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For decades sales managers have tried to boost revenue by organizing sales contests to win cars, televisions and sports tickets. And they have gotten quite good at it. By offering a small prize for a big revenue increase, sales contests have become a cost-effective way for super-charging revenue growth. Unfortunately, those same sales contests are also quite good at supercharging headaches: simple contests too often turn into unwieldy messes of whiteboard score tabs and spreadsheets. Quickly disorder sucks the fun right out of the competition.
That’s a problem startup Fantasy Sales Team(FST) thought worth solving. To make selling more competitive, engaging and fun, the company has built an online platform that organizes sales contests around the rules of popular sports like baseball, basketball and football. Using the FST platform sales representatives compete against each other, and on teams together, trying to score points by making additional sales calls, closing additional sales and adding new customers.
And their idea has gotten a boost recently boosted. Austin-based ATX Seed Ventures and the Central Texas Angel Network investors have backed the startup with a $1.5 million Series A round investment. The first $750,000 of that investment came in April 2014 and investors just doubled down with $750,000 more.
“Since our initial capital investment in April 2014 we’ve more than doubled our customer base and have made dozens of improvements to the core product,” said CEO Adam Hollander in a statement. “These new funds and our expanding customer base will allow us to significantly scale our marketing and sales efforts in 2015 as well as continue to build on our award winning platform.”
The company claims the platform not only boosts performance at the top, but also the bottom of the pyramid. Using the software, sales managers can create performance targets for straggling sales representatives giving them goals worth shooting for. The FST platform also integrates with CRMs Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics, automatically pulling sales data from that platform into the games.
Since being founded in 2012, Fantasy Sales Team has grown to over 100 customers. Its gamification software costs about $20 to $35 per month for each user.
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