Tech

StartUp The Conversation: LevelEleven Makes Selling Things A Game

July 26, 2013, 4:02 PM

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LevelEleven works to motivate sales teams by turning their jobs into a game. Team members track sales accomplishments with points and scoreboards, akin to Foursquare or Reddit -- the more you participate and accomplish, the more points you get.

LevelEleven works with Comcast, OpenTable, Morningstar and dozens of other companies working to engage their teams around key initiatives and drive usage of Salesforce.com to better manage their business. 

StartUp The Conversation is an occasional series on Deadline Detroit that features local startups and small businesses. Deadline Detroit submits questions and businesses respond in writing.

What does LevelEleven do?
LevelEleven helps VPs of Sales engage their sales teams by creating competition and contests around anything you can track in Salesforce.com.

How?
Our lead product is called Compete, which is an easy to use tool to create competitions around any behavior that can be tracked in Salesforce.com. Compete provides a step-by-step wizard to pinpoint the behaviors you want to motivate, and create high impact leader boards for salespeople. Unlike most enterprise software applications in the marketplace, Compete is completely native to Salesforce, and lets a client be 100% deployed in less than 30-minutes.

Example screen on Compete

How will you know it's working?
We’ve had great feedback from clients, which has helped identify where exactly we see the most success. We discovered that after implementing Compete...

  1. Clients who identified key behaviors to motivate saw a 177% increase in those specific behaviors.
  2. Clients who wanted their salespeople to focus on certain key products saw sales of those products rise by 421%.
  3. Clients who wanted to improve data quality experienced an 819% increase in data updates.

How will you make money?
Compete is a subscription based product where clients pay $12/user/month for any salesperson who will participate in a contest, or a manager who builds a contest. Clients generally sign 12 to 24-month agreements though we also offer month-to-month options to make it easy to get started.

What change are you hoping your company brings about?
The answer here is twofold. Gamification is more than just a buzzword, and LevelEleven has the statistics to back that up. As a company, we want to motivate employees by rewarding specific behaviors through competition. Salespeople are naturally competitive and Compete successfully taps into that.

On a different level, we are passionate about tech startups’ role in crafting a bright future for Detroit. Especially in light of Detroit's recent financial woes, we think the city is ready to make a real pivot thanks to local tech entrepreneurs and startups; we're thrilled to be a part of it.

Why Michigan?
Being a startup based outside of more traditional technology hubs like Silicon Valley or New York is one of the things we are most proud of here at LevelEleven. When people hear that a technology company is from somewhere like Michigan, they remember it. That novelty factor has gone up recently, with Detroit’s filing for bankruptcy. The city’s startup community, however, mirrors the spirit of the city.  The challenge of rebuilding Detroit is both invigorating and inspiring on a day to day basis for those at LevelEleven and throughout the downtown area.

Who are the brains behind the creation?
We first came up with the idea for LevelEleven while leading sales strategy for ePrize, another Michigan company with a large sales team.  We realized how much of an impact an app that focuses on competition can have on motivating salespeople. A year later, and with the blessing of ePrize CEO Matt Wise, we spun out and established LevelEleven as a separate company.

We currently have 13 employees on staff, each bringing their own talent and expertise to the team. For example, our CTO Kevin O’Hara was named a Force.com MVP recently, which is a huge recognition in the developer space.

We’re located in the iconic M@dison building downtown with other interesting startups, which makes for a cool office culture.  We’re a down-to-earth bunch, working in a city we love on a product that has already seen great success. We like to have fun, and that comes through in our work.  For example, after a recent Salesforce event we made a funny video thanking all those we met. 

If you’re associated with a business, contact info@deadlinedetroit.com to be featured in StartUp The Conversation.



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