Microsoft buys Incent Games, aims to boost sales

Microsoft has acquired Texas startup Incent Games to integrate its FantasySalesTeam sales-gamification software into Dynamics CRM. The terms of the deal were not revealed.

With the addition of fantasy sports component to its CRM offering, companies would get a tool to make incentive programmes for sales staff more engaging, according to Bob Stutz, corporate vice president for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, who discussed the news in a blog post.

Stutz said Microsoft would integrate the platform into its own Dynamics CRM software in the coming months. It would also continue to support customers using FantasySalesTeam with other CRM products.

However, one analyst made some sharp comments.

"Are they kidding?" said Denis Pombriant, managing principal at Beagle Research Group, via email. "Let's see, for many years and even centuries, we have incentivized sales people with money (the carrot) and job loss (the stick). That wasn't enough? Really?"

According to Pombriant, the real problem with incentives was the difficulty in individualising and applying them across a product line that contained more than one product, and that could not be solved with gamification, IDG News Service reported.

It was rather a big data problem, and it could be solved by comprehensive compensation-management systems such as what was offered by companies like Xactly and Callidus, he added.

Incent Games, had ''disrupted the old sales incentive model with an original twist that combines gamification with fantasy sports and expertly applies it to a sales setting,'' Stutz said in a blog post.

''Their platform is highly effective at increasing team collaboration, productivity and consequently driving greater results and business growth''.

Employees drafted peers onto teams whose combined results they believed would be the best, in a spin on fantasy sports games in which people picked a pretend roster of players whose combined statistics they believed would be tops at the end of a season.

The strategy got employees invested in each others' success, which led to better sales team results, according to Stutz.