Chapter 31. FantasySalesTeam
The market for CRM gamification continues to grow and expand, and Microsoft acquired FantasySalesTeam in August 2015 to further this trend.
The idea is bringing gaming elements into CRM will prompt user interest and create greater user engagement and productivity by tapping into a sense of competition and motivation. Gamification has been shown to result in positive reinforcement and higher system usage. Many kinds of games can be introduced into Dynamics CRM, and they all motivate differently.
The most common type of gamification is individual motivation based on results, typically tied to peer evaluation. An example of this is pitting salespeople against each other in a competition for the most leads brought in or converted or for the amounts calculated for work sold for a period of time. This type of gamification is actually native to the system (via Goals), and with some minor configurations, this information can be shared with the teams for viewing.
FantasySalesTeam takes the concept of gamification to the next level, involving the entire company as either players or fans. FantasySalesTeam helps organizations motivate their employees by creating contests driven by CRM data and involving all the employees.
While FantasySalesTeam was intended to be used and configured by sales managers to motivate sales teams, involving the entire team has an competitive effect in organizations. In addition, it broadly increases CRM usage and adoption.
This chapter explains in the usage and configuration of FantasySalesTeam.
There is no additional cost for FantasySalesTeam beyond your CRM Online Professional license. The solution has a web client component that can be accessed by any browser as well as a mobile app that can be installed on Android or IPhone devices.
Tip
You can find FantasySalesTeam by navigating to your Office 365 Admin Portal, selecting your CRM instance, and selecting Solutions > Preferred > FantasySalesTeam.
Installation
FantasySalesTeam is a new solution available for CRM Online subscribers that must be manually installed. To do this, as an Office 365 admin, navigate to the Office 365 Admin Portal by going to https://portal.office.com/ (see Figure 31.1). Then follow these steps:
Note
FantasySalesTeam runs on a separate web interface that can be integrated with other CRM systems, like salesforce.com, and provides an application programming interface (API) and web services to integrate with any custom solution.
1. Click CRM under the Admin group in the left navigation pane to open the CRM Online Administration Center (see Figure 31.2).
2. Select the organization for which you want to install FantasySalesTeam and then click the icon to the right of Solutions to access the Solution Explorer.
3. Select FantasySalesTeam and click Install (as shown in Figure 31.3).
4. When the Terms of Service dialog appears, click Install. The installation takes several minutes to complete.
Note
At press time, the solution version number was 1.3.3.
5. To verify that the solution is installed, go to CRM and navigate to Settings > Solutions (see Figure 31.4).
6. Open the FantasySalesTeam solution and complete the registration form (see Figure 31.5).
As part of the registration, request a registration code by clicking the Request a Code link to go to www.fantasysalesteam.com/preview (see Figure 31.6). Complete this code-request form, and within 24 hours, you will receive an email.
7. When you receive the email with the code, go back to the CRM web interface, navigate to the FantasySalesTeam solution, and enter the registration code (refer to Figure 31.5). Then click Next.
8. Enter the service account identifier and the security token, as shown in Figure 31.7, and click Setup.
When the setup is complete, you receive a welcome email with the instructions necessary to set up your first game (see Figure 31.8).
9. Click the link in the email that says Click Here.
10. Set up a new password (see Figure 31.9) and click Submit. You are logged in to the FantasySalesTeam portal.
10. Optionally upload a photo or select an avatar.
11. Optionally watch any of the 12 videos in the Playbook, which show you how to set up games. If you want to access this page again in the future, you can find it under the Help menu by selecting the Commissioner Help option.
12. A new menu navigation item is added to CRM, as shown in Figure 31.10.
Tip
You can find more information and installation instructions on the FantasySalesTeam website, at www.fantasysalesteam.com/preview.
Configuration
When you have the FantasySalesTeam solution installed, you are ready to configure it. Configuration is required to properly set up who is involved and what the goals are.
Account Types
The first thing you need to do is configure users. Users can have any of the following account types:
Player
Fan
Game Admin
Commissioner
Player
In order to be able to set up a CRM user as a player, that user must have a Professional or Enterprise license for Dynamics CRM.
Fan
In order to be able to set up a CRM user as a fan, that user must have at least a Basic license for Dynamics CRM.
Game Admin
In order to be able to setup a CRM user as a game admin, that user must have at least a Basic license for Dynamics CRM. A game admin user can be the administrator of a single game but does not have administrator rights for the entire system. You can assign game admins by going to the Games menu and selecting Game Admins. Then you can use the Assign or Remove Game Admins from Games tab to assign game admins to games, as shown in Figure 31.11.
A game admin can log in as any player or fan assigned to the game he or she administers. The game admin can also add or remove players or fans to the game but cannot modify the game settings.
Commissioner
Commissioner is the highest account type, and it has all the privileges needed to manage all the settings in FantasySalesTeam.
