Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of games are they playing when you talk about gamification. I think what you’re saying is the concept of games as a method of sales training, yes?

Duncan Lennox: I think it’s a lot more than that, but that’s certainly a key part. When you talk about gamification, it’s important to drill into it a little bit. Because there’s a lot of people talking about gamification, but they don’t really know what they’re talking about. It’s a marketing exercise because it’s a hot topic. When we talk about it, we mean using proven scientific techniques to engage people and get them to participate in your application. It’s not meant to be cutesy or novel. It’s not meant to be a trick. How do we make the process of engaging in our application fun and interesting for them to participate? If they then participate, with the science and the way our methodology works, we will get the long-term retention and behavior change.

In our case, I sometimes call Qstream as Jeopardy for sales people because it’s a question and answer game. We’re presenting selling scenarios to them and they’re choosing what they think the next appropriate step is. Then they get to see whether they’re right or wrong. They get to see how their peers answer in aggregate and they get to see why the correct answer is correct. While they’re doing all of that, they’re scoring points and competing against their peers in individual or team competitions. It can work in a variety of ways. That’s also one of the components that keeps them engaged.

Sramana Mitra: Would it help to do use cases?

Duncan Lennox: Let me talk about a few different ways that it typically works for us. I’ll give you two or three classic examples. When we first start working with new clients, it’s usually with one particular group. We don’t usually start day one with the entire global sales force, as you might imagine. We’re working with, say, a product marketing group in the pharmaceutical or technological case about to launch a new product. It could be a new software or a new drug. A lot of prep work, of course, goes into preparing the sales force to bring that new product to market.

Of course, those initial 30 to 90 days right after launch is a critical selling time. Your product is often unique in the market. It’s incredibly important that the sales force be effective during that initial launch in particular. What happens traditionally is you put the sales force in a hotel and do, what I call, death by PowerPoint where you show slide by slide eight hours a day for a couple of days. Essentially, you dump a ton of information onto the sales force in a relatively short period of time and then you send them back into the field.

From what we know from science and what everybody knows empirically from their own experience is that you quickly start forgetting the vast majority of that. With Qstream, you might still do those things we talked about, but as soon as you get back out into the field, we’ll start the Qstream game, which will immediately begin reinforcing all the core concepts that you need the sales force to know. Product launch would be a classic project for us.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox
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