Global leader in gamification consultancy and training turns to JFDI and Microsoft Teams to enable deeper sales pipeline collaboration

Summary

GAMIFICATION+ is an award winning and globally recognized leader in gamification consultancy and training. They help organisations achieve behavior change through game-like experiences. They also organize the annual Gamification Europe conference and the global Gamification Awards.

GAMIFICATION+ needed to replace an old web-hosted CRM system with a collaborative system within Microsoft Teams. To achieve this, opportunity data needed to be accessed and displayed within the Teams environment across the relevant: Teams (available products); Channels (vertical markets); and Tabs (competing sales teams).

Challenge

The solution needed to offer a flexible collection of meaningful charts, while maintaining compatibility with the full Microsoft Office suite, including tools such as Power BI and offering extensibility through connected platforms such as Microsoft Flow.

Gamification+ had moved to using Teams for managing projects, products and events collaboratively. Ongoing work was managed very well in Teams. However, usage of the existing external hosted CRM system dropped substantially. Management no longer had visibility on the sales pipeline as no data was being entered into the CRM.

Working with their trusted Microsoft partner JFDI, GAMIFICATION+ found that staff wanted to access their day to day work within the one environment that they were now using every day: Teams. If the system wasn’t usable in Teams then it wasn’t going to get used at all.

The immediate challenge was to add CRM functionality into the Teams environment and enable users to enter sales data again.  This would enable the organisation to surface the state of the sales pipeline, then direct resources at  key sales opportunities to close immediately.

Gamification+ also wanted to use this move to encourage a more collaborative approach to sales. They needed a solution that fit in with how Teams works and, importantly improved the relevance of leads generated and quality of sales won. The new CRM needed to motivate different members of the sales team to work together to win best fit sales for the company.

Strategy

Sales opportunity data needed to be accessed and displayed within the Microsoft Teams environment across the relevant Teams – available products, Channels – vertical markets, and Tabs – competing sales teams.

The system needed to be simple and intuitive to use without requiring user training. It needed to work very much the same way as the host environment of Microsoft Teams. Because of the sensitive nature of sales opportunity data, the system needed to store all the customer’s data in their own corporate Office 365 tenancy.

To achieve these goals, JFDI implemented the Aardvark Sales for Teams application, which leverages Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Office Graph to connect Sales opportunities to Channels for managing related documents and conversations.

Aardvark Sales for Teams can be added to a Channel or Team many times, providing a familiar Kanban view of sales opportunities in a Teams Tab.  Drag and drop technology allows sales opportunities to be moved easily and intuitively between stages in the sales pipeline.  Each Tab can be configured to roll up data from the Channel or across the entire Team.

Sales opportunity data is maintained within Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online. The data format of a sales opportunity can be heavily customized by adding columns in the Aardvark SharePoint List. This List is independent of Aardvark, so the user will always have access to their data regardless of whether they still have a paid subscription to the Aardvark service.

The Aardvark user interface adapts to support custom fields that the Team administrator can add to the underlying SharePoint List. The ubiquity of SharePoint Lists means that users can use their data throughout the Microsoft Office suite and with tools such as Microsoft Flow and Power BI.

The technology stack used in this solution included Microsoft Teams, Office 365, SharePoint Online, Microsoft SharePoint Framework (SPFx), Microsoft Office Graph API, Microsoft Azure Function, Microsoft TypeScript, React, and Chart.JS.

Results

By enlisting the help of JFDI and implementing their Aardvark application that integrates with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, the GAMIFICATION+ team has seen the following results:

• Increase in data entered by sales staff
• Sales pipeline visibility to management
• Resources directed to key opportunities
• Increased number and quality of sales due to collaboration among sales teams
• Increase in team morale and motivation