigger positive impact than the former, because it is something students have control over, and the foundational step then leads to better performance. That is the whole idea here. It is not just about the end game, it is about all the other stuff that is going on.

SM: You talked about data gathering in the context of sales forces. Sales forces hate entering data into CRM systems. We expect that the CRM systems are then going to gamify and provide some of those incentives as part of their systems? Is that how you see it?

RP: No. We are actually partnering with all those guys. We are a Salesforce partner, a Jive partner, and we are working on a partnership with SAP. Jive is a great example. They had their own lightweight gamification component built into their social collaboration suite. And their customers were asking for more and better. So they went out and did an evaluation of the various vendors in the market. They picked us as a best-of-breed gamification partner, integrated our platform, which we are continually evolving and making better.

SM: Is this an OEM kind of relationship, or are they selling your platform separately?

RP: I don’t know if OEM is the right word. It is embedded in their platform, their sales team sells it and it is on their paper.

SM: But from the customer’s point of view, is it a product from Jive or Salesforce or is it a product from Bunchball?

RP: It depends on the partner. With partners like Jive it is called the Jive Gamification Module, but it is powered by Bunchball. In the case of Salesforce, there isn’t an OEM model. We are just selling to their install base, so we are selling directly.

SM: In that case it is an application of this particular use case that you are bringing to market in partnership with CRM vendors.

RP: Exactly. It all depends on our relationship with various companies on how we go to market. Salesforce knows that their core competency isn’t gamification, so they are not trying to build that in-house.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Rajat Paharia, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Gamification Leader Bunchball
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