Social Sales motivation with Badges!

Team:  I wanted to share this best practice with you on Social Selling!

Since Aug 15, IBM sellers can compete for over 40 merit badges, used to recognize and promote identified social accomplishments and behaviors.

For example, we have a badge that sellers can “win” if they join Twitter, or exceed a certain threshold for followers, or install the latest version of software on their own personal workstation.

That way we know our sellers are living social, and also we are sure that they are using and demonstrating the latest/appropriate versions of our software.

This strategy is a gaming type strategy to motivate the sellers to have the highest skills possible!

Stats at a glance:

• Individuals from thirty-two countries have received 1,000 badges
• 60% of badges go to people outside the US.
• 51% of applicants receive the most popular badge.
• 71% of applicants receive more than one badge.
• 22% receive more than 10.

The program has been open for business for four weeks.

First two weeks it was word of mouth; resulting in about 200 badges. We purposely has a “soft opening” so we could build a groundswell or early adopters who would microblog about it.

Such a ‘soft launch” is a best practice for launching any kind of new social program — give yourself some time to build a tipper network for it.

In week three, I formally announced it via email, and badge requests have quadrupled & exploded, to exceed 1,000.

Here’s a view!  What do you think?