Commissioners can also impersonate the other account types, logging in as players or fans, for example, without needing to know their passwords.
Users
Every time you add new users to Dynamics CRM, you are alerted to import those new users in the Commissioners Portal (see Figure 31.12).
You can click Import in this dialog to see the Import Dynamics Users interface (see Figure 31.13). You can also open this interface by clicking Commissioner > Dynamics CRM Users. When importing the users, you can select the account type as explained earlier.
Select the users you want to import, select the account type, and then click the Import Selected Users button. A confirmation window alerts you that this process might take from seconds to minutes. Click the Import Reviewed button. When the process finishes, you get an email telling you this task has been completed.
Game Setup
You need to set up at least one game to start. To setup a game in FantasySalesTeam, go to Games > Game Setup, as shown in Figure 31.14.
The Game wizard helps you create a new game. First you enter basic information about the game. For Game Model, you can select any of the following:
Fantasy Teams
Fixed Teams
No Teams
FST TV
Each model presents different options, but all games share some properties, such as the name of the game and the start and end dates. By default, the start date is set to the next Monday, and the end date is set to the last Sunday of the month, 2 months later. This way, the game can have complete week periods. If you select any day other than Monday for the start day, you will have less than 7 days for the first week period of the game.
Depending on the model you select, you might need to set other attributes. The following sections discuss the four models
Fantasy Teams
Fantasy Teams is the recommended model because it offers most of the features and benefit of FantasySalesTeam.
The Fantasy Teams model allows you to use sport themes, which can be any of the following:
American Football
Baseball
Football (Soccer)
Basketball
Car Racing
You need to specify the frequency, which can be any of the following:
Weekly
Monthly
One-Time
You need to select whether you want to enable fans for the game and whether you want to use actuals or targets, as shown in Figure 31.15.
Metrics
The Metrics model allows you to measure the way the players can earn points. These can be, for example, X number of phone calls made, or X number of leads created, or X number of deals closed.
The Metrics model allows you to have you to use 20 different metrics. For each metric you must enter a name and the type, which can be any of the following:
Number Of
Revenue or Amount
Percentage or Quota (Default or Linear)
Percentage
Then you set the number of points for which you want the metric set—either every X number of records or a specific number of records reached. (In addition, you can set the roles that each metric will be applied to.)
Player Positions
Depending on the sport theme selected, you will see different positions in the first tab. Figure 31.16 shows the positions available for the Football (Soccer) theme.
Drag and drop the users in the players list on the right to the positions list on the left.
Awards
You can enter the prizes and awards for up to 10 places per award category. For example, you might offer prizes like a week of time off or an Microsoft Xbox One console.
These award categories are available:
Fantasy Team Awards
Game MVP Awards
Position Awards
Metric Awards
The Metric Awards category shows the number of metrics you created earlier, so you can set different prizes per metric created.
Fixed Teams
The Fixed Teams model is good for setting up a game where people play in teams. Fixed Teams can have a maximum of 100 teams (see Figure 31.17).
Positions
You can configure players after they are assigned to a team. You can change the team names and assign players to teams by dragging and dropping the players available in the players list on the right to the teams on the left.
No Teams
The No Teams model means each player is alone against the others.
Positions
You can select which players will participate in the game.
Awards
For the No Teams model, there are two types of awards: Game MVP award and Metrics award.
FST TV
The FST TV model displays daily, weekly, and monthly sales metrics on TVs around your office (see Figure 31.18). (The other game models can also be displayed on TVs.) With this type of game, there are no winners, so you don’t have to specify the awards.
Final Configurations
After you set up a game in the Commissioners Portal, you need to activate the team before it will show up in Dynamics CRM.
The last step in configuring a game is binding the metrics you created with Dynamics CRM metrics. Because you enter free text for the metric name in FantasySalesTeam, you need to tell CRM what this mean. Go to Dynamics CRM, navigate to FantasySalesTeam, and then click the Sales metric. You will see all the active metrics, along with the status so you know which ones are already set up and which ones needs to be set up (indicated by Not Setup in the status field).
Open the metric you want to configure and select the type of entity you want to measure for that metric. Figure 31.19 shows the setup for a phone call metric.
Players
Players are the most important users of the FantasySalesTeam system, as the games don’t make any sense without players. Figure 31.20 shows the Players Portal.
Note
Players must have a CRM Professional or Enterprise license. If someone wants to participate in a game but is not a CRM, consider registering that person as a fan. (See “Fans,” later in this chapter.)
Note
To create a new player, you must first create the user in Office 365 and then import the user into FantasySalesTeam by going to Commissioner > Dynamics CRM Users and setting the account type to Player. The user then shows up in the Players Portal.
In the Players Portal you can configure the following options:
Roles
Handicaps
Player Badges
Roles
It is a good idea to set up roles as you can assign them to game metrics.
You can create roles manually one by one, or if you have a big list of roles, you can upload an Excel file (see Figure 31.21). To do that, you first download the Role template, which has only the Role Name column.
Once you have a few roles created, you can assign them to metrics. Figure 31.22 shows a game metric configuration screen with roles assigned to the metrics.
Handicaps
Handicaps are configured by game, by player, and by metric associated to each game. You must first select a game to see the metrics, and then you can set a percentage number for each metric/player (see Figure 31.23).
This interface allows you to adjust the player points. Entering a value of 10 reduces the points by 10%, and entering a value of 110 increases the points by 10%.
Player Badges
You can see all the badges awarded to the different players as well as manage the badges assigned. As shown in Figure 31.24, you can add, edit, or delete badges.
To manually assign a badge to a player, you must select the player and then click the Award Badge button. A dialog asks you to enter a name of the badge, a description, and a message to the player. You can also select the image of the badge here (see Figure 31.25).
If you enter a message to the player, an email is sent to the player with the message you entered here, and you receive another email saying that an email was sent to the player.
Players Portal
When a commissioner creates a player, the player receives an email about resetting his or her password, When the player goes to the Players Portal to reset the password, he or she can either upload a photo or select an avatar. Players are also asked to draft the teams for the games they are playing.
Figure 31.26 shows how the interface looks for a Fantasy Team game with the Soccer theme selected when a player must draft the team.
A player’s profile page (see Figure 31.27) where shows the badges earned and the progress players are making in games in terms of metrics.
Fans
Fans are any non-sales employees who want to play games. The Fans Portal allows you to register fans that are not necessarily Dynamics CRM users. You can register one fan at a time by using the registration form shown in Figure 31.28.
To add a large number of fans, you can upload an Excel file. To do that, first download the Excel template FansExcelTemplate.xlsx, which has three columns: FirstName, LastName, and EmailAddress.
Commissioners and game admins can also be fans in the games, but they are not be displayed in the Fans Portal.
You cannot delete a fan after you register it, you can instead deactivate it and then you can activate it again if you need it in the future.
When you create a game, you are asked whether you want to let fans play in the game. If you let the game use fans, you need to add the fans to the game manually. You cannot upload an Excel file in this case.
Fans Portal
Fans don’t receive an welcome email when you first register them, but the commissioner can set passwords for fans so they can access the Fans Portal, shown in Figure 31.29.
The first time a fan enters the Fans portal, he or she can either upload a photo or select an avatar.
FST TV
FST TV displays the rankings and positions of the players and is helpful in driving participation and competition, as shown in Figure 31.30.
You can configure FST TV to display based on different requirements.
Settings
Commissioners can access a number of settings from the Commissioners Portal by going to Commissioner > Settings.
Company Logo
You can upload your company logo, which should be a PNG file, if possible. Figure 31.31 shows an uploaded logo.
Contact Menu
You can set a contact menu by entering either an email address or a web page URL, as shown in Figure 31.32.
When you set the contact menu, it is available via Help > Contact Commissioner for players, fans and game admins, in their respective portals. Figure 31.33 shows this menu option in the Fans Portal.
FST TV Posts
You can turn off or on the TV board posts. You can configure the time in seconds of the board post display, the count of post you want to show, and the waiting time. You can configure the same for the other fields, as shown in Figure 31.34.
Player Stats
You can access player stats (see Figure 31.35) from the Commissioners Portal by selecting Player > Home > Player Stats.
You can filter the stats by game, by player, or by metric, and you can see the chart by points or a table with the points only. You can export the table to a Microsoft Excel file.
Best Practices
The recommendation is to create one game per month, selecting a Monday for the start date and a Sunday for the end date of the game.
Figure 31.36 shows the overall leaderboard interface for a game that has been setup.
Tip
While the goal is to drive system usage and adoption, it can be fun to put a big TV in a central area, showing the leaderboard, so employees can see the game progress and winners.
When creating a game and setting up the positions of the players, you should upload from Excel for large number of players. Otherwise, the graphical or table views are recommended.
When working with teams, try to put the most experienced people together in a single team and the most recent employees on another team.
Commissioners can download a kickoff template from the Help menu in the Commissioners Portal. This zip file contains a PowerPoint template presentation that will help you explain the game to the team and employees before launching the games in the company.
Summary
This chapter explains how gamification can drive Dynamics CRM adoption and system usage. By using FantasySalesTeam, your organization can involve the entire organization (not just the sale team). This chapter shows how to install the solution in Dynamics CRM Online and how to configure it.
Organizations can set up several different game types and account types to manage players and fans. Finally, this chapter describes a few best practices for getting maximum benefit out of FantasySalesTeam